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School of Art and Design · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
In this course, we explore Western conventions of artistic autonomy through a historical, philosophical, and material engagement with automation. Automation is most commonly understood as a mechanisation of the process of making and we see it around us in the proliferation of algorithms and robotics. Automation is also a delegation to an external process, a way of "letting the world in," as Robert Morris wrote. But automation is accompanied by accidents and this course will review the history of the accident from ancient Greece into the present. By intervening in social, environmental and technological systems, probing contemporary forms of automation and accident, we will develop a deeper understanding of what autonomy means for artists now and how to engage systems without being instrumentalised by them.
Contextualising research
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 4
Project and development works made in response to discourse around automation and artistic autonomy
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4
130 hours of total students learning time made up from: a) 48 hours of contact over 12 weeks comprising lectures, tutorials, critiques and supervised studio practice; and b) 82 hours of independent students research, studio production, reading and writing Other Information School of Art & Design studio courses have a limited enrolment capacity. Students are advised to enrol as early as possible to maximise the opportunity of securing a place.
Prescribed texts are not required. Preliminary Reading Morris, Robert. "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making", Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris. New York, N.Y: MIT Press, 1993. Steyerl, Hito, and Kate Crawford. “Data Streams.” The New Inquiry (blog), January 23, 2017. https://thenewinquiry.com/data-streams/. Stiegler, Bernard. Automatic Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016. Metahaven. The Sprawl, 2015