MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory & Practice

Within the MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice, you will consider the following questions:

• What is the historical relation between computation and media systems? What is meant by interactive media culture? What is meant by computational media or meta-medium?
• Which theoretical methods can we use to approach the increasing development of interactive media culture as a specific form of computational cultures?
• How do cybernetic models of control and communication (1st and 2nd and 3rd orders cybernetics) contribute to technical, cultural, political development of the new notion of media ecologies?
• How has the development of relational databases re-articulated the operations of control and how has it produced a new aesthetics of data visualization?
• What are the critical tensions between the increasing adaptation of tactics of viral communication and neo-liberal strategies of non-linear capitalisation?
• What is the relation between computation and capitalism?
• What are the philosophical (and ontological) tensions between notions of computational aesthetics (the aesthetic of coding) and notions of a digital aesthetics of affect and virtuality?
• Where are the opportunities for collective intervention?
• Is there a distinct ethico-aesthetic practice of computational media art?

Practically, you will explore:

• Software through defamiliarisation techniques.
• “Freeness and openness” within the media systems of nascent control societies.
• Signals – media systems, media ecologies and their possible biological origins.
• Practical examples of information theory.
• The structural operations of specific media systems and when and where to intervene.

You will be introduced to leading artists and their practices and projects. We will focus on your own learning needs and what needs to be done to get you making progress. We will attend international arts events.