Art, time, and new media

Elecitve Course

This course approaches an examination of contemporary artistic practice, time, and new media from an interdisciplinary and transitional perspective. How, in recent artworks, is time evoked and denied, measured and transformed, linear and looped? How has an interrogation of speed, duration, and scale become interwoven with a consideration of art and new media from the late 1960s till today? How has contemporary telecommunication (instant, real time) altered time in a finite world? How has telepresence shifted how we conceive of the space-time duality? Why do we conceive of time in economic terms: “spend” time, “waste” time, “free” time? As Jonathan Crary argues, the era of late capitalism’s non-time operates on a twenty-four-hour clock in which management of attentiveness and the impairment of perception combine with compulsory routines and mimesis. This encourages a revisitation of the history of perceiving and communicating with and through various media of the last century.  This class interrogates the intersections of art, time, and new media within a broader consideration of historical, technological, and labor-based revolutions and theoretical shifts.