Course Syllabus

How do machines see? How do we see through machines? What happens to our understanding of the world when we no longer primarily rely on human perception but use machines and algorithms to sense our surroundings?

We live in a world where algorithms analyse every image we take. Our phones look for faces to set the focus before we snap and connect those faces to our Facebook friends so it can suggest we send their photos to them afterwards. Surveillance cameras check our faces against databases and cars are being built to respond to our emotions, based on images captured from a dashboard camera. The ways our machines see us, and the ways we see the world through machines, are fundamentally changing the ways the world looks to us.

DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics is a Master level seminar course in Digital Culture, that is also open to exchange students and to students from other MA programs at the University of Bergen by application. The focus this semester is on visual technologies, and students will learn about the history of visual technologies and about theories of algorithmic and technical images, including new aesthetics. The final assessment is a 4000-5000 word term paper which we will work on throughout the semester. Look at the Modules to see an overview of what we will be doing throughout the semester, and see the complete list of readings for DIKULT303 to find out which books to buy.

The professor for this course is Jill Walker Rettberg. An overview of the schedule (shown below) is available as a PDF, or you can download a schedule showing books to buy, readings and the schedule.