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Template for Proposed New College of Arts and Letters Course
(Please use this MS Word form to submit both original and revised proposals. Revised proposals
must use “track changes” or a different color font to show emendations.)
Course Title: HMU/HAR 120 History of Technology and the Arts
Program: DOTA Core
Proposed Course # or Level: FR/SOX
JR/SR
Catalog Description:
The convergence of music, performance, theatre, and visual art has variously been termed multimedia,
hybrid arts, intermedia, interdisciplinary arts, and transmedia, among others. This course looks at how
artistic disciplines inform one another and how parallel developments in technology have played a
significant role in the history of the arts and music, from early tribal rituals to our contemporary digital
age. The course will begin with the concept of “techne,” first used in antiquity, as a means of establishing
the philosophical basis of creative practice and showing the fundamental unity between art, science and
technology and proceed as an examination of the intersection of technology and cultural practice.
Through weekly lectures, readings, and discussion, we will explore the many ways that science and
technology informs and inspires the creative production. By the end of the course students will understand
the ways in which diverse modalities of artistic practice function as forms of symbolic communication
with aesthetic, material, cultural and political dimensions.
Goals
 To explore a variety of theoretical and historical perspectives on the philosophy of technology as it
informs artistic practice across diverse media
 To provide students with an understanding of the ways in which diverse modalities of artistic
practice function as forms of symbolic communication with aesthetic, material, and political
dimensions
 To demonstrate how historical contexts inform the social function and role of the arts in society
 To understand how political, economic and technological factors operate in tandem in the
constitution of historical (and cultural) change and social formations
 Employ basic procedures for the analysis of art as both a mode of production and a form of
communication;
Outcomes:
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Promote ethical responsibility and awareness of the societal impact of one’s future profession.
Promote a fuller understanding of the traditional humanities and social sciences can be obtained
through the study of science and/or technology.
Increase awareness of cultures and societies other than one’s own.
Improve writing and/or public speaking skills.
Increase one’s love of learning for its own sake.
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Students successfully completing this course should be able to:
Prerequisites: None
Cross-listing:
HMU/HAR 120 — show cross-listed course number(s)
Percentages for:
Written Assignments:
Article Summary (In-class) 5%
eLearn Forum (Class Website) 10%
Exhibition/Performance Report (Class Trip) 5%
Written Essays and assignments x6 15%
Tests:
Mid-Term Examination 15%
Final Examination 25%
Quizzes: 10%
Classroom:
Study Group Presentations 5%
Discussion + Participation 10%
Credits:
Enrollment:
3 credits
Other NB only 3-credit courses may count as Humanities credit
Only for Dept. Majors
Not for Dept. Majors
Textbook(s) or References (List required and recommended texts including publisher and year in
standard format such as MLA, APA, etc.):
Course-ware Package of Required Texts
A course-ware package will be made available for students. Relevant excerpts will be taken from the
following books:
Albright, Daniel. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Allen, Barry. Artifice and Design: Art and Technology in Human Experience. Cornell UP, 2008.
Bowie, Andrew. Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche. 2nd Ed. Manchester UP, 2003.
Campbell, Alan Greated and Arnold Myers. Musical Instruments: History, Technology, and Performance.
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge, Mass.:MIT, 1990.
Demers, Joanna Teresa. Listening through the Noise: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music.
New York: Oxford University. 2010.
Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present. NY: Abrams, 1979.
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Hochman, Elaine. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. New York: Fromm, 1997.
Hultén, K.G. Pontus. The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. NY: Museum of Modern
Art, 1968.
Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music. Berkley: University of California
Press, 2004.
Kemp, Martin. Seen/Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope. Oxford
UP, 2006.
Koepnick, Lutz and Erin McGlothlin, Eds. After the Digital Divide?: German Aesthetic Theory in the Age
of New Media. Camden House, 2009.
Lopes, Dominic. A Philosophy of Computer Art. Routledge 2009 London
Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. NY: WW Norton & Co.,
2001.
Patterson, David. John Cage: Music, Philosophy, and Intention. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Ross, Alex. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth-Century. NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007.
Theberge, Paul. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover, NH:
Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Boston: MIT Press,
2003.
Recommended Reading
Bishop, Claire. Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.
Bijvoat, Marga. Art as Inquiry: Toward New Collaborations between Art, Science, and Technology.
American University Studies Series Xx, Fine Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
Burkholder, Grout, and Palisca. A History of Western Music. NY: W.W Norton &Co., 2009
Dahlhaus, Carl and Ruth Katz. Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music. New
York: Pendragon, 1987-93.
Francastel, Pierre, Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. NY: Zone Books, 2000.
Green, Charles. The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism.
Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2001.
Meyer, Leonard. Music, Arts, and Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1969.
Scholz, Trebor and Geert Lovink, ed. The Art of Free Cooperation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2007.
Schuller, Gunther. Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development. New York: Oxford, 1968.
Shlain, Leonard, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time and Light. NY: William Morrow & Co.,
1991.
Slonimsky, Nicholas. Music since 1900, 4th edition. New York: Scribner, 1971.
Sollins, Susan and Nina Castelli Sundell, ed. Team Spirit. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated,
1990.
Mode of Delivery
Class meetings
Studio
On-line
Modules
Other
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Program/Department Ownership: DOTA
When first offered: F10
Sample Syllabus: Use form on next page. This syllabus should be sufficiently detailed to allow
the CAL Curriculum Committee to understand and discuss the scope of the course, its aims and
assignments. The Committee understands that this syllabus is a sample of how a course might be
organized, not a commitment to always offer the course exactly as described every time. Note
that a syllabus is not merely a listing of topics nor a restatement of the catalog description.
Department Point of Contact: Andy Brick/ Sharla Sava/ Aysegul Durakoglu
Date of first meeting proposed F10
Date approved by individual school and/or department curriculum committee:
.
Sample Syllabus:
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Weekly Topics
Intro to course: Techne
Philosophical Background
Antiquity
Religious rituals, secret rites and ceremonies;
Secular festivals and feasts; Mechanical marvels
(deux ex machina); Pythagorean intonation and
theory of sound; Automata; Hymns
Medieval
Jewish synagogue and liturgy; Techniques of
Gregorian chant and performance; Rise of
masonry, metalwork, weaving; Clockwork
mechanisms; Notation; Royal spectacles; Science,
secularism, and humanism; Mensuration and
isorhythmic techniques; Development of
instrumental music
Renaissance
Art in the Renaissance and musical parallels;
Guttenberg press; Leonardo da Vinci; Early opera;
New compositional techniques: counterpoint;
Descartes laws of mathematics; Music printing;
Franco-Flemish polyphony; Rise of instrumental
music
Baroque
Performance techniques: ornamentation and
improvisation; Invention of opera: music, visual
arts, literature, theater, dance; Italian opera and
techniques; French Baroque: focus on drama and
Required Reading
Barry Allen
David Kaplan
Assignments
eLearn forum and
course website
begin
Quiz
Campbell, Chap 2
Hultén, Introduction
Campbell, Chap 3
Katz, Chap 3
Written Assignment #1:
Article Summary
study group
presentations
begin
Presentations
Allen, Chap 2
Campbell, Chap 4
Martin Kemp
Quiz
Campbell, Chap 5-6
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dance; English Baroque and musical theater;
Instrumentation and chamber music; Baroque style
in architecture, music and art; Stylistic eclecticism
in music and arts
Week 6
Week 7
Week 8
Week 9
Enlightenment and Neo-Classical
Ut Pictura Poesis, Laocoon, the battle between the
ancients and the moderns
G.E. Lessing
Joan de Jean
Romantic
Richard Wagner: “Artwork of the Future” 1849,
rejection of lyric opera, believed in the collective
artwork
Packer, Intro+Chap. 1
Alan Ackerman
Andrew Bowie
Modern (1860-1900)
Photography to cinema; Italian Futurists (The
Untamables); F.T. Marinetti; Noise instruments;
Russian Revolution and the arts, including
Constructivists; Tatlin;
Modern (1900-1930)
Bauhaus (Art & Technology, a new unity);
Innovation of the Recorded Sound; Music from
African-American Roots: Jazz; Experimental
Music; Dadaists (Sound art, poems, and visual
performances); Marcel Duchamp
Week
10
Modern (1930-60)
László Moholy-Nagy; Theatre of Totality;
Vannevar Bush (“father” of information
technology); Surrealist performances;
Kinetic sculpture; Recording, Production;
Electronic Music; Rise of the music Industry;
Week
11
Late Modern
Neo-Avant-Garde including conceptual,
performance, happenings;
John Cage/Merce Cunningham/ Robert
Rauschenberg; Moog synthesizer; Popular, Rock
music; Minimalism and Post-Minimalism
Week
12
Postmodern
Nam June Paik; John Whitney (considered “the
father of computer graphics”); Experiments in Art
and Technology (E.A.T.); Billy Klüver; Fluxus;
Dick Higgins; Yoko Ono; Music video
Week
13
Contemporary
Computer Music and Mixed Media; Robert
Wilson; Brian Eno; Meredith Monk; Eduardo Kac;
Written Assignment #2:
Essay
Mid-term Exam Review
Mid-term Exam
Goldberg, Intro, Ch 1-3
Jonathan Crary
Martin Kemp
Quiz
Ross, Chap 3
Katz, Chap 2
Elaine Hochman
Goldberg, Chap 4-6
Theberge, Chap 4
Lutz Koepnick
Written Assignment #3:
Take-home Essay
Patterson, Chap 1-3
Erin Manning
Written Assignment #4:
Essay: Exhibition Report
(Class Trip) due
Packer, Chap 2-6
Written Assignment #5:
Take-home Essay
Dominic Lopes 2009
Wilson, Chap 2+5
Presentations
Written Assignment #6:
Open Topic
6
Week
14
Internet Music
Course Review
Communication and Music of Non-Western
Cultures; New Instruments, Sounds, and Scales
No assigned readings
Exam Review
Presentations
Final day of
eLearn Art Forum
Please submit this information electronically to the your program director, who will forward it to
Ed Foster and the CAL CC requesting the proposal be added to the CAL CC Committee agenda.
Please allow at least 2 months for approval: there will be a first meeting to introduce and discuss
the proposal, and a second meeting to consider for approval. Stakeholders must be available to
the Committee during meetings discussing proposals.