Course Materials

The course materials are fairly straightforward. Primarily, there are two sorts of required materials, readings on the syllabus, and this blog. This post deals with items on the syllabus.

The readings on the syllabus will either be available for download in some electronic format (usually PDF) on the drop.io for AD502. The drops with reading material in them are password protected. This password is ad502. This is relatively self-explanatory, I think. If you have any questions, be sure to email me.

However, some of the readings will be from books. These books are:

Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (Week 4, February 4).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Week 11, April 1).

I have not put an order in through the bookstore. These are both widely available both new and used from places like amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, bookfinder.com, &c. It is your responsibility to locate and purchase copies of these well before they're due for class. (To wit, buy Art and Technics soon.)

Additionally, you might want to buy a few other books, in order of importance:

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Week 15, April 29). We will be reading all of this book, and I was originally going to require you to buy it. However, I discovered a complete PDF of the book, so I have posted it online. I recommend buying the book, but this I leave up to you.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology (Week 6, February 18). We will be reading two essays from this book, "The Question Concerning Technology" and "The Age of the World Picture." These two make up a good chunk of the book. They're PDFed online. But the other essays are fascinating, and well worth looking at.

Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage (Week 7, February 25). This book is recommended reading for the course. It's a beautiful piece of design, attempting to work theory and visual language in relation to one another.