Art and Media Interfaced

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

We experience art and popular media genres today in many contexts and with multiple kinds of interfaces and mediations (physical, technical, conceptual, cultural, ideological, and institutional). This course will provide a multi- and inter-interdisciplinary approach to understanding visual art, photography, film, and other media in our contemporary context of genres, technologies, and institutions of mediation. We will build an interdisciplinary knowledge base that draws from semiotics, the design principles of computing technologies, art historical and social historical methods, and institutional theory for approaching way to understand how art is mediated and constructed as a cultural category or object. As unifying and discovery principles, we will expand four main conceptual metaphors: interface, medium, networks and nodes, and de-blackboxing.Using the key concepts of interface and medium, we will recover deeper continuities in our key ideas about representation and transmission of cultural genres and artefacts. When we expand the cluster of concepts for our notions of "interface" and "medium," we find that museums and artworks themselves function as interfaces to the larger systems of meanings, values, and social relations that make them possible and interpretable. Any artwork interpreted as such is first an interface to the system of meaning and genres of representation within which it is developed and into which it is received and understood.By the end of the course, students will have gained the ability to interpret, explain, and research artworks, artists, and art concepts in the interpretive contexts in which we receive them, and explain the functions of interpretive interfaces in their institutional, cultural, and technically mediated modes.Case Studies in Washington Museums: COVID Safety and Online ConsiderationsDepending on the health and safety policies for visiting DC museums, we will build many course units on visiting and studying first-hand curated exhibitions in museums as case studies to apply the methods in the course. We will also study the online and virtual interfaces and designed contexts for presenting and interpreting artworks. In both "interface" modes (physical institutional contexts and online presentations) the museum case studies will open up the role of institutions, cultural interpretive contexts, and technologies for mediating and transmitting forms of cultural artefacts. With historical and conceptual background developed in the course, we will use artworks and artefacts in their museum contexts as cases for developing research questions and applying theory and methods for in-depth interpretation and analysis. Students will develop their own research projects based on artworks, photography, and other artefacts in Washington area museums, whether by visiting them personally and/or by presentation in "virtual museum" interfaces.Course OutcomesStudents will learn the main interdisciplinary methods for interpreting art and media in the systems of genres, material forms, and technologies in which they are developed and received. With a deeper understanding of what an interface and medium are and can be (both conceptually and technically), students will not only be equipped to analyze current and past technologies of mediation and representation, but will understand how to apply this knowledge to the design of interpretive frameworks for any kind of cultural artefact or medium. This knowledge base and practice in designing an interface will also equip students to participate in ongoing research, critique, and implementation of technical and institutional interfaces for enabling cultural knowledge and the transmission of the cultural heritage.GradingGrades will be based on weekly writing assignments, class participation, and group projects (50%), and a final research project (50).