Content, progress and pedagogy of the module

Aims: The Media Cultures Stream emphasizes the critical consideration of significant areas of media history, theory, and criticism. The curricular emphasis is in areas of digital media, but traditional media forms (e.g. film) are also addressed. This stream is intended to provide postgraduate level preparation especially for media professionals and graduates, and for applicants from other professional areas in which the role of being a media specialist is increasingly desirable or necessary.

Courses offered in this stream will vary from year to year, based on faculty, demand and the schools other offering. Please see the list of stream offerings included in the City U School of creative media “Taught Postgraduate Catalogue” found also on the website http://www.cityu.edu.hk/pg/201617/catalogue/catalogue_TP.htm?page=TP/TP_course_SM.htm

(Example for reference use only, please see individual course descriptions for details)

Learning objectives

Knowledge

SM6325 Philosophy of Technology and New Media

This course seeks to understand how new media technologies are embedded and constituted in our everyday practices and to examine the artistic potential of human-technology relations. It posits practices involving new media technologies into a framework of philosophy of technology and critically interrogates the promises and expectations about around new media. More specific topics include examining the ways in which technologies are (re-)shaped in their culturally situated use-contexts. Special attention is paid to the mundane but intimate human-technology relations we enter into on everyday basis and the ways in they modify our understanding of the world and our ability to operate in it. Relevant questions, to be dealt with in both scholarly and artistic fashion, include: Do technologies have purposes? Where does the human body stop and the technology begin? Do technologies make us more/less free? What is the balance of power like in a particular human-technology relation? Upon completion of the class, students should be able to apply post-phenomenological insights in their own research projects and artistic practice, and subject new media artworks to critical analysis as technologies.

Course Intended Learning Outcomes

• To identify the key theoretical positions and concepts concerning the nature of technologies and their role in constituting human experience of the world
• Articulate how technologies are created in human practices and how they mediate and transform human experience of the world; identify artistic uses for existing technologies
• Differentiate between and critically discuss new media artworks based on the involvement of technology
• Apply post-phenomenological theory in independent research and critical writing, and artistic practice (if applicable)

Exam

Exams