Media modules

Why does music matter? What is its value? What makes music a distinctive form of communication? In what ways does music enhance people’s lives, and produce forms of individual and collective flourishing? Conversely, how can music reinforce social hierarchies? How does music link to questions of social power, notably in terms of class, race and gender, in relation to its production and consumption?

This module explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities, across space and time.

No technical knowledge about music is required for this module. Rather, we are interested in the social, cultural and psychological experience of music, as well as the political-economic context of music production and consumption. You are encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars (as well as others you will have come across in your reading and on other modules).

This module examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. Its core concern is to explore notions of ‘crisis’ in mature democracies as voter turnouts and ‘trust’ informal political institutions steadily drop, national economies struggle, and news media decline. It combines theoretical insights and case examples from the fields of media studies, journalism, sociology and political science. It mainly focuses on democracies, particularly in the US and UK, but literature and examples are also drawn from other types of political system and country.

Weekly topics combine political communication themes and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. Topics covered include the crisis of politics and media in established democracies; comparative political and media systems; mass media and news production and regulation; political parties, citizen relations and political marketing; government media management, war and propaganda; symbolic and cultural political communication; forms of public participation and public opinion; media effects and audiences; policy-making, lobbying and power; economic policy and the financial crisis; digital media and online politics; globalisation and international political communication.

Much of the material for this module is highly contemporary, so students are encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire.

In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also draw on phenomenology to explore how race structures the present, often by receding into the background, as well as theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes.

Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin’, and set readings include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place’. We also attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

Within the humanities, sciences, and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from contagions, which spread virally on social media seen to work through embodied forms of sense-making and perception, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities; the modulation of emotion, affect and feeling, and the creation of mediated intimacy across a range of media forms; through to a range of practices which target the body as the site of change, expression and transformation. The body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding media and communications. This option will explore these debates by encouraging the student to think through their own embodied experience in relation to a number of case studies. These will include media representations and eating disorders; body image; queer and transgendered bodies; social media contagions, non-verbal and subliminal communication; affect and emotion; film and the senses (including suggestion); narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation; and mental health and the media (particularly exploring mental health and difference in the context of diasporic media).

The module draws from a wide range of debates and theories across the field of body studies, including affect studies, queer theory, feminisms, cultural studies, media studies and sociology. It will provide students with some timely and novel ways of thinking about the place of experience within contemporary governance and communication processes.

The module investigates the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners primarily in the UK, but with some comparison with the situation in the USA and references to the experiences of media communicators in other countries. The students are directed towards an analysis of media law as it exists, the ethical debates concerning what the law ought to be, and the historical development of legal and regulatory controls of communication. It is a lively and dynamic subject which is approached with critical balance and informed by multi-disciplinary subject areas such as the law rather than the post-Marxist predictability of cultural and media studies. For example, if a society has abolished criminal libel, how can it justify having a criminal liability for breach of privacy? As tabloid journalists up to editor level, and their sources, have been prosecuted in the UK for engaging in techniques of information gathering, the module asks about the implications for democracy and media freedom rather than solely focusing on the concept of retribution for the cult of ‘media victims.’ Who defines and determines the power co-efficient of ‘public interest?’ Is the concept of privacy a convenient ideological construct to protect powerful elite interests or a justifiable human right to protect vulnerable persons? What role should the journalist and media publishers have in justifying their power through the conception of being a public servant to their audience? The theoretical underpinning involves a module of learning the subject of media jurisprudence - the study of the philosophy of media law, media ethicology - the study of the knowledge of ethics in media communication, and media ethicism, the belief systems of media communicators.

The module evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context. The seminars involve a combination of discussion of the lecture topic followed by viewing a film/documentary programme/extract, or the constitution of a moot court whereby the students take adversarial roles in teams of attorneys/lawyers to address a fictional scenario related to each lecture topic of the module. The students also take turns to constitute a three-judge panel to decide the cause. The fictional ‘trials’ give the students an active opportunity to research, argue and determine legal and ethical issues that are deemed problematical. The module delivers considerable practical knowledge of how to navigate media law and apply it to multi-media publication.

This module examines a selection of films generally understood as examples of ‘world cinema’. It analyses the critical and conceptual approaches which have come to define the academic study of national and international film cultures, specifically ideas of ‘third’ and ‘third world’ cinema, and theories of regional and transnational cultures of production and reception.

Divided into three sections, the module will address a body of movies from Africa, Latin America and Asia that have been released over the last forty years according to three guiding themes: global(ised) economies, activism, and populism. We will be investigating these films’ formal strategies and thematic concerns; their social and cultural specificity or ‘universalism’ (alongside the politics of that distinction); their industrial and institutional contexts; and their national and international status (for example, in their home countries and in the festival circuit). How different forms of colonisation are absorbed and interrogated will be a question that threads through the entire module.

In order to be able to make sense of what is happening now in our culture of moving images, we need to understand its past – not in the sense of teleological development but in terms of how untimely sensibilities and ideas embodied in obsolete images and technologies keep on reappearing, inadvertently perhaps, in the present. This module situates itself within the emerging field of inquiry called ‘media archaeology,’ which searches through the archives in order to account for the forces that make up the contemporary world. The module will look at the deep history of audiovisual mediations through specific ‘turning points’ so as to understand the recurrent forces, motives and forms of experience that have animated the movement of images for the past 400 years. It seeks new methodological approaches to understand the history of technical images, which bridge the rift between criticism and creation, that is between thinking about and (re)inventing images. In this way, the module requires students to critically reflect on their own relationship to moving image media, relationships that may be productive, poetic and arbitrary as much as they are disciplined, rationalised and controlled.

This module sets out the key theorisations of the culture industry. While incorporating classical figurations of the culture industry, the module is primarily concerned with assembling a clear engagement with contemporary research such as those spearheaded by leading researchers at Goldsmiths.

The organisation and substance of work and of precarious labour, of the developing debates and mechanisms of ‘intellectual property’ and cultural workers’ development of institutions and networks, as well as contemporary configurations of the professional, will be discussed. The globalisation of the culture industry will provide a persistent and ambitious point of reference.

This module will introduce the key conceptual frameworks for interpreting the cultural industries, starting with the classic macro perspectives of the ‘culture industry thesis’ developed by The Frankfurt School, and Political Economy; analyses concerned with the economic structure of culture, its mass production and resultant aesthetic and social forms.

These theoretical frameworks are read critically in relation to contemporary structural changes within the social and built world, primarily the shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy, and accompanied by related transformations of the city of production into the creative city. The rise of globalisation, reorganisations in the labour market, and the proliferation of cultural and symbolic goods, brands and logos provide key dimensions of this exposition.

As it continues, the module draws more broadly from contemporary cultural theory in order to develop a model of the cultural industries which remains attuned to the influence of economic structure and ‘the domination of the commodity’ while also being able to account for the complex texture of innovation, creativity, and restructured power relationships which are emerging.

This module introduces Critical Technical Practice in partial alignment with Phil Agre’s 1997 essay Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI. Agre states that computers are not simply instrumental, the computer helps structure the site of practice as part of its very design, a form of imperialism; as ‘it aims to reinvent virtually every other site of practice in its own image’. Agre also explores how his thinking was altered by both his learning computer science and his subsequent reading of critical texts across disciplines. He explains how his ‘consciousness and purpose’ changed by describing it as ‘a slow, painful, institutionally located, and historically specific process’ to create a criticality within the field of Artificial Intelligence. During this module we will learn how to perceive technical objects as politically, culturally, socially, and economically effective, exploring grey media, network security issues, contentious databases, leaked information and cryptography. We will use the intrapersonal as a legitimate site of enquiry. We will treat each project as an evolving pedagogy situated in an evolving environment, and that ethical conflict and risk, personal or within a project, are important motors of engagement with technical objects, institutional, social or discursive critique.

At its broadest, CTP taught at Goldsmiths can be summarized as the formation of thought and action that incorporates art as a method of enquiry into a particular socio-technical milieu. This is a compacted intellectual form that makes the space between the technical, theory, practice and the intrapersonal ambiguous. A typical class in CTP would make/explore things, attempting to explain the phenomena caught in the lens of a project or proposition, and reflect on the process.

To do this we use a series of defamiliarisation techniques to create an environment of enquiry rapidly producing small projects. As the lab work is student centred, the specific experiments undertaken depend on the current mix of students. Subjects covered might include; Linux command line; Formal Language vs Informal Language; the dissection of a unix file; Programming Python; variables lists, hashes, modules; editing with Vim; introduction to networking; introduction to electronics; introduction to physical computing (Arduino); Introduction to Relational Machines - Database; introduction to Natural Language processing. This module needs no prior technical knowledge.

From Ferguson to Gaza, from the local to the global, this module proposes that we are faced with the necessity to revisit the canonical texts of postcolonial theory in order to make sense of our contemporary world. The aim of the module is to introduce you to a selection of these founding texts, and to consider the manner in which the spectre of colonialism persists in our present, both in our material reality and as a ‘spectropoetics’ that haunts the unconscious.

In this sense, you will read classic postcolonial texts of the twentieth century together with contemporary academic, activist and artistic interventions and countersignatures. Close, first-hand reading of texts is emphasised and you are required to probe the whole spectrum of postcolonial thinking—from literary theory, politics, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, race and gender studies to philosophy, art, anthropology and history—and as such interrogate the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse positionalities. We seek to problematize the very notion of post-coloniality, understood not as a temporal marker but more as a style of thought—as a problem, a question and an option, an ‘epistemic and political project’.

We begin the module from the present, with a questioning of the links and divergences between postcolonial theory and current decolonial thinking (in particular where this concerns struggles across today’s global south), in order to invest our readings of canonical postcolonial texts with a sense of urgency and to set out a disciplinary framework.

Weekly topics are organised conceptually and across geographical and temporal boundaries through the themes such as the following, each of which re-inflects the next: objectivity; recognition; representation; ecology; relation; translation; ambivalence, appropriation; repair and reconciliation.

The critique of capitalism has been an important horizon for research and theory in cultural studies since its inception. Beginning with an introduction to this (anti-)disciplinary history, this module introduces and engages with past and contemporary critical approaches to the imbrication of capitalism and culture in cultural studies, cultural theory and philosophy.

We will consider the evolution of cultural studies from its early focus on the role of capitalism in shaping class relations and class culture, through its integration of such critiques into a still-expanding range of areas of concern, including issues around gender, race, sexuality, (post)colonialism, posthumanism and ecology. We will engage with key theoretical concepts and paradigms that have been developed in order to better understand the cultural dimension and functioning of capital, such as commodity fetishism, ‘capitalism-as-religion’, gift-exchange, theories of debt, parasitism, neoliberalism, information capitalism, and post-natural ecology.

We will ask how contemporary global phenomena such as the rise of digital networking, climate change and financial crisis may be transforming the relationship between capitalism and culture, and critically examine currently circulating claims that capitalism is giving way to ‘postcapitalism’.

This module is organised around the following questions: What part do the media play in the democratic processes of society? What influences the media? How do different societies organise their media systems? To what extent do ‘new media’ change things? And (briefly) what influence do the media have?

This is a module about the transformations of the media and media systems. From changes in the mass media of broadcasting and print, to multimedia and the Internet, we look at different ways of making sense of these transformations and consider a range of questions concerning media power and influence. This is also a module about the political and economic organisation of the media.

We explore a central claim of political economists that there are important relationships between the content and output of media and the way in which media production is organised in a particular economy and social system. Political economy is concerned with questions about the relationship between media and society, with questions of media influence, and questions about how media power connects with other forms of power in society. It is concerned with questions about how media industries and cultural work is organised, and why this matters for the range and quality of what is produced by journalists, media professionals and creative workers.

It considers such issues as the influence of policy and regulation, market forces and commercial dynamics. In doing so, the module compares culturalist interpretations with studies emphasising the role of the state, media ownership, advertising and market structures as forms of media control.

Topics include: media globalisation and national media; political economy of the internet; media commercialism; media and advertising; new journalism and entertainment media; media convergence and policy; democracy and the media; comparing media and political systems across the globe.

This module addresses the emergent relations of virtual and material geographies and focuses on questions of territory, communication and speed. It is concerned with the mobilities of information, people and objects and will address topics such as the dynamics of migrancy/nomadology and sedentarism; questions of globalisation, regionalisation and the reassertion of border controls; the role of tele-technologies in the transformation of temporal and spatial relations; processes of de/re-territorialisation and ‘new mobilities’; and differential demographies of technology use.

These issues will be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, and will draw on cultural studies, cultural geography, communication studies, anthropology and logistics. The module’s concerns will be exemplified through focussing on three of the iconic figures of the contemporary era of modernity - the migrant, the mobile phone and the container box.

This option combines urban sociology with cultural studies to provide insight and understanding of key aspects of city life and urban experience. Of significance is the rise of the urban creative economy and the growth of new forms of work and careers in design, retail, art, media and culture. Throughout the module, close attention is paid to the significance of spatiality and its consequence for networking and for sociality in the ‘urban hub.’

We start the module with a focus on urban social and cultural theory and the scholarship associated with postmodernity and the ‘LA School’ i.e. David Harvey, Fred Jameson and Ed Soja. We then backtrack to the original theories of urban modernity, and the invention of city planning (Marshall Berman), including the development of the department store, and the spaces of participation available to women in city life, from the prostitute to the middle-class lady of leisure.

This is followed by one session on the global city and the emergence of new categories of urban service workers, in particular migrant workers such as nannies and care workers. In the second part of the module we consider recent forms of gentrification (Zukin) through Richard Florida’s idea of a ‘creative city’, the rise of the ‘hipster’ (Andrew Ross and Richard Lloyd) and changes in the retail landscape incorporating urban fashion ‘start ups’ (in London and Berlin). We also closely consider the role of immigration, race and class in urban organisation through the work of Loic Wacquant and Mike Davis. We tie all this up with a field trip which helps to put the module theory in a tangible and recognisable London context.

Students taking the module are encouraged to reflect on their own urban experience, both local and global, for contribution in seminars. It is advised that some prior interest in, or previous experience of, the key terms and concepts of sociological theory is useful – though extra support is available on request for students looking for fresh access to the topic.

The moving image created a revolution in perception. It changed much more than the media: it opened new ways of seeing. Fairly quickly after about 1906, the standard forms of the modern cinema began to stabilise; just as later TV would stabilise around the half-hour segment and the 30-second advert. This module focuses on those who refused to settle down, and who continued the immense deregulation of perception inaugurated by the cinema in 1896.

Between the industries of cinema, TV and digital on one side and art institutions on the other, generations of artists have worked in and on moving image technologies to offer alternative projections of the world. Sometimes personal, sometimes spiritual, sometimes political, this diverse body of work is both a treasury of advanced forms of creativity, and a storehouse of techniques and ways of thinking for new generations.

Experimental Media will address moving image and other recording technologies to analyse the breadth and boundaries of what might be considered an experiment, in artistic, activist and popular forms of media production. Topics may include the idea of beauty, medium-specificity, abstraction, sound, time ‘poor’ and ‘imperfect’ cinema, DIY aesthetics, expanded media and installation works.

This module aims to explore how the media operate as a focus of ritual action, symbolic hierarchy and symbolic conflict. In particular, it explores to what extent theoretical frameworks already developed in anthropology and social theory can help us analyse contemporary media and mediated public life. The module begins with a general introduction to debates on the media’s social impacts (integrative or otherwise). Key theoretical concepts are then outlined: sacred and profane, symbolic power, ritual, boundary, and liminality. Specific themes relating to the media’s contribution to public life and public space are then explored: celebrity and ordinariness; fandom and media pilgrimages; media events and public ritual; mediated self-disclosure (from talk shows to the Webcam); ‘reality’ television and everyday surveillance. The module concludes with a review of ethical questions arising from the media’s role in public life and public space.

This module considers the relationship of documentary to re-presenting ‘reality’ and its various ‘truth claims.’ It explores documentary production in its changing social and historical contexts, and across its different distribution platforms, and deals with current debates about documentary ethics and aesthetics. Taught by a range of lecturers (mainly) from the Media & Communications Department, it encompasses both Anglophone and some international documentary traditions, and historical examples from the early Soviet avant-garde to contemporary documentary.

This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding), promotional intermediaries and their impact on society.

The first part of the module will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development. These include professional/industrial and economic, political economy and other critiques, post-Fordist and postmodern perspectives, audience and consumer society accounts, semiotics and textual analysis.

The second part will look at specific case areas, investigating the ways promotion intervenes, interacts and mediates social relations and organisations. These sector studies include fashion and taste, hi-tech commodities and innovation, popular culture and creativity (film, TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties and promotional politics, and markets and values.

In each of these areas, questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/genres and socio-economic trends.

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.

This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

What does it mean to live entangled with social and mobile media? What are the consequences of the culture of ‘always on’ connectivity for our identities, relationships and communities? There are currently more mobile handsets on the planet than people, while Facebook alone numbered almost 1.8 billion monthly active users by the end of 2016. Most growth in mobile media users comes from the so-called Global South. There are myriad assumptions about the impact of these technologies and platforms, and yet there is little comparative evidence and critical understanding about the social life of digital media.

This module examines the consequences of social and mobile media in a comparative context. We take an explicitly non-Western approach focusing on ethnographies of social media use in China, Ghana, the Philippines and Trinidad among many others. The module brings together the interconnected literatures on globalization and social shaping of technology while we will also address contemporary debates on digital media, consumption, social change and power. The lectures will follow a trajectory from the mediation of personal processes (such as intimacy and privacy through social media) to the relationship between social media and structural processes such as migration, social class formation, inequality and development. Ultimately, rather than reporting on a collection of international case studies, the module aims to revisit assumptions about social media as well as key concepts in social science, such as intimacy and social class. The tension between cultural particularism and social change is central to the module which will end with a broader theorization of social media.

While both academic and industry research has long established how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed negatively in the media, in recent times there has been an increase in the level of campaigning around issues of representation – from the trending of #oscarssowhite, to the activism of the website Media Diversified, and recent parliamentary interventions made by actors Lenny Henry and Idris Elba demanding more diversity on and off screen. The aim of this module is to develop a rigorous, theoretically and empirically grounded approach to the topic of diversity in the media in order to help students develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how cultural industries work to produce discourses around race.

The unique intervention of the Race and the Cultural Industries module is in drawing attention to the context of production. It explores the experience of people of colour working in the cultural industries to help explain why representations of race take the form that they do. In order to address the varied contextual factors that shape representations of race, there is a strong stress on interdisciplinarity, combining critical media studies (including political economy and cultural studies perspectives) with race critical scholarship (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist and post-Marxist approaches). By focusing on cultural production the overall aim of the module is to demonstrate how racialized minorities who work in the media are constrained (or enabled) by the conditions of the cultural industries. Moreover, the module is designed to help future practitioners conceptualise their own forms of antiracist media practice.

One of the problems that the study of the culture industry presents is that - in its very nature, its key object of analysis - the culture industry as a whole has the status of a theoretical or policy-oriented fiction. Such a status does not negate its analytical use, but reflection on the particularly fragile and temporary nature of the field and its associated circumscription by notions of policy need to be brought into productive comparison with actual cultural practices. Equally, those active in the field described by this term recognise the term as belonging to a separate category of knowledge than that required to succeed in the production of culture. Culture involves complex networks of production ranging from the institutional and the transnational to the interpersonal and aesthetic. Here questions of genre, of variegated economic models and ultimately of existential and aesthetic rationale, break up any treatment of the culture industry as a coherent whole.

Driven by questions of practice, this module is organized around a series of more detailed analyses of specific cultural dynamics, where the theoretical models from ‘Theories of the Cultural Industry’ are brought to bear on individual areas of practice and the ways that they can and cannot be thought of in terms of ‘industry’. The section will focus on the empirical structure of particular methodologies for researching the culture industries, and the practice of cultural workers within these fields. In addition to lectures by academic researchers with particular expertise in music, fashion, radio and new economies, you will have access to practitioners from the fields of radio, film, music and art.

This module aims to provide students with the theoretical tools necessary for understanding postcolonial transformations in today’s Global South. The political imperative behind Postcolonial Studies – which emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s – was metropolitan multiculturalism. Multiculturalism emerged as a key agenda of progressive politics – responding largely to mobilizations around race, diaspora and the politics of gender. Grounded in certain notions of representation, discourse and text, it enabled the theorist to mount an attack on the ethico-political enterprise of post-Enlightenment humanism on behalf of those who were excluded from its universalist schema. The module seeks to familiarise students with both analytical tools and activist models developed over the last few decades to comprehend, analyse and intervene in these transformations.

Media, both old and new, are fast changing not just the way we perceive the world but also the way we experience our being-in-world and our interventions into the world. In view of this, elements of the module are concerned with studying the cultural aspects of globalization, including ‘the politics of aesthetics’, ‘sensible politics’ and the visual cultures of non-governmental activism. Globalization has also seen to a remapping of cultural and artistic fields, and the emergence of new cultural and commodity imaginaries. The globalization of art has resulted in the culture of spectacular biennales and new practices of curating. Museums and collections have become major tools for educating and disciplining populations.

Drawing from the tools provided during the ‘Postcolonial Theory’ module, and supplementing these with the ‘thinking and doing’ that has arisen from the ‘decolonial turn’, the module approaches many of the weekly topics through the framework of ‘decoloniality’ and what Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al have named ‘epistemologies of the South’. In addition to this, a key component of the module is the new socio-political theory developed after the end of the Cold War, which aims to understand the decline of the nation-state and the enhanced power of supranational institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. This requires a critical examination of a range of agendas, namely: Global Civil Society and Governance, Human Rights, Non-Governmental Organisations, Sovereignty, New Social Movements, (Intellectual) Property Rights, Environmentalism, Biopiracy, the Commons, Social Capital, etc. The module seeks to ground these concepts in political/cultural theory rather than treating them as ad-hoc ideas. Students are encouraged to draw from the critical theory tradition of cultural theory and to question the normative claims of liberal theory in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Software Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged over the last decade or so amongst an international range of scholars. It combines approaches from the arts, humanities and social sciences with those drawn from computing, in order to develop a creative and critical approach to the theories and practices of computing.

Software is understood to be a core, yet under-theorised aspect of contemporary culture and society. This module examines how software, and computing more broadly, is deeply imbricated in the developments of aesthetics, political forms, social agency and the generation of new forms of subjectivity.

It will aim to follow a line of enquiry that draws together inventive critical thinking from technologists, hackers, computer scientists, philosophers, artists and cultural theorists and thus provide the context for a rich interdisciplinary discussion on the nature of contemporary software cultures. Crucially, it goes beyond the culture/science division at a fundamental level, assuming that software is always of both kinds.

If in modernity, biological or ‘bare’ life enters the stage of history and the field of politics for the first time – as extensively argued by philosophers Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben – ushering in a biopolitical age in which power intimately accesses and regulates life, how do aesthetics register, reflect and contest such developments?

The insistent attempts of modernist and contemporary art movements to burst the banks of aesthetic autonomy and return to the contingent creativity of ‘everyday life’, living systems and corporeality as sites of experience, sensation, meaning and action, parallel power’s increasing need to relate ‘positively’ to life; to act through and upon ‘active subjects’ and to co-opt the vitality of populations.

This module moves schematically through key historical conditions, movements and artists, from the late 18th century until today, to explore this relationship and consider art’s dual role as pioneer and antagonist of biopolitical power.