Garrett Johnson

This team-taught, introductory course provides a foundation for most additional coursework in the Art and Technology Studies department. Students are given a broad interdisciplinary grounding in the skills, concepts, and hands-on experiences they will need to engage the potentials of new technologies in art making. Every other week, a lecture and discussion group exposes students to concepts of electronic media, perception, inter-media composition, emerging venues, and other issues important to artists working with technologically based media. Students will attend a morning & afternoon section each day to gain hands-on experience with a variety of forms and techniques central to technologically-based art making.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin (and its underlying ¿blockchain¿ technology) emerged quietly as a decentralized alternative to the corrupt centralized banking system. In the decade since, cryptocurrencies have seen widespread adoption, bringing with them ludicrous energy consumption and digital cats worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the potential of blockchains¿networked distributed ledgers that keep a tamper-proof record of all transactions that occur on the network¿extends far beyond facilitating digital cash. Will blockchains spawn egalitarian techno-utopias free from authoritarian governments and tech companies? Or is the whole 'crypto' enterprise just a wasteful pyramid scheme?

This course will explore blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies as both a material and context for artistic experimentation, emphasizing both a cultural and technical understanding of blockchains that can inform critical making. As cultural foundation, we will weave a thread through the invention of money, cryptography, the creation of the Internet, the relationship of cryptocurrencies to anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism, posthumanism, surveillance capitalism, planetary-scale computation, environmental impact, techno-solutionism, meme magic, the NFT/¿cryptoart¿ market, and the history of conceptual art. Technically, we will learn the basics of public-key/private-key cryptography, crypto-mining, oracles, and the principles behind Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Practically, we will work primarily with the Ethereum blockchain and the Solidity programming language to create our own tokens (fungible and non-fungible), dApps (decentralized Applications), and smart contracts. We will examine works by crypto/blockchain-adjacent artists such as Simon Denny, Primavera De Filippi, Ai Wei Wei, Eve Sussman, Jonas Lund, Sarah Friend, Bitnik, Larva Labs, Stephanie Rothenberg, Julian Oliver, and Terra0. Additionally, we will look at how blockchain-based platforms are transforming the way both digital and physical art are bought and sold.

Screenings and readings will provide technical and conceptual foundation for blockchain technology. Students will complete weekly homework assignments, as well as midterm and final projects with respective critiques. While some programming experience is encouraged (JavaScript in particular), no coding experience is needed to make meaningful work in this class.

Post-modernist and post-structuralist art, architecture, literature, music and performance have often made overtures to the chaotic, while admitting the creative act always requires structuration driven by a more-than-human intentionality (see Cage¿s definition of music as ¿organized sound¿). Sidestepping aesthetics altogether, Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz understands art as a non-extraordinary rerouting of the chaotic forces of the earth to create a territory. A territory is a culture, a culture of intensities. For psychoanalyst and activist Felix Guattari, the artist, and perhaps exceptionally the improviser, must open themselves onto the cosmos ¿ which he calls the chaosmos. Despite historical adoration for chaos as a catalyst for creativity, appeals to chaos might feel exasperating in 2023. The founding scientists of chaos theory wrote ¿we grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate¿ (Prigogyne and Stengers, 1984). Unexpected loss of human life in the pandemic, the rise of stochastic terrorism fueled by extremism, and the industrialized destruction of our very lifeworld ¿ haven¿t we had our fill of chaos? In four parts, this seminar charts a path across disciplines and between chaos and order in the creative act. First we begin with the scientific origins of chaos theory (Poincare¿s ¿three body problem¿), early systems theory (Von Uexhull¿s ecology), and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger¿s seminal Order out of Chaos. Next we will fashion a cultural thermodynamics through science fiction (Cixin Liu, Ursula K. Le Guin) and feminist art theory (Grosz, Institute for Precarious Consciousness). We turn to the chaosmos (a chaotic cosmology) as articulated by activist and in-disciplinary thinker Felix Guattari as well as radical empiricist-pragmatists (Bergson, Dewey). Finally, we revisit the cybernetic bedrock of chaos theory: computation. We turn to both arguments about what it is (Galloway, Dhaliwal, Parisi), what we imagine it can do in a chaotic world(Turner, Curtis), and what we argue it can¿t do (Simondon, Yuk Hui). Students are encouraged to bring their own practices and perspectives to the readings and to a final paper. In addition to seminar discussions and student presentations about readings, students will choose to respond, elaborate, and interject into the course¿s discourse either through creative projects or papers.