Art History and Actuality / Media (B2)

2nd quadrimester

Teacher: Isabel Burr Raty

This part of the course will start as a historical journey through the artistic technologies devised by indigenous cultures, adapted by minorities living in a state of resistance and excluded from the “official” artistic production, such as the Easter Island Rapa Nui community, the Mapuche people in Chile, or the Zapatista community in Mexico. After understanding the “technology of art” as it developed within a “struggle for survival”, we will explore the notion of “resistance” in artistic practices lying at the core of new media movements such as hybrid art, digital art, mechatronic art, xenofeminist art, bio art, ecofeminist art — all of which develop their own technologies or technological approaches, inscribed in a reflection on non-human agency, matter- and material-oriented ontology, multispecies aesthetics, post-humanism, the Anthropocene and climate change among others.

Objectives

- Providing an introduction to the history of new media arts, with a special focus on artistic practices using or re-creating technology in order to re-appropriate it.

- Opening the imagination around the creative potentialities of technology and expanding the notions of matter beyond the established paradigms of interaction.

- In the course, the students will learn to reflect on the development of their own practices.

Evaluation modes and criteria

- Oral exam and written essay.

Teaching method

- Individual research

- Group dynamics, presentations and readings

- Exhibition and performance visits

- Guests (conditional)