This year’s premier Science and Technology Studies forum, 4S, (http://www.4sconference.org/) included several sessions dedicated to Media Arts (Communications and Social Works, Portable Technologies, Media and Place, Networked Gaming, Historicizing Design). Furthermore, the conference had a strong showing of practicing artists as presenters and attendees.

This seminar is an attempt to query this newfound appreciation of media arts amongst humanities scholars and STS researchers. In particular we will try to determine what the Arts and their particularly free-form methods of ‘research’ can contribute to Science Studies. Also, we will attempt to understand how scholarly methods in Science Studies might be fruitful for (media) art practitioners.

We will have two outside respondents in email contact with us during the course. They are:

>>Alan Sondheim
Alan Sondheim is widely recognized as a writer, philosopher and artist. He is currently associate editor of the online magazine Beehive, and one of the editors of Nettime's Unstable Digest. Alan Sondheim's books include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988), and .echo (alt-X digital arts, 2001) as well as numerous other chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special topic for the America Book Review on Codework.

>>Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Ewa Ziarek is Park Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She teaches feminist theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. (SUNY, 1995), An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. (Stanford 2001); and a co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (forthcoming) and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics (forthcoming).

Students are required to pick one of the topics listed below for class presentation (or to propose an alternative, such as the new monograph on Stelarc or Kac's Biolife). Students are also required to critically reflect on their own research methods in a six page semester paper.

Open to all graduate students !