AH563

Cyber Spaces: Contemporary Landscapes of the Virtual World

Monday, 530-830pm, 209 Jefferson Hall

Peter B. Hales, Professor, Art History Department, American Studies Institute email pbhales@uic.edu
208A Henry Hall 413-2461

This is an interdisciplinary seminar exploring the notion that the new public spaces are cyberspaces; that the new revolutionary artistic production of our age is the production of cyberspaces in computer and video games and in internet sites.

A huge amount of writing has poured forth pontificating on the significance of cyberspace; most of it is by people who have never read cyberpunk literature, or constructed real cyberspaces or done CAD or played Quake or Doom in internet deathmatches or engaged in cross-gender identity-masking while in chat rooms. This is the course to change all that.

The course will start with readings in fiction, science fiction, analytical non-fiction and polemics: we will look at works like Hamlet on the Holodeck and The Electronic Disturbance. The bulk of the course, however, is devoted to entering, living in, and then detaching and analyzing these radical new spaces. Students for my seminars usually come from literature, creative writing, painting, photography and the visual arts, art history, anthropology, and the humanities. Everyone will do relatively brief pieces analyzing each week's experiences: poetry, paintings, 'pages, 'zine pages, fiction, short essays are all appropriate if defensible. A final project of real scope and ambition, directly relating to the course material, is the major work of the course.