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description:
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This course is a hands-on introduction to digital media technologies.
Students will master a number of tools and programming languages so that, by the end of the term, students should be capable of designing and implementing relatively sophisticated digital media technologies.
We will focus on technologies useful in the production, transformation and interpretation of networks (especially the Internet) and computer graphics (especially bitmap graphics).
We will be using and extending these digital media technologies in order to better understand and support the practices of collective authorship.
What are media?
In general, media are technologies and practices that mediate between people: The "media" of "digital media" need to be understood in at least two ways: (1) as a set of practices; and, (2) as a set of technologies that mediate between people.
As a practice, a medium influences or determines a repertoire of social, political, economic, legal, and cultural activities.
As a technology, a medium provides a mechanism and material form for a set of relations between people.
What are digital media technologies?
Digital media are computational media: Computers and computer-networks are the technologies that make digital media technologies different from other media technologies.
These technologies are qualitatively different than the technologies of older media.
While historically it was remarkable to find machines built with hundreds or thousands or interacting parts, now -- in the form of computational machinery -- we find machines with millions, even billions, of interacting parts in our daily environments.
The complexity and multiplicity of these digital media technologies make them difficult to neatly characterize and categorize without a working knowledge of theories and practices of computational design.
Consequently, in this course, we will be centrally concerned with computers and computer networks.
Digital media facilitate the formation of new groups of people.
Today we are in the midst of an exponential growth in the adoption and adaptation of new media technologies by a wide variety of groups of people.
New media technologies play a constitutive and increasing part in international, national, and local government; neighborhoods; communities; industry; business; and, social movements.
The diversity of these groups' goals, needs, desires and the differences of culture, language, and history constitute the practices of digital media.
The complexity and multiplicity of these practices make them difficult to neatly characterize and categorize without a working knowledge of theories of contemporary social, political, economic, legal, and cultural formations.
This quarter we will focus on a series of new practices that are constituative of some of the most important new social formations engendered by digital media.
Specifically, we will focus on practices of collective authorship (e.g., the open and distributed production of software) that have engendered important new social formations (e.g., the open source software movement) and art (e.g., at Ars Electronica in 1999, the Linux operating system was awarded the Golden Nica award in the category of net art).
Digital media research and teaching interleaves theory, design and analysis.
Research and teaching in digital media proceeds by articulating theories and undertaking analyses by designing computational technologies; and, conversely, designing technologies informed by questioning and constructing theories and analyses.
As students in this course learn about the technologies and practices of digital media they will also be introduced to this methodology.
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