SPAN 6090 - Latin American Art and Fiction in the Age of the Internet

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

G. Speranza.

Networked digital information and communication technology has become the dominant mode through which we experience the everyday. The internet has changed our ideas about reality, identity, consumption, participation, authorship, originality, attention economy and control, profoundly transforming artistic practices. The course will explore the extensive effects of digital culture on contemporary art and fiction, analyzing new aesthetic forms and devices inspired by acceleration, demterialization of the object, information overload, and by the non-linearity, multimediality and unlimitedness of the hyertext. In a world still fragmented by network inequality, we will also focus on the work of Latin American writers and artists who have turned technological gap into creative took, rendering delay,digital debris, poor image and misuse a means of critical rupture. The course will also explore forms of reconstructing an occluded reality or disrupting the real by means of materialization, repetition and reenactment.