Course summary (tentative):
*This course is offered as a Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing, and our written projects will be workshopped between each other as colleagues and targeted towards public (rather than academic) audiences.*
Therapy chatbots, uncannily targeted advertising, and the algorithmic extraction of our most subliminal data: this course asks how psychoanalytic logics of the unconscious mind cryptically haunt our devices, platforms, and network technologies–and how these animate our nightmares and dystopian visions of the future. Perhaps more importantly: we’ll also use these discussions to identify opportunities for justice, subversion, and free play through technology.
We’ll approach potential texts from cultural studies, critical design, STS, and Black feminist, postcolonial, and queer critiques–alongside histories of psychoanalytic thought and its deployments in contexts across time and space. We’ll observe how artists, hackers, critics, and everyday users across intersectional axes speak back to algorithmic apparatuses as a challenge to automated discrimination, hegemonic arrangements, Big Tech’s logics of extraction, and the encroaching and unequal digital surveillance and manipulation of our bodies, affects, and desires. We’ll ground our discussions by workshopping our own quarter-long media projects and (auto)ethnographically observing the places our dreams and nightmares interface with algorithms, databases, and the world writ large.