Designing Critical Networks

This course focuses on creative network practices through a critical examination of culture, media, society, and art.

 

“Designing Critical Networks” is a course that introduces students to networked art practice, hacking networks, and the critical examination of culture, media, society, and art practice. The course will begin by grounding students with the background and theory behind these types of projects and work with them throughout the semester to collaboratively create, diagnose, and experiment with networks and networking technologies in an attempt to design both individual and collective projects that fuse together networks and critical data analysis. This approach will be carried out in a similar function to online “mashups” and other social subversions that pair discreet data sets to social problems or questions in order to elicit feedback and response from users and the general public. The end result will be both a collaborative and individual project that delivers critical analysis and execution of some form of connectivity or connected device.  This course combines skill sets of production with theoretical analysis and provocation of the results of the experiments. Students will be expected to use the facilities across all departments to better realize their goals for their own unique projects. In this respect, the course will feed into a multi-disciplinary discussion that would also transverse social theory, critical theory, and cultural studies.

 

Semesters and Institutions Taught:

Spring 2015 (Lehman College, CUNY)

Fall 2013 (Parsons, The New School for Design)

Fall 2012 (Parsons, The New School for Design)

Fall 2011 (Parsons, The New School for Design)

Fall 2010 (Parsons, The New School for Design)