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Syllabus Visual Culture and Digital Media: Image Screen Interface - 50772
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Last update 17-02-2021
HU Credits: 2

Degree/Cycle: 2nd degree (Master)

Responsible Department: Communication & Journalism

Semester: 2nd Semester

Teaching Languages: Hebrew

Campus: Mt. Scopus

Course/Module Coordinator: Prof. Paul Frosh

Coordinator Email: paul.frosh@mail.huji.ac.il

Coordinator Office Hours: Tuesdays 10.30-11.30

Teaching Staff:
Prof Paul Frosh

Course/Module description:
The course examines the development of visual culture in the contemporary period and the transformations affecting it as a result of digital technologies.

Course/Module aims:
The course is based on central theoretical texts and new research focusing on the fate of modern media such as photography, cinema and television in the digital age, as well as the creation of new visual forms.

Learning outcomes - On successful completion of this module, students should be able to:
To explain the major theories and topics in research on visual culture in the digital age.
To achieve a high level of competence in conceptualizing communicative, social, political and cultural questions concerning digital visual culture and media.
To produce in-depth critical readings of advanced theoretical writings and research in the field.
To compare and contrast central thinkers and schools of thought and to interpret and evaluate their points of similarity and difference.
To analyze contemporary empirical communications and cultural phenomenon in the light of the works studied.

Attendance requirements(%):
100

Teaching arrangement and method of instruction: Lectures, presentations and discussions.

Course/Module Content:
Overview

1. Before the computer: images and vision in the modern era
2. What are Digital Media?
3. The enchanted interface and the operative image: icons, cursors, windows and screens

Media

4. Digital photography: And God created Photoshop.
5. Is this a movie or a theme-park ride? Digital cinema
6. Does television still exist? Television after TV
7. Here you are! Mobile media and global positioning

Cultural Practices and Social Functions

8. Keeping it real: Image manipulation and simulation
9. Movie, video-game and action figure: transmedia storytelling
10. You Have Been Tagged! Narcissism and Voyeurism
11. A Democracy of Images? Photo-sharing and Citizen Photojournalism

Required Reading:
Andén-Papadopoulos, K. (2009) “US Soldiers Imaging the Iraq War on YouTube”. Popular Communication 7: 17-27.

Casetti, F. (2013) What is a Screen Nowadays?, in C. Berry, J. Harbord and R. Moore (eds), Public Space, Media Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan: 16–40.

Casetti F and Sampietro S (2012) With eyes, with hands: The relocation of cinema into the iPhone. In: Snickers P and Vonderau P (eds) Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 19-32.

Chamberlain, D (2010) “Television Interfaces”, Journal of Popular Film and Television 38(2): 84-88.

Crawford K. and Paglen T. (2019) Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine Learning. https://excavating.ai

Doane, M. A. (2007) “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity”. Differences 18(1): 128-152.

Friedberg, A. (1993) ‘The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity’, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press, Berkeley: 15¬-28.

Friedberg, A. (2006) ‘The Multiple’. Chapter 5 in The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press: 190-239.

Frosh, P. (2019) Eye, Flesh, World: Three Modes of Digital Witnessing. In K. Schankweiler, V. Straub, V. and T. Wendi, eds. Image Testimony: Witnessing in Times of Social Media. Routledge: London.

Lotz, A. (2009) What Is U.S. Television Now? The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625: 49-59.

Manovich L. (2001) “The Screen and the User” (94-115) in The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 99-114 in course version.

Manovich, L. (2006) The Poetics of Augmented Space. Visual Communication 5(2): 219-240.

Manovich, L. (2012) The back of our devices looks better than the front of anyone else’s: On Apple and interface design. In: Snickers P and Vonderau P (eds) Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 278-286.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005) ‘There are no visual media’. Journal of Visual Culture 4(2): 257-266.

Packer, J. and Oswald, O. (2010) “From Windscreen to Widescreen: Screening Technologies and Mobile Communication”. The Communication Review 13: 309-339.

Pantti, M. and Bakker, P. (2009) “Misfortunes, memories and sunsets : Non-professional images in Dutch news media”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(5): 471–489.

Pold, S. (2005) ‘Interface Realisms: The Interface as Aesthetic Form’. Postmodern Culture 15 (2).

Rose, G. (2001). ‘Researching Visual Materials: Towards a Critical Visual Methodology’. Chapter 1 in Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London, Sage: 1-27.

Ross, M. (2012) “The 3-D aesthetic: Avatar and hyperhaptic visuality”. Screen 53(4): 381-397.

Rubinstein, D, and Sluis, K. (2008) “A Life More Photographic: Mapping the Networked Image”. Photographies 1(1): 9-28.

Thompson, J. (2005). The New Visibility. Theory, Culture and Society 22(6): 31-51.

Van Dijck, J. (2008) “Digital photography: communication, identity, memory”. Visual Communication 7(1): 57–76.

Verhoeff, N, and Cooley, H. R. (2014) The Navigational Gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface. NECSUS 3 (1): 111–128.

Additional Reading Material:
Acland, C.R. (2009) “Curtains, Carts and the Mobile Screen”. Screen 50(1): 148-166.

Bennet, T. (1995) ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, The Birth of the Museum, Routledge, New York.
Also in: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (Eds) Thinking About Exhibitions (1996), Routledge, New York, and Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley and Sherry Ortner (Eds) Culture/Power/History (1994), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ.

Bolter J. D. and Grusin R. (1999) “Immediacy, Hypermediacy and Remediation” (20-52) in Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Burgess, J. and Green, J. (2009) ‘How YouTube Matters’, Chapter 1 in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, Polity: 1-14.

Caldwell, J. (2004) ‘Convergence Television: Aggregating Form and Repurposing Content in the Culture of Conglomeration’. In Spigel, L. and Olsson, J. (eds) Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition. Durham, NC., Duke University Press: 41-74.

Carlson, M. (2006) ‘Tapping into TiVo: Digital Video Recorders and the Transition from Schedules to Surveillance in Television’. New Media and Society 8 (1): 97-115.

Crary, J. (1988) “Modernizing Vision”, in Hal Foster (Ed) Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press. 29-49.

Cook, L. (2005) A visual convergence of print, television, and the internet: charting 40 years of design change in news presentation. New Media and Society 7(1):22–46.

Cooley, H. R. (2004) “It's all about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision”. Journal of Visual Culture 3(2): 133-155.

Darley, A. (2000) “Simulation and Hyperrealism: Computer Animation and TV Advertisements” (81-101) and “The Waning of Narrative: New Spectacle Cinema and Music Video” (102-123) in Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London, Routledge.

Thomas Elsaesser (2013) The “Return” of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty- First Century. Critical Inquiry 39(2): 217-246.

Foster, H. (1996) ‘The Archive without Museums’, October 77: 97-119.

Frosh, P. (2009) ‘The Face of Television’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625: 87-102.

Frosh, P. (2015) The Gestural Image: The Selfie, Photography Theory and Kinaesthetic Sociability, International Journal of Communication, 9: 1607–1628.

Griffin, M. (2012) ‘Images from Nowhere: Visuality and News in 21st Century Media’. In Frank Esser and Thomas Hanitzsch (Eds) Handbook of Comparative Communication Research, London, Routledge: 159-189.

Greenblatt, S. (1991) ‘Resonance and Wonder’ in Ivan Karp and Steven Levine (Eds) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Hansen, M. (2010) ‘New Media’. In W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen (eds.) Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 172-185.

Jay, M. (1988) ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’ in Hal Foster (Ed) Vision and Visuality: 3-27. (Also in S. Lash and J. Friedman (Eds) Modernity and Identity (1992) Blackwell, Oxford: 178-195.

Jose M. Garcıa-Montes, Domingo Caballero-Munoz and Marino Perez-Alvarez (2006) “Changes in the self resulting from the use of mobile phones”. Media, Culture & Society 28(1): 67–82

Jenkins, H. (2004) “The cultural logic of media convergence”. International Journal of Cultural Studies 7(1): 33-43.

Kirschenbaum, M.G. (2008) ‘Introduction: Awareness of the Mechanism”, in Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press: 1-23.

Kompare, D. (2006) ‘Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television’. Television & New Media 7(4): 335–360.

Lapenta, F. (2011) ‘Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems’. Visual Studies 26(1): 14-24.

Lister, M. (1997) “Photography in the Age of Electronic Imaging” in Liz Wells (ed.) Photography: A Critical Introduction, pp. 251-266.

Marika Luders (2008) “Conceptualizing Personal Media”, New Media and Society 10(5): 683-702.

Manovich L. (2001) “What is New Media?” (18-55) in The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 43-77 in course version.

Manovich, L. (2001) “The Forms” and “The Database” (213-236) in The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 190-207 in course version.

Manovich, L. (2001) “What Is Cinema” (287-308) in The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 244-260 in course version.

Manovich. L. (2003) ‘The Paradoxes of Digital Photography’, in Wells, L. (ed) The Photography Reader. London, Routledge: 240-251.

Manovich, L. (2013) ‘Understanding Metamedia’. Chapter 2 in Software Takes Command. New York, Bloomsbury: 107-157. Electronic version available via library database.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002) ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture 1(2), 165-181.

Mitchell, W.J.T. (2010) ‘Image’. In W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen (eds.) Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 35-48.

Mulvey, L. (2004) “Passing Time: Reflections on Cinema from a New Technological Age”. Screen 45(2): 142-155.

Murray, S. (2008) “Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics”, Journal of Visual Culture 7(2): 147-163.

Niessen, N. (2011) “Lives of cinema: against its ‘death’”. Screen 52(3): 307-326.

Schwartz, O. (2009) ‘Good Young Nostalgia: Camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths’, Journal of Consumer Culture 9(3): 348-376.

Sekula, A. (1989) ‘The Body and the Archive’ in Richard Bolton (Ed) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass: 342-388.

Soderman, B. (2007) ‘The Index and the Algorithm’. Differences 18(1), 153-186.

Uricchio, W. (2011) ‘The algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and the changing implications of the image’. Visual Studies 26(1): 25-35.

Verhoerff, N. (2012) Navigating Screenspace: Toward Performative Cartography. In: Snickers P and Vonderau P (eds) Moving Data: The iPhone and the Future of Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 19-32.

Course/Module evaluation:
End of year written/oral examination 0 %
Presentation 25 %
Participation in Tutorials 0 %
Project work 75 %
Assignments 0 %
Reports 0 %
Research project 0 %
Quizzes 0 %
Other 0 %

Additional information:
Option of writing a seminar paper.
 
Students needing academic accommodations based on a disability should contact the Center for Diagnosis and Support of Students with Learning Disabilities, or the Office for Students with Disabilities, as early as possible, to discuss and coordinate accommodations, based on relevant documentation.
For further information, please visit the site of the Dean of Students Office.
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