Dreams, Memes, and Twittering Machines
Spring 2017
ENGL 2930 Intro Digital HumanitiesM 4:00pm - 6:40pm HS 248B
Dreams
Selfie vs. Self-Portrait
Memes predate the internet but have become pervasive with digital technologies.
Memes
Everywhere
This course is a Digital Humanities project that investigates memes in digital culture: what they are, how they spread and change, what they mean to us. The course project will be to collect and curate memes.
Twittering Machines
Twittering Machine, Paul Klee. 1922. Watercolor and ink. Like Duchamp, and not like Picasso, Klee depicts biology meeting machinery. Is it a meme? It was.
Originally displayed in Germany, the image was declared "degenerate art" by Adolf Hitler in 1933 and sold by the Nazi party to an art dealer in 1939, whence it made its way to New York. One of the better known of more than 9,000 works produced by Klee, it is among the more famous images of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). It has inspired several musical compositions and, according to a 1987 magazine profile in New York Magazine, has been a popular piece to hang in children's bedrooms. Our friends at Wikipedia
Now twittering machines are digital: it's Twitter. Wikipedia
Texts
Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press, 2013. ISBN-13: 978-0262525435, ISBN-10: 0262525437. $12.29 print. 10.00. Kindle.Walker Rettberg, Jill. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. ISBN: 9781137476661. Open source text. Free in digital. here.
Topics
as of 16 Oct 2016- Methods of the digital humanities: collect, annotate, remix, distribute
- Memes: What are they? What do they do? What do they signify?
- Memes as art: Dada, Detournment, 'Pataphysics
- Memes as popular exchange - trading cards.
- Memes as identity formation - private and public
- Creating a catalogue, annotating, arranging, presenting.
There are matters of identity, aesthetics, and value at stake.
