I am teaching two courses in the Critical Studies Department of the California College of the Arts over the 2023 Fall semester.
The “The Post-Real” course addresses the following questions:
Do you know what is real or fake, factual or made up, truth or lies? Do you think we live with a shared reality, that reality is up to each individual, or that reality is an algorithm that has been hacked? Has what is real become wildly confusing as disinformation, alternative facts, or conspiracy theories increase? What does it mean to see deepfakes, chat bots, AI systems, virtual life forms, replicants, and counterfeits swarm across the digital and offline world?
In this course we examine how the technologies we make and use shape the real, who the players of the ‘reality business’ are, and how this matters in the choices we make in daily life. Over the semester, we will create artworks and short essays in response to texts, artistic works, films, animations, and performances by Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Latinx, Asian and other global theorists and artists. This course provides foundational skills in critical analysis through hands-on assignments that improve how one communicates concepts and ideas.
The “Performing the Data Body” seminar addresses the following questions:
What is a data body, and why does this matter? Virtually everything we do can be collected as a data point. The volume of data collected about humans every single day is already 70 times what is held in the Library of Congress. Each of us has an external data body, and it is performing across AI, virtual life forms, robotics, social media and dataveillance databases, and ancestry DNA websites. Internally, we are made up of DNA, a genetic code so complex that if you stretched the coils out, they would reach twice the diameter of our Solar System.
How are our data bodies performing across time and space, who owns them, and what are they performing when we’re not paying attention, or even aware of their existence? Do our data bodies replicate us, misrepresent us, implicate us, and know us better than we know ourselves? This course explores the surprising and innovative ways that artists, body hackers, and scholars approach these questions through performance theory, body theory, and cyborg theory. This course is centered on critical readings and artworks by Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, Latinx, Asian, and other global theorists and artists.