Judy Malloy

With a concentration on creative practice in online environments, students will focus on the work of women, from the early days of computing, to the late 20th century, to the 21st century. In addition to lectures, readings, and traversals, practicum segments will guide student creation of online works that explore and expand on the role of women in cyberspace. Beginning with the work of women software engineers, such as black mathematician Katherine Johnson, and engineer and transgender activist Lynn Conway -- and with a project-oriented focus -- the course will look at the cyberspace-based work of women artist innovators, including ECHONYC founder, Stacy Horn; Cave Automatic Virtual Environment developer Carolina Cruz-Neira; and Ping Fu and Colleen Bushell's role in graphical interface design for Mosaic. At its core, the course will focus on the works of women cyberartists, including Joan Jonas, Sherrie Rabinowitz, Nancy Paterson, Brenda Laurel, Pamela Z, Char Davies, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shu Lea Cheang, Tamiko Thiel, Carla Gannis, and Micha Cardenas. Students will create women-centered virtual art works, including graphic narratives and electronic manuscripts, and/or archives, online essays, or criticism.

Note that because Women Artists in Cyberspace is an asynchronous class, attendance on a specific day or time is not required.

Electronic manuscripts combine images, words and potentially other media including sound and video. They include but are not limited to online narratives with interactive, hypertextual, animated, or generative elements; artists books (either online or with digital elements); innovative online portfolio pages; SoundWorks hosted on a webpage with textural or visual elements; and installations with digital narrative components. We will study issues in creating content for electronic manuscripts and explore the software, algorithms, and interfaces with which they are created, including social media platforms, HTML5/CSS; JavaScript, twine, and Inform7.

The works we will study in this course include Matt Huynh's scrolling 'The Boat,' in which a harrowing narrative of Vietnamese 'boat people' refugees unfolds amidst animated falling rain, storm-rocking graphics, voiced laments, light and dark, moving text, and floating images; Carla Gannis' triptych animation:'The Garden of Emoji Delights; Nick Montfort's generative concrete poetry 'Autopia'; Catt Small's 'SweetXheart¿, an interactive game that asks 'Can you get through a week in the life of a modern black woman?; and installed works such as Carolee Schneemann¿s 'Venus Vectors' and Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Camille Utterback's 'Talking Cure'.

Students will traverse examples; create content; learn/practice HTML5/CSS, basic JavaScript, twine, inform7, and social media-based authoring platforms, create work in the media of their choice.

In an in-situ online studio environment, Social Media Narratives will explore the possibilities of social media platforms as authoring systems for creative work. Interactive traversals of classic and contemporary social media-based artworks; authoring practicum; critical discussion of issues in contemporary social media, such as surveillance advertising, censorship, and content ownership; envisioning new social media platforms hospitable to artists; and an online panel with guest artists will ground the course in the lineage and contemporary practice of social media-based narrative.

The works of artists and writers -- such as Jennifer Egan, Teju Cole, Eduardo Kac, Joseph DeLappe, Carla Gannis, Cindy Sherman, Al Weiwei, Bernie Su, Sandra Cisneros, and Chindu Sreedharan -- will key explorations of creative practice on social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Second Life, YouTube, and Twitch. Fox Harrell's concept of phantasmal media, plus the works of scholars and media historians -- such as Beth Coleman, Judith Donath, Robert Gehl, and Henry Jenkins -- will inform investigations of social media, past, present and future.

Students will create short, midterm, and final projects in the media of their choice -- including words, images, video, animation, performance, conceptual, information-based, and interactive.