Final Semester!

Here’s my class line up:

The­sis 2

The sec­ond semes­ter of the­sis class; Adam Chap­man is teach­ing my sec­tion. I’ll soon move into pro­to­typ­ing Lil­liput, test­ing out dif­fer­ing uses of the Wun­derkam­mer and inter­ac­tive sto­ry­telling to cre­ate a travel log.  Even though the con­cep­tual frame­work is rein­forced by all my stud­ies in His­tory, Pho­tog­ra­phy, and Design and Tech­nol­ogy, imple­men­ta­tion in a inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal for­mat is very new ter­ri­tory for me. This is a risky move for the­sis.  That said, I am com­mit­ted to seri­ous exper­i­men­ta­tion with inter­ac­tive nar­ra­tive before I leave school.

Nar­ra­tive and Dynamic Systems

Appar­ently, game design is deal­ing with many of the same issues of affect, nar­ra­tive, agency and engage­ment that doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy and social art prac­tices are grap­pling with. I will use this gam­ing cen­tric class to sup­port the­sis work and mine emer­gent cre­ative fields for insight into the roll of inter­ac­tiv­ity and agency in the cur­rent media land­scape. Nick For­tugno teaches this class (love hav­ing teach­ers who have wikipedia arti­cles about them). I’ll get to read Thomas Pyn­chon and Mark Z. Danielewski and join an MUD and play RPGs. Yea, Design and Tech­nol­ogy!  I’m already fan­ta­siz­ing about sham­less throw­backs to high­school geekdom.

Intro to Data­bases: PHP and MySQL

Server side tech­nol­ogy and data­bases have a lot to do with the power behind web 2.0. I’ll be work­ing learn­ing the prac­ti­cal pro­gram­ming side of these tech­nolo­gies as instructed by Jamie Kosoy.  Prac­ti­cal skills!

Ori­gins of Con­tem­po­rary Visual Culture

This his­tory class will trace mod­ern atten­tion economies and visu­al­ity from the 19th cen­tury up to… well, wher­ever we end up. I’ve been deal­ing with issues orig­i­nat­ing in 19th cen­tury prac­tices of the archiv­ing and index­i­cal­ity, so it’s excit­ing to address this with some rigor in a class­room set­ting. Last semes­ter, I stud­ied the his­tory of infor­ma­tion the­o­ries and their rela­tion­ship to tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment and body pol­i­tics. This class will step back a lit­tle ear­lier to under­stand how life, machines, and gov­ern­men­tal­ity came together in moder­nity.  Orit Halpern is teach­ing this class.