Closure and Infinity in Digital Media

Undergraduate / Graduate

From hypertext works spanning thousands of nodes to algorithmically-generated animations that unfold slowly over the course of hundreds of years, 21st Century media has leveraged digital technology to approach scales never before conceived. This class examines a broad array of digital artworks and theoretical trends from the past several decades, all circling around issues of endings and infinity. This includes everything from humanistic inquiries into the nature of closure in electronic literature of the 1990s to contemporary dreams of infinite machine-generated content (coinciding with the reciprocal promise of infinite growth via replacing human labor). Course assignments will be a mix of analytical writing and creative projects.