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.
Two cool things I found in the past day:
flickrvision displays photos uploaded to Flickr as they go, correlated on a world map.
Alex Dragulescu's Malwarez is a visual rendering of a few internet worms, based on analysis of their code.
2 comments:
Whoa, I could watch that flickrvision for a long while I imagine: the rotating globe is a nice effect.
I've also been interested in the work of alex dragulescu...although I'm not sure malwarez is my favorite. I don't know much about how viruses are coded: would any code visualized like this have a similar "look"? Or, does the specificity of virus-code, coupled with the visualization technique, produce these formations whereas non-virus code would look different?
Flickrvision was shown recently at the MoMA.
Another project like that would be "We Feel Fine" by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kavmar.
http://www.wefeelfine.org/
Instead of images, that project aggregates blogged emotional states.
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