DAS|LAB|BLOG

This course introduces students to emerging and experimental digital arts, encouraging critical assessment and creative exploration of technologies such as software, code, and hardware. Students will reimagine tools and techniques to build or conceptualize digital works and writing, with an emphasis on experimentation, innovation, and play. The course challenges students to engage technology in new ways while considering their ethical implications, feasibility and future potential of their ideas. Students will develop skills in working with a variety of media—image, video, text, and sound—within the context of current and emerging technologies. They will also be introduced to key concepts in contemporary digital theory and aesthetics to inform their creative practice. Key topics include Aleatoricism, where chance shapes art-games and digital writing; Debord’s theory of the dérive, applied to creating locative stories and poetry through real and digital landscapes and critical interrogation of technocapitalism manifested in gentrification, extractionism and neocolonialism; and Emergence, used to explore generative art and writing with unpredictable outcomes, emerging from human-machine intersections. Across the theoretical backdrop of Posthumanism, students will also consider more-than-human systems, examining how creativity might extend beyond human perception and integrate ecocritical perspectives e.g. from the worlds of zoology and botanics. Overall, the course fosters a playful, critical, and imaginative approach to digital creation—encouraging students to break, rethink, and rebuild digital technologies in unexpected ways.