Visual and Critical Studies II (3x)

This graduate seminar is second in the required MassArt MFA track of three VCS courses. It begins and ends with students giving artist talks for critique. In between, the course covers major topics in interdisciplinary contemporary art since 2000, with an emphasis on narratives of art and artmaking. Through critical conversations about art and media, students sharpen their abilities to contextualize and communicate about their own work.

Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature, and Computer Games

A lecture hall course covering concepts and major figures in digital art history. We examined precedents and concepts in digital art, electronic writing, and art games, leading up to work from recent years. Students completed the course with lengthy research papers.

Digital Humanities in Practice

Co-taught with Astrid Ensslin

This course addressed the use of data in humanities research. Students learned how to use visualization tools and do basic coding, and applied these skills to databases and datasets in research projects. Alongside this practical dimension, the course critically considered the affordances and limitations of data, and where visualizations might mislead.

Critical Approaches to Technology and Society

Co-taught (one of three modules)

My third of this course examined the cultural, political, and ethical stakes of surveillance capitalism. Readings and lectures discussed what is known and unknown about how digital platforms collect and monetize personal data, and included Shoshana Zuboff's book as well as critics of her vision.

Electronic Literature

This course introduced students to language-based digital artworks, from hypertext fiction to experimental poetry. Students engaged with theoretical frameworks and electronic literature works to explore how language and storytelling operate in data-driven, networked media. (When the Fulbright program was grounded for a year during the pandemic, UiB hired me to teach this course remotely.)

Electronic Literature: Black Box Poetics

Framed around the concept of "black box poetics," this course (a reworking of the workshop I taught at Brown in 2018) explored how writing and art can probe closed-source proprietary systems. Students read theory, studied contemporary electronic literature, and created experimental works of their own. Structured as an online seminar/workshop, the course emphasized critical dialogue, risk-taking, and text-centered creative practices across media.

Voice as a Performance Technology

A graduate seminar focused on voice in artworks, both embodied and disembodied. We practiced breath control exercises, studied the voice as related to identity and semantics, and explored a range of aesthetic and compositional strategies. The course also covered conceptual approaches in relation to dictation software and synthesis, along with fundamentals of microphones and audio editing.

Black Box Poetics

This writing workshop explored poetry and poetics through the lens of digital systems, opacity, and code. We considered how unreadability, selective clarity, and mediated forms can be tools of creative practice. Student projects explored possibilities for using language to probe the unknowable in a world of proprietary systems.

Electronic Literature

This creative writing workshop explored writing in digital contexts, engaging with code, sound, video, interactivity, and the internet. Alongside students creating their own work, we studied digital textual art and writing, reflecting on their effects and possibilities. The course emphasized collaborative processes, close reading, and the literary qualities of digital systems.

Electronic Writing II (2x)

The first courses I taught as a graduate student. These multimodal writing workshops explored the production of experimental literary works with media and code, and included labs in which I taught students JavaScript and Processing.