The Nature of Electronic Culture

Course Description

This course will examine the connection between nature and technology. At stake here will be notions of physicality and embodiment, industrial cityscapes versus wilderness landscapes, virtuality/actuality/reality, and the sublime. Through an investigation of textual, filmic and website sources, we will explore the ways in which technology informs our way of perceiving and conceiving of the world and our place in the world.

Source Material

Text
J.G. Ballard, Crash
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think"
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Christopher Dewdney, Last Flesh. Life in the Transhuman Era
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
N. Katherine Hayles, "The Materiality of Informatics"
Martin Heidegger, "Creative Landscape: Why do I stay in the Provinces?"
Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World-Picture"
Friedrich Kittler, "The City is a Medium"
Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual. Reality in the Digital Age
William J. Mitchell, "Replacing Place"
Alan Turing, "Computer Machinery and Intelligence"

Film
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, dir. Walter Ruttmann
Brazil, dir. Terry Gilliam
Koyaanisqatsi, dir. Godfrey Reggio
The Man with a Movie Camera, dir. Dziga Vertov
Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang
Safe, dir. Todd Haynes
Tetsuo, dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, 1988
Twelve Monkeys, dir. Terry Gilliam

Websites
k.i.s.s. of the panopticon <http://carmen.artsci.washington.edu/panop/home.htm>
Voice of the Shuttle: Cyberculture Page <http://vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/cyber.html>
cyberspace, hypertext, and critical theory <http://landow.stg.brown.edu/cpace/cspaceov.html>
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society <http://www.tecsoc.org>