First Paper Assignment & Oral Presentations

Important Dates:
Paper proposal due: Tues, 9/27, via email by 8:00 pm
No class/ office hrs: Thurs, 9/29
Oral presentations: Tu/Th, 10/4 & 10/6
Papers due: Thurs, 10/13, at the beginning of class

Paper Topic:
Your first paper will be an analytic essay about a single work of digital art. You may write about any work covered in Christiane Paul’s book, Digital Art; any work in Rachel Greene’s Internet Art; any work we’ve discussed in class; or any other work of digital art (internet art, robotic work, video art, electronic sculpture, digital photography, installation art, etc.), given prior approval by me.

Paper Format & Guidelines:
The paper must be 6-8 pages long. (As always, it should have a title, your name, and page numbers, and it should be stapled.) This paper will require you to reflect critically on a work of art, offering a coherent thesis in relationship to the interpretation of the work. Formulation of this argument should be dependent upon the formal components or elements of the work, including a close-reading of the rhetorical relationship between word and image (or the visual and the verbal/linguistic, etc), which will also entail contextualizing the relationship between form and content.

I will be evaluating your ability to formulate a clear thesis, to argue in favor of this thesis, to identify and analyze the work’s formal elements, and to synthesize and apply the vocabulary we’ve established through our readings and discussions. Your thesis should make a concise statement about what the work signifies and the way in which it does so.

While primary emphasis should be placed on the work itself, papers should also consider how the piece fits into the artist’s larger body of work and art historical precedents. This will most likely entail inserting a short paragraph on a previous work or works by the same artist, and another short paragraph on the art historical tradition from which the work springs. Given this requirement, your paper must cite at least one reference, in addition to our assigned readings. Considering that most of the discourse about digital art is found online, internet references are ok, but please use your best judgement to determine the seriousness of the reference. Chat room discussions and other “casual” sources are inappropriate. Curatorial statements, journal articles, exhibitions reviews, and other “serious” essays are acceptable. Of course, good old-fashioned books, academic journals, and art magazines are also acceptable.

Oral Presentations:
I will email each of you to assign one of the above oral presentation dates. On this day, you must give an 8-minute presentation of the work you’ll be discussing. In this presentation, you should introduce us to the work (playing a maximum of three minutes of video, or otherwise projecting or exhibiting the image or work), and present your thesis about the work. The presentation will give you the opportunity to boil down your main argument and the primary evidence for your claim (i.e. sub-points). You should estimate that a full single-spaced page usually takes about 2.5 minutes to read. Therefore, your presentation should convey the content of approximately 2-3 double-spaced pages, allowing time for the display of the work. The goal of this exercise it to get you in the practice of beginning the process of writing by fleshing-out precise, specific claims, and then coming back to fill-in additional observations.

Paper Proposals:
Your proposal must include all of the following:
• the artist and work of art to be discussed (provide a URL, if possible)
• a preliminary thesis
• the one outside resource you anticipate using
• the format of your presentation.
(Will you be showing a dvd, a vhs tape, something online, a photocopy…?)

These proposals must be emailed to me by 8pm, on Tuesday, September 27.