Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries

Gina Neff is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington. She studies the contemporary economics of media production by examining the relationship between work and technology in both high-tech and media industries. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT 2012) examines the risk and uncertainties borne by New York City’s new media pioneers during the first Internet boom.

late imperial china and the world

Empire of great brightness: visual and material cultures of Ming China, 1368-1644 Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China

Media Technology and Society

Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet By Brian Winston

PreCinema/ParaCinema

Special Topics in Film: PreCinema/ParaCinema Instructor: Mark Sandberg Interest in the contextual study of early cinema’s emergence has increasingly put pressure on developmental temporal models that lead directly from “precinema” to cinema “proper.” Other lines of research have made clear that spatial models emphasizing adjacency (“paracinema”) not only reveal relationships hidden by more teleological accounts, but also help emphasize cinema’s ongoing intermedial relationships up to the present day. This seminar organizes the subject matter of paracinematic cultural history in terms of place and juxtaposition; it examines the cinema “beside” the theater, the museum, the panorama, the laboratory, the shopping arcade, the fairground, the zoo, and the train station. The spatial emphasis will assist us in thinking through both image production and spectatorship in new ways, but also embraces the possibility that this kind of “cinematic” research might lose its cinematic center altogether. Readings emphasize both cultural-historical content and theoretical approaches to developments from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. This is a research seminar, so students are expected to engage with an original topic requiring work with primary historical materials. One seminar paper and oral presentations required. Required Texts: Ames, Eric. Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0295988337 Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. ISBN-13: 978-0262531078 Ligensa, Annemone and Klaus Kreimeier, eds. Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. John Libby Publishing, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0861966967 Rabinowitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-0231156615 Sandberg, Mark B. Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-0691050744 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: UC Press, 1986. ISBN-13: 978-0520059290

postindustrial sociology and others

Talcott Parsons Structure of social action

What was socialism, and what comes next?

Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet experience: politics and history since 1917 (oxford, 1985) Dorothy Rosenberg, "Shock Therapy: GDR women in Transition from a socialist welfare state to a social Market economy," signs 17 (1991): 129-51

beautiful circuits

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A history of the idea of communication Rosalind Krauss "a voyage on the north sea:" art in the age of the post-medium condition Michael North, camera works: photography and the twentieth-century word Thomas Foster, The souls of cyberfolk: post humanism as vernacular theory Francis Frascina ed., Pollack and after: The critical debate (essays that deal with or argue against Clement Greenberg's notion of media specificity) p8-9 (m)ugh of the newness that is attributed to new media art and culture is understood to render obsolete the sense of modernism and medium specificity(modernism as medium specificity) championed most notably by Clement Greenberg. "It quickly emerged," writes Greenberg in his 1960s essay "modernist painting," "that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all hat was unique in the nature of its medium." Identifying modernism with a commitment to the physical constraints and artistic conventions of individual mediums- so that to engage with their materiality is not just to discover but to delimit their ideal realms of practice and technique-- Greenberg's arguments remain a point of departure fro many writers seeking to understand the forms of multimedia, or new media art that follow modernism proper. Thus when Rosalind Krauss suggests that we are now in a "post-medium condition," she all but admits the what she means to say is "post-Grenberg." And for Hansen, even this is not saying enough: Krauss's"reconceptualization of the medium" remains incapable of "grasping the aesthetic newness of new media art" because this art is designed to address the body "as a selective processor of information" whose "medial interfaces" displace and transform the very material limits of the art object with which traditional notions of the medium contend. New media art is defined by "its resistance to capture by now dated, historical forms of art and media criticism." The very notion of the "medium" and its aesthetic epistemology is no more bleeding edge than Betamax.