Cycle 4 Courses
BANALITY BASED BANALITY
Ermahgerd! Take this class because YOLO!!! DIS AR TEH BANAL CLAS BOUT TEH BANAL PROPAGASHUN OV BANALITY.NOSTALGIA IZ (TUNA FISH ON WITE BREAD). Snooki had a baby? Tell me again how this affects you personally. JOY IZ (A DIMINISHIN RETURN). Gotta get down on Friday. Oh, so you use Instagram? You must be a professional photographer! WEAKNES IZ (TEH FRACTURD CONCRETE IN DA DRIVEWAY). Oh, you just graduated? You must know everything. LUV IZ (ANTI-ITCH CREAM). I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over how awesome I am. CAN I HAZ BANALITY (gangnam style)? Y U NO ENRUL?
Digressor Talan Memmott
E.M.P.-LIT
Darkness. Sweet, silent darkness. The power’s out. Permanently. Piles of plastic. The network is down. The network is dark. Sweetly, silently dark.
Where does electronic literature go when the power is out? Permanently? When the server no longer provides the PC? When the Personal Computer no longer provides the person?
Into darkness. Into sweet, silent darkness.
This class will explore and define methods of digital preservation beyond the place of power. Hypertextuality, generativity, multimedia interactivity: gone, replaced by piles of bargain-bin pop-sensational fiction, unless we work to analogize these methods to a platform with more longevity. In a first act of desperation, we will be transposing what we as electronic literates have discovered through digital composition back onto paper which, when all has become dark, sweetly and silently dark, can still be experienced by candlelight.
Digressor Sonny Rae Tempest
“I’M KNOT SURE!” USING TEXT MESSAGING TO YOUR ADVANTAGE!
Didn’t mean to send that typo ridden text message? Embarrassed that you misspelled ‘restauraunt’? Turn those text messages into love notes, cover letters, sestinas, etc! Before you know it, you’ll be the talk of the town! Students are encouraged to send their “worst” text messages. By the end of the course, this collaborative effort should have enough material for publication!
Digressors: Ray DeJesús
THE INADEQUACIES OF LANGUAGE
Linguistic inadequacies, linguistic insufficiencies, the lacking, incomplete, the damaged conversation, the imperfect communication, or declaration, disclosure, the blemished revelations, the poor expressions, the meager, invalid, the frail, the lame, the broken, weak: Wanting Tongue
Digressor Sandy Florian
MOXIBUSTIONAL CARTOGRAPHIES
(The physics is not the compost)
Students will explore geomancy through heat transfer, “writing” on things with thermal/temporal signatures that will be documented, along with lighting s*&t on fire, and adding these events to biblio-geographical data-bases. Successful participants will be invited to conferences in foreign countries.
Digressor Linus Lancaster
MUSIC IMPROVISATION
THIS COURSE IS FULL
What is musical improvisation? Why do we do this? Why do we do music at all? We’ll consider this and other issues and post / critique musical
files through a blog interface. We’ll see if we can find a way to
improvise communally online or off. Please sign up if you’re seriously
interested in the subject; I’d like to try to assemble a body of writing
and work. There are no assignments per se, except to post your thoughts and sounds; the course will grow organically.
Digressor Alan Sondheim
OBJECTS
There is a common theme in what might be termed the recent objective turn in thought. Whether in thing theory, new realisms, object-oriented thought, or their cousins there is a turn towards the inhuman, towards the objects which do not necessarily need our existence. These has the dual import of a general philosophical map and of an increasingly appropriate one in a technocratic world of things. Internet literature on the internet of things. Through assignments the course will explore what an object poetics might look like.
Digressor Erik H Rzepka
SHADOWS ON THE WHITEBOARD: WTF1001
THIS COURSE IS FULL
This course explores and extends Rob Wittig’s fake whiteboard lectures (WTF1001). We will seek and analyze existing evidence of WTF1001, and further disseminate its ambiguous (though rigorous) messages by creating our own WTF1001 artifacts and traces, while implicating UAC in this pedagogical conspiracy. We will develop a curriculum together, based on the following: 1) every student/player will contribute at least one set of whiteboard notes and submit it with photo documentation of its location, and 2) every student will individually reverse-engineer a curriculum document (the syllabus of WTF1001) using each and every set of whiteboard notes (known as “lectures”) in a sequence of the student’s choosing. All course assignments will be planted/seeded/documented in academic or pseudo-academic settings around the world.
Digressors: Rob Wittig, Claire Donato, Mark Marino, Jeff T. Johnson
THINKING DIFFERENTLY: INVENTING ELECTRATE THINKING PRACTICES
“A new image of thought–a new conception of what thinking means is the task of philosophy today,” writes Gilles Deleuze. This course invites participants to explore and invent the new conception of thinking that the age of electracy will herald as the latest technologies of communication are leveraged to unleash the latent creative potential of human becoming. This UnderAcademy College course will be to electrate thinking what the traditional university course is to literate thinking. As such, students will participate in establishing the institutional practices of a new era, one founded on aesthetics, pleasure, and collaborative cognition. Students will not understand electrate thinking; they will undergo electrate thinking.
Digressors: Richard Smyth
UNDERWATER PROCRASTINATION
THIS COURSE IS FULL
We’ll add a description when we get around to it.
Digressors: Maria Damon
