Announcing my spring grad seminar at NYU on "Digital Media and Materiality." I'm delighted to be team-teaching with Leif Weatherby from the German dept. The course is listed in MCC as well as in German.
Digital Media and Materiality
Leif Weatherby & Alexander Galloway
Wednesdays 2-4:40pm
Spring 2019
Norbert Wiener wrote in 1948 that "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day." This course takes up the challenge, introducing students to the range of recent materialist research, while at the same time maintaining a skepticism about claims of the “newness” of this approach & the coherence or unity of the “material turn” in social theory. While including materialist media theory, the course will also focus on the elemental aspects of digital media – from codes & circuits to power generation & storage – in order to assess the usefulness of materialist & infrastructural analytics for understanding contemporary media systems.
