In this unit, you will work on four one-week assignments, rather than one large project. Each week we spend class time looking at a particular “mode of criticism.” Lessons for the four modes are below:
Your goal throughout these four projects is to use different formats to deepen and strengthen your critical relationship to technology. You should allow each mode of criticism to inspire different ways of thinking about a particular technology. Therefore, you must use the same subject for all four projects.
As the name would imply, your projects should be about criticism. Each project should be a critique of the technology that you choose. It’s important to explain that a critique is different from a complaint. A complaint would be describing why something is bad, annoying, frustrating, unsatisfactory, etc. A critique is an analysis of a subject that is connected to contemporary issues — cultural issues, political issues, economic issues, curatorial issues, etc. Criticism is not always negative. A critique can be positive. What makes it critique is that it is thoughtful, insightful, and proves to the viewer that there is something at stake.
A fairly common way that academics might write criticism is by combining different points of view from a few existing authors, using them to synthesize something new.
Another common approach is to portray your first person perspective: how does the subject matter affect you personally? In this approach, external source materials is still important, but the driving content will be your lived experience.
A third approach—and this should be how you approach this project—is to apply another framework to a subject matter. Our class thus far has been developing a framework about social reality. And so the basis of your criticism will be questioning what your technology has to do with identity, knowledge, and truth.
Although you must produce four projects, we only critique one of them. I suggest you produce all of them, and only afterwards decide which is the best. The rest will be due at the end of the semester.
The expectation is that you will manage your time responsibly. The easiest way to complete this workload is to spend one week per project. That being said, I want to allow for you to spend up four weeks working on something if you felt so inspired. Nevertheless, we will critique projects under the assumption that the timing was one week.