Digital Language Arts
an introductory course
Course Description
Digital language art is an emerging field that studies the interaction of text and language with other mediums, such as visual art, sound art, games, installation art, video, or live performance. In this introduction to the field, students will develop a framework of the practice by studying writers like Katherine Hayles, David Jhave Johnston, and John Cayley, who helped define the field, looking at early experimental text and video artist like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Nam June Paik, engaging commercially successful artists in the field like Jenny Holzer and Nam June Paik, and finally by looking at contemporary practitioners making digital text art like Allison Parrish and Hito Steyerl. In collaboration with this cursory study, students will create and workshop texts that engage a series of experimental formal techniques. For example, students will create twitter bots, make a poem in the form of a GIF, write with algorithmic rules, create language in game spaces, and build a text installation in the classroom.
Taught at:
Brown University, Providence, RI, Spring 2019