The internet, like many technologies, is often claimed to possess the power to collapse time and space. As we emphasize this communication network's capacity to erase distance, the physicality of the internet itself also tends to disappear from public view–or at least, from public concern. At the same time, the internet has enabled expanded access to tools for seeing and comprehending the physical world, through web mapping tools and satellite imagery resources. This class will introduce students to Javascript-based tools for creating web maps using Leaflet, D3, and Mapshaper. We will focus on visualizing data concerning physical infrastructures central to the internet. Discussion and reading will explore various ways that infrastructure occupies, transforms, and is transformed by its material environments.

The acronym IRL, or “in real life,” purports to distinguish our “real,” unmediated, bodily existence from everything “unreal” that happens online. But the distinction isn’t quite so tidy; there’s hardly any aspect of our social and material worlds that remains untouched by digital technologies. How can we deploy the methods and sensibilities of ethnography, anthropology’s signature method, to better understand how the digital shapes our relationships, our institutions, our economies, our selves, etc? How might we deploy digital tools *in* that investigation? And how can we supplement anthropological methods with those from media studies, critical data studies, infrastructure studies, design, creative technology, and a variety of other fields? In this intensive intersession workshop, we’ll join with the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, and the University of Toronto to engage in the globally networked exploration and application of digital ethnography. Students will be invited to complete course readings and screenings, small ethnographic exercises, and an individual or collaborative final project: a multimedia documentary of, or a field guide to, a digital environment or community or phenomenon. For the first two weeks in January, we’ll meet intensively for lecture, discussion, and collaborative exercises; students should expect to dedicate roughly five hours each day to either class meetings or asynchronous engagement, plus light homework. Students will then apply their learning through independently designed and executed digital fieldwork, which they’ll complete during the first half of the spring semester. From late January through mid-March, students should plan to dedicate roughly nine hours per week to independent research, individual consultations, and small-group workshops. The sensibilities and skills developed in this course will be highly relevant in a variety of fields, as most institutions and industries in the post-pandemic world will have to reimagine themselves to more integrally incorporate digital technologies.

Since there have been computers there have been programs lurking surreptitiously in the background, ready to exploit them. This will be a survey course covering a history of computational skullduggery from the Stuxnet virus the US used to tamper with Iran’s nuclear reactor software, to the Mirai Botnet which used thousands of unsecured smart fridges, toasters and cameras to bring down major websites, to the algorithmic excess of Facebook and Google’s proprietary content distribution systems that led to false news stories being read by millions. As we explore these historical events, how they were perceived at the time and the social and technological changes they led to, we will also work to understand how these events happened from a computational perspective: what were the vulnerabilities of the system, and how were they exploited. The goal is for students to able to apply this perspective to new technologies as they emerge and to better understand and predict the potential for exploitation. Coursework will include readings, discussions, research papers, and coding exercises to explore some of the underlying ideas of the historical examples. For the final, students will have the option of creating a creative, compelling, safe and reversible virus in the form of a browser extension. Students should bring a laptop to class.

This class is a survey course to live coding methodologies, artists, and techniques and introduces live coding as an interdisciplinary approach to making work. Live coding is a performance practice that involves real-time composition, usually with the use of computer programming. It often manifests as the practice of writing code with a programming language in order to change a live process, like sound or visuals. This results is an immediate feedback loop where the performer works to manipulate a running system in real time. Topics include the algorave movement and live coding techniques involving sound, visuals, the body, and text. This class will also include readings and discussions on the history of live coding, live coding philosophies, and its position in contemporary performance and computer science. Students will be introduced to a broad range of tools and environments for coding, such as Sonic Pi, Hydra, and in-browser techniques, as well as other art-forms that inform this methodology. A performance will take place at the end of the semester to showcase the techniques investigated. No previous coding experience is necessary. Students are expected to bring a laptop with them to every class; laptops are available to checkout through the University.

In this course we will ask the question: “How does SIRI work, and what is it actually doing?” Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that uses linguistic theory to attempt to provide more human centered ways to interact with a computer. Students explore the relationships between data, information and knowledge while being introduced to programming in Python. Readings are drawn from fifty years of literature in philosophy, linguistics and computer science that addresses the nature of language and meaning. The question we will debate is “Do computers know what they are talking about?” Using an extensive set of coding resources, students experience the satisfaction of creating a computer program that focuses on issues they identify. A major project is self-designed and can range from a language (text-based) game, to a literary creation, to a formal experiment in computational linguistics. This course fulfills the Integrative Course requirement of the Culture and Media major. [Tracks C, M, S]

Silicon Valley loves its "tools." Tech critic Moira Weigel notes the frequency with which tech chiefs use the term, and she proposes that its popularity is largely attributable to its politics -- or the lack thereof; tool talk, she says, encodes "a rejection of politics in favor of tinkering." But humans have been using tools, to various political ends, for thousands of years. In this hybrid seminar/studio we examine a range of tools, the work they allow us to do, they ways they script particular modes of labor and enact particular power relationships, and what they make possible in the world. After building up a critical vocabulary (of tools, gizmos, and gadgets), we'll tackle a number of case studies -- from anvils, erasers, and sewing needles to algorithms and surveillance technologies. In our Monday sessions we'll study the week's case through critical and historical studies from anthropology, archaeology, media studies, science and technology studies, and related fields; and in our Wednesday sessions we'll explore that tool's creative applications, either by studying the work of artists and creative practitioners, or by engaging in hands-on labs. Each student will develop a research-based "critical manual" for a tool of their choice. For Anthropology majors this course satisfies requirements in Reading and Doing.

Cryptocurrency emerged as a means of decentralizing the financial system and making banks obsolete. Its detractors cite the ways in which it reproduces systems of capital. A critical engagement with this emerging technology is the responsibility of artists and researchers, who must find creative grounds with which to explore this new paradigm. This class examines the history and theory of cryptocurrency, as students learn how to create blockchain tokens, mine crypto, and produce alternative local currencies, for the purposes of cultural production. This class is a studio/seminar hybrid, so students should be prepared to read, discuss, create, and critique.

Textile production influenced the industrial revolution causing social upheaval. Textile craft is also at the root of modern computer programming that has dramatically influenced the Information Age. This course provides a liberal arts perspective on the fundamental concepts of programming and computer architecture, exploring the premise that computer science is derived from textile craft production. Students will learn how crochet patterns provide models for understanding computer code, and how punch card techniques grew out of weaving and knitting. Computer architecture is introduced through constructing a Raspberry Pi -powered knitting machine based on Jacquard loom principles. Students will practice coding with programmable embroidery machines and then transfer those the techniques to 3D printing. Students will also read and discuss 'The Empire of Cotton' (Beckert) and 'The Fabric of Interface, Mobile Media, Design, and Gender' (Monteiro) to develop an historical perspective on the place of computer science in society.

What is the relationship between technology and musical aesthetics? Since antiquity, composers have incorporated new tools to create unique and original artworks. This course will explore the interaction between sound, art, and technology in the recent past. Starting with the birth of electricity, Futurism, and Dada, students will examine the practices and innovations that led to the most current ideas about sound art and music technology, and from here develop contemporary analytical methods for exploring and creating music. Students will be assigned weekly reading, listening, and sound composition exercises, using commercial production tools.

Digital creative writing is an astoundingly broad field incorporating a wide variety of media and technical practices from twitter poems, to interactive fiction, to games to memes. The goal of this class is to help you discover and create a digital writing practice that is personally satisfying and yields interesting work. A secondary goal is to have you develop some basic literacy in the field and some grounds on which to base your taste. A third and final goal is to have you learn some basic principles of coding and computation as they apply to the creative arts.