Programme

Media Arts

Level of Qualification|Semesters|ECTS

Doctorate | Semestral | 7,5

Year | Type of course unit | Language

1 |Mandatory |Português

Total of Working Hours | Duration of Contact (hours)

187,8 | 45

Code

ULP1962-15358

Recommended complementary curricular units

n/a

Mode of study

Face-to-face

Precedences

Não

Professional Internship

Não

Syllabus

1. The media before the media
- Ancestrality and the archê-fossil
- The originary technicity or the magic phase (Simondon) before the subject-object dualism

2. Classical origin of the concept of media
- Non-instrumental perspective: the media as stoicheion (primordial element) and as periekhon (environment)
- Pharmakon in Plato
- The Aristotelian model of production: genealogy of instrumentality

3. Modernity: the media as devices
- The end of the symbolic and the possibility of scanning the real: sound and image
- Technical reproducibility
- Heidegger and the problem of the spontaneity of the technique

4. Materialities of communication
- The media as inscription systems
- The conditions of possibility of cultural formations

5. Analytical Perspectives:
- The archive
- Obsolescence
- Operating manuals and other neglected means

6. Media Ecology and New Materialisms
- Vibrating materials, weird objects and the impossibility of mapping
- Geomedia or the Earth as medium

Objectives

Explore the media archaeology concept as a possible reading of the evolution of technics, not only in the perspective of a continuous, cumulative and chronologically based analysis, but, above all, considering the affinities and dissociations of the great historical and cultural paradigms of the media notion, which in turn will problematize the questions of material, nature, time, the human and the artificial.

Knowledge, abilities and skills to be acquired

Understand the great historical and cultural paradigms of the media notion
Understand the scope of the media notion for the thought of the formation conditions of the contemporary experience.
Form a broad understanding of the media notion, not only in the correspondence with the technical apparatus notion, but as a mode of access to and delimitation of the real.

Teaching methodologies and assessment

Expositive method with presentation and discussion of basic texts provided by the teacher, which are complemented with the individual presentation of case studies, by the teacher and the students. The evaluation will be composed by the presentation of an individual case study (40%) and a critical analysis of one or more subjects of the syllabus (50%).

References

Benjamin, W. (1936)¿¿A obra de arte na época da sua possibilidade de reprodução técnica.¿ In Benjamin, Walter. A Modernidade. Ed. e Trad. João Barrento. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim

Cubitt, S. (2005) Ecomedia. Amsterdam: Rodopi

Kittler, F. (1986)¿Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trad. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young, Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Meillassoux, Q. (2006)¿Après la Finitude ¿ Essai sur la Nécessité de la Contingence. Paris: Seuil

Parikka, J (2012) What is Media Archaeology. London: Polity

Peters, J. D. (2015)¿The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: UCP

Russil, C. (2017 )Is the Earth a Medium? Situating the Planetary in Media Theory. In CTRL-Z New Media Philosophy #7 (http://www.ctrl-z.net.au/journal)

Siegert, B. (2015)¿Cultural Techniques ¿ Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. New York: Fordham University Press

Simondon, G. (1958)¿Le Mode D¿Existence des Objets Techniques. Paris: Aubier