The Page + The Screen: Siting Text in the Early 21st Century and Beyond | Session 1
Sunday, February 21, 5 pm, at 177 Livingston; taught by Caleb Waldorf
All sessions of The Page + The Screen are FREE.
The first session of The Page + The Screen will be taught by Caleb Waldorf of The Public School Los Angeles (and Triple Canopy). Since this class is somewhat sprawling, and will include a number of sessions over the next couple of months, the first session will be structured loosely, providing us with an opportunity to talk about our various interests and concerns in relation to the subject matter and how the rest of the sessions might be planned accordingly.
Caleb will give a brief presentation on some of his own projects (TPS, Version, and East of Borneo among them) as a way of planting ourselves firmly in the current-day before delving into the origins and future of print culture. Then we can discuss these—and some of our own projects—in relation to the evolving nature and meaning of publishing and new-media-based art practices that assume an analogous (oftentimes barely distinguishable!) form. How do these new models respond to and/or produce changes in print culture? How has print culture come to be defined, or pressured, by forces external to it, i.e. digital technologies and the new modes of social interaction and knowledge exchange they've spawned?
We can follow this with a more general discussion about the future of the class and how to tackle the wide array of issues related to the many topics that have been broached on this page.
Readings will be announced in the next week or so. We're aiming to post a few brief articles and book excerpts that do some of the following things: situate the traditional concept of publishing (and the literary culture that evolved from it) in relation to the Internet, and the resultant shifts in reading practices (attention, the form of the screen, etc.); speak to the development of a discourse around siting text, emergent forms of authorship and readership, and the new social and political relations that may result; illustrate the parallel development (or lack thereof) of an analogous (but ultimately anachronistic, facile, narrow, and self-preservationist) discourse in the publishing world. Feel free to make suggestions.