Internet poetics - critical and creative inquiry with data, digital infrastructures and the web
module description
From the module description:
How can the web, online platforms and data be leveraged for critical and creative inquiry? How might digital societies and cultures be organised with different kinds of dynamics and logics?
With the rise of “big tech” platforms and services, there has been a resurgence of interest in what is called the “poetic internet” - experimental, alternative and playful ways of knowing, relating and being together online.
This module surveys how artists, designers, technologists, community groups, journalists and researchers explore the capacities of the web as a cultural, social and political medium. We will review how Internet artists from Olia Lialina to Chia Amisola work with web browsers as devices for artistic exploration, as well as how groups like the School for Poetic Computation, Permacomputing Club and HTML Energy encourage inventive computational artefacts. We will learn about feminist, decolonial, queer, speculative and other approaches to working with data, the web and digital infrastructures.
Through a series of hands-on learning sessions we will learn how to critically and creatively repurpose hyperlinks, hashtags, databases, algorithms, archives, bots, scrapers, search results, images, videos and online devices to interrogate and intervene in digital culture and society. Those taking this module will have opportunities to develop creative works and reflective essays at the intersections of critical data studies and critical data practices, Internet research and Internet art.