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  4. Área de Especialização em Cultura Contemporânea e Novas Tecnologias
  5. Contemporary Thinking and Art

Contemporary Thinking and Art

Objectives

  1. To understand the general impact of information technologies on contemporary culture and its rapid transformation;
  2. To become familiar with emerging and transdisciplinary issues within contemporary culture and its current debate, contextualizing works and authors within these themes;
  3. To apprehend the figuration of these issues in contemporary artistic proposals, including art as an investigative basis;
  4. To relate these issues with the foundational thought of central authors on the problematic of technique in contemporary culture.

General characterization

Code

02107668

Credits

10.0

Responsible teacher

Maria Teresa Pimentel Peito Cruz Bragança de Miranda

Hours

Weekly - 3

Total - 280

Teaching language

Portuguese

Prerequisites

Available soon

Bibliography

  • Braidotti, R. (2019) Posthuman Knowledge, Polity Press;
  • Bratton, B. (2016) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press;
  • Foster, H. (2015) Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. Verso;
  • Groys, B. (2017) Particular Cases. Sternberg Press;
  • Hayles, K. (2017) Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. MIT Press;
  • Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press;
  • Heidegger, M. (2013) The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, Harper Perennial Modern Classics;
  • Müller, J. (2016) Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, Rowman & Littlefield;
  • Simondon, G. (2017 [1958]) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Univ Of Minnesota Press;
  • Sloterdijk, P. (2014) In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization. Polity Press;
  • Stiegler, B. (2019 [2016]) The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Polity Press.

Teaching method

The methodology will be expository and problematizing, promoting the understanding of contemporary debates and the perspectives and arguments in play. This methodology encourages students to participate in oral exercises for discussing texts and presenting objects and practices related to the themes of the course.

This general methodology will be complemented with the transdisciplinary participation of experts, as guest speakers in modules 2 and 3, depending on the theme proposed for each semestrial edition of the course.

Evaluation method

Continuous Assessment - Essay or project work (60%), Participation in class assessed by the quantity and quality of interventions, such as in presentations, debates, collective readings, and other contributions(40%)

Subject matter

Module 1. Culture, Technique and Art 

  • Culture and technique: anthropological views;
  • The "technogenesis" of the human and the critique of instrumental and ontological visions of technique;
  • "Technical milieu" and "technical objects";
  • Art and technique (modern approaches); "cultural techniques" and "mnemotechnics";
  • The Digital and the planetarization of technology;
  • A new "organology": cognition and its artificial extension;
  • Posthumanisms: contemporary critiques of anthropocentrism;
  • The Anthropocene and the new contracts between the human and the non-human.

Module 2

Specific theme to be indicated at each semester, within emerging issues in contemporary thinking, and to be addressed by a high profile guest lecturer

Module 3 

Presentation of cultural and artistic practices related to the theme of module 2, to be addressed by a guest lecturer or the professors collaborating with the discipline.