I am teaching two media/cultural studies seminars online at the VASA Project, founded and managed by Roberto Muffoletto, director of the Media Studies Ph.D. programme at a major American university.
One seminar is on New Media Theory, McLuhan and Contemporary Reality.
The Internet today is no longer the utopia that it was promised to be. There are many positive aspects, but there is also Orwellian surveillance of personal data, excessive commercialization, dead links, and mountains of useless information. How could the Internet be transformed into something better? How could computers and software be redesigned to liberate us from work, rather than leading to more work and bureaucracy? What should the Car of the Future look like? The Library of the Future? What is the future of television, cinema, books, personal digital assistants, medical technologies? What about the introduction of robots into society? And is Artificial Intelligence possible? To consider these and other questions about the present and the future of media and technologies, we will consider ideas from the great media/technology thinkers of the past, and what they would say about contemporary reality if they were alive today. Our main focus will be on Marshall McLuhan, but we will also look at Harold Innis, Jean Baudrillard, and Martin Heidegger. And also at Paul Virilio and Donna Haraway, who are in fact both alive. The participants will be asked to read two short texts of about 5 pages each before each meeting of the workshop.
The other seminar is on Quantum Culture.
We need a new paradigm to move thinking, practice, and creativity forward. This paradigm is: Quantum Culture. The main principle of Quantum Thinking is to hold two seemingly opposite ideas in one’s mind at once and understand both ideas to be fully true. F. Scott Fitzgerald already said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time…”
Quantum Thinking will change our way of dealing with everything.
In this seminar we will consider through readings and discussions, various aspects of Quantum Culture: (1) Embodiment (includes a certain advanced kind of electronic art, dance, and social choreography) (2) Politics (3) Language (4) Real/Virtual Institutions for the Dissemination of Knowledge (includes education, museums, and Wikipedia) (5) New Mathematics and Quantum Computing in Software.
The real, the virtual, the digital, and the quantum will all someday merge into a higher synthesis. But for now, media theory and cultural studies continue to focus obsessively on the idea of “Digital Culture.” For now we are told that Facebook is utopia realized, and humanities scholars go on endlessly quoting Foucault and Deleuze. This seminar will offer another “frame of mind” through which to understand everything.
