Week 1: Introduction to the Course

1/11: Thinking Technology: Some Key Issues

1/13: Thinking Technology, continued
Readings: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Walter Ong, excerpts, Orality and Literacy

*****SCREENING: BLADERUNNER

Week 2: Are We All Cyborgs? The Technological Body

1/18: Readings:
Donna Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"
C. Gray & S. Mentor, "The Cyborg Body Politic and the New World Order"

1/20: Readings:
Mark Dery, excerpts, Escape Velocity

*******LAB EXAMPLES*********

Week 3: Narrating Technologies circa 1851

1/25: Readings:
Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of the 7 Gables

1/27: Readings:
Hawthorne, continued
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, excerpts, The Railway Journey

Week 4: Technologizing Vision: Photography and Cinema

2/1: Readings:
Jonathan Crary, "Modernizing Vision"
Vanessa Schwartz, "Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus"

2/3: Readings:
Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment"
Thomas Elsaesser, "Louis Lumiere: The Cinema's First Virtualist?"

************SCREENING: METROPOLIS*******************

Week 5: Sexing Early Cinema

2/8: Assorted cinema: screening lecture

2/10: Readings:
Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other"
Marshall McLuhan, excerpts, The Mechanical Bride

********FIRST PAPER DUE************

Week 6: Technologies and Tele-presence: From Telegraph to TV

2/15: Readings:
Jeff Sconce, excerpt
Carolyn Marvin, excerpt, When Old Technologies Were New

2/17: Readings:
Lynn Spigel, excerpt, Make Room for TV
Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides

Week 7: Electronic Media: Early Prophets

2/22: McLuhan: visual examples

2/24: Readings:
Marshall McLuhan, excerpts, Understanding Media

Week 8: Thinking Across Media

2/29 & 3/2: Readings
Beatriz Colomina, "Domesticity at War"
Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction"
Anne Friedberg, "Cinema and the Postmodern Condition"

WEEK 9: LABS ONLY

Friday Lab to meet 3/7 at 2 PM in Carriage House
Thursday Lab to meet 3/9 at 2 PM in Carriage House

Week 10: Digital Images: Rethinking Photography & Visual Culture

3/21: Readings:
William J. Mitchell, "How To Do Things With Pictures"
Kevin Robins, "Will Image Move Us Still?"

3/23: LAB: Readings:
Beryl Graham, "The Panic Button"
Donald Slater, "Domestic Photography and Digital Culture"

Week 11: In the Game: From Myst to Doom

3/28: Readings:
J. C. Herz, Joystick Nation, selections
Henry Jenkins, excerpts, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat

3/30: LAB:Readings:
Julian Bleeker, "Racial Tension and Virtual Reality"
Ted Friedman, "Civilization and its Discontents"

Week 12: Expanding Narratives and Rethinking the Book

4/4: Readings:
Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, selections
George Landow, Hypertext 2.0, selections

4/6: Readings:
N. Katherine Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers"
Stuart Moulthrop, "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture"

Week 13: Self and Community in Cyberspaces

4/11: Readings
Sherry Turkle, "Constructions and Reconstructions of Self in VR"
Pamela Wilson, "Virtual Kinship in a Postmodern World"

4/13: Readings:
Sandy Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?"
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, "The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier …"

***********SCREENING: THE MATRIX*********

Week 14: New Media/Old Media: Digital Culture, Movies, & Music

4/18: Discussion: Video Games and Recent Cinema

**************PAPER TWO DUE**************************

4/20: Readings:
Ron Eglash, "African Influences in Cybernetics"
Tricia Rose, "Give me A (Break) Beat"

Week 15: Narrating Technologies circa 1995

4/25: Readings:
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

4/27: Readings:
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, continued
Joseba Gabilando, "Postcolonial Cyborgs"

LABS FOR WEEK 15: FINAL PROJECTS:
Initial Presentations

FINAL PROJECTS DUE DURING SCHEDULED EXAM TIME:
Thursday, May 4, 2000, 2-4 P.M.