Courses

COMM/STS/MDST (2-300 level)

Clouds, Cables, and Broken Things: Investigating Internet Infrastructure

Racks upon racks of hot, humming boxes, tangles of threaded glass stretched across the globe, and thousands of people laboring to keep it all duct-taped together so that we can share cat videos and binge Tiger King on Netflix. What exactly is the Internet anyway? How do we make sense of it? Where do we even start? This course will bring the Cloud down to Earth, exploring the Internet through its material footprint, and introducing students to the field of Critical Infrastructure Studies. We will dive headlong into the deep materiality of the Internet, with an emphasis on the history, geography, and politics of its infrastructure(s). Students will learn how the Internet works, how information moves, who moves it, and how it works through, within, and between other built infrastructures, past and present. The course is divided into four modules: Ground-work, Forms, Processes, and Residuals. Ground-work lays the foundation (the infrastructure, if you will) for the course. Students will learn how scholars define and deploy concepts of infrastructure, and how these concepts are used to study the Internet. Forms explores the Internet through its infrastructural objects. Students will learn how to conduct humanistic infrastructural analyses of the clouds, cables, and data centers that give the Internet form. But what does it take to maintain this form? Processes follows the stuff of the Internet as it travels from dirt to data, with a focus on mining, logistics, and energy. Students will learn how these processes help bind the Internet together. Lastly, Residuals deals with conflicting concepts of waste (e-waste, mining waste, manufacturing waste, from all links in the supply chain), and the monumental amount of human labor involved in repairing, maintaining, and caring for the material forms, processes, and imaginaries that uphold digital life.

PSPR 007/054 (College prep)

Chasing the Cloud: Introduction to Network Infrastructure

This class is designed for advanced high school students

This course seeks to introduce students to critical theories and methods of networked communication infrastructures. Together, we will explore the deep materiality of the internet, with an emphasis on the history, geography, and politics of its infrastructure(s). Students will learn how the Internet works, how information moves, and how it works through, within, and depends on other built infrastructures, past and present. Each session will focus on a different material component of the Internet – fiber optic cables, data centers, hard disk drives, energy, internet governance, etc. Throughout the course, students will also utilize their own environments as archaeological sites, where they will “dig”, and make the Internet visible. Students will post journals of these “data walks”, where they will record traces of Internet infrastructure in their neighborhoods, creating a sort of collective archaeological and geographic record of our Internet. By the end of the module, students will better understand the material footprint of the Internet, and will be able to find “the cloud” buried in their own back yards!

COMM/STS/MDST/FILM (400 and/or graduate-level)

Environmental Media Practicum: Reciprocal Landscapes of Big Data & Energy

This is a two-semester course that combines critical approaches to big data and energy relations, and media production practice. The intent is for students to use multimodal methods (documentary, mapping, data visualization, VR, etc.) to conduct critical analyses of local infrastructures of big data and energy. The final project will be a student led and curated exhibition in which each project functions as part of a larger whole. Part seminar, part design studio, part media production class, this practicum will not only teach students how to critically engage with the intersections of technology and the environment, but also encourage them to work together to communicate big ideas across mediums.

In Development…

CIMS 1030: Television and New Media (100-level)

Media Technologies never quite remain fixed, they always co-emerge in their interactions with human actors, and debates erupt about whether their transformations are brought by technical innovations or shifts in socio-cultural usage patterns. We begin the course with some of these debates including arguments about the limitations of describing a particular technology as “new” or “digital.” Is “new media” same as “digital media”? How and when do media become digital? What does digitization afford and what is lost as worlds become digitized? As lots of things around us turn digital, have we started telling stories, sharing experiences, and replaying memories differently? Does digitization transform television, earlier construed as a broadcast medium, into a network or a post- network medium? What role do algorithms and interfaces play in the success of Netflix?

 Should we approach “television” as an industry and content provider or as a technology and set of audience relations? We discuss the history of television and how issues of race and gender have been entangled with televisual representations? Does digitization transform television, earlier construed as a broadcast medium, into a network or a post- network medium? What role do algorithms and interfaces play in the success of Netflix? While digital distribution platforms like Hulu and Amazon promise interactive and participatory forms of spectatorship, have they fundamentally changed televisual watching experience?

 This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, social media, distribution platforms, net neutrality and optical fiber cables. We will also explore possible media futures like virtual reality and ai-generated media.

COMM/STS/MDST (200-level)

From Gutenberg to Bored Apes: Archaeologies of Media Scarcity

In Development…

DMF (200-300-level)

Disaster Cinema at the End of the World

In Development…

DMF (200-300-level)

The History of Avant-Garde Cinema

In Development…