This course will examine contemporary trends in theorizing digital media with particular attention given to software and the video game as new media texts. The semester will be divided into two units. The first unit will address theories of code and software. We will discuss the concept of “software studies” in relation to traditional media studies, and investigate how code and software can be examined as aesthetic and political texts. Through an examination of code and semiotics, software and ideology, and critiques of particular software programs, we will lay a theoretical foundation for the investigation of our second unit: video games. Following the rise of the “serious game movement” we will investigate the emergence of political games, persuasive games, simulation games, newsgames, art games, etc., in relation to the theoretical Concepts we developed while analyzing Software and code.

Sunday, February 3, 2008

Posted by Sebastian at 7:01 PM

1 comment:

Braxton said...

Nice! Hadn't seen this before. You should link to where you found this. I'm guessing runme.org? Runme is a great resource for software-art related projects (for those of you wondering).

You know, the best aspects of this image (to me) are the fact that the spellchecker is underlining "cant" as if it is still functioning mindlessly without any care for the content of the writing. Like, the spellchecker "cant" have any emotional sensibility to what is being written: it just works. And, the fact that the cursor looks like a giant "I" (when captured in the image) -- something I have not noticed before, but which makes total sense: the "text-cursor" as a large "I" in control of language...

February 3, 2008 at 9:42 PM

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