MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory & Practice

Developed by the Digital Culture Unit, the MA Interactive Media programme primarily takes place in the Centre for Culture Studies Media Lab, a hack hub and maker space that is flexibly re-created by each year's intake of students. In the lab we explore and interrogate the techno-cultural issues of the day using python, Linux, physical computing, Raspberry Pi, mobile phones and different forms of networks.  This lab-based degree provides consistent and thorough support for you to create a self-directed approach to these and related materials.  Students do not necessarily need to have a technical background and each year we have students with prior experience in the arts, humanities, sciences, making a very lively mix.

What you study

We use art methodologies alongside those from computing and cultural theory. A key method adopted in the Lab is to make the space between theory and practice ambiguous. The class makes and explores things, attempting to explain the phenomena being looked at or thought about. Explanation in this context is not necessarily a reduction of phenomena to literature or a system of logics, but can instead be thought of as knowledge incorporated into a thing that we create, look at or point to, through figuring out a proposition.

In practice this means we may:
- Learn MySQL databases and explore how their integral model of entities and relations create new forms of governance and aid in the performance of different scales of power. 
- Build simple telephony systems while taking inspiration from early/current data networks and their relationship to cultural change, resource wars and political insurrection.
- Explore systematic failure within computation by exploring hacking and security issues such as creating fork bombs, doing penetration testing and reviewing the need for cryptography post-Snowden.

We actively work with cultural theory in a world with computation as a central pillar. The Digital Culture Unit in the Centre for Cultural Studies, under whose auspices this programme is run, has been a pioneer of practice-led theory. This method pursues a form of working on projects that at the same time undertakes research and writing that incorporates contemporary cultural theory, philosophy and cultural studies. The Masters, therefore, is also ideal for students with primarily theoretical interests who wish to ground these with concrete knowledge and experience.

Building on the Digital Culture Unit's research excellence in software studies, media philosophy and digital art, students will learn to employ cutting edge research and practice-based methodologies to enhance their own skill set.  The programme gives you the opportunity to develop critical and speculative theoretical and practice-based research on the ways computational media technologies are embedded in the technical, cultural, aesthetic, and political structures of society and how we interact with them. The applications of such work are highly diverse.  The degree helps students to prepare for or to create a bridge towards a critical career in the cultural, creative, educational, analytical, and computational sectors. 

This module critically engages with the philosophical, aesthetic and cultural implications of computation-based media technologies. Computation is not the same as digitalisation and rather implies an abstract capacity to order data (linear and non-linear command) and organise communication (through input/output relations of information in an environment of data) common to all media technologies. From this standpoint, interactive media are only an instance of a computational method influenced by the sciences of cybernetics, autopoeisis and system theories, and challenging notions of reason and cognition, perception and memory, emotions and affection.

The module brings together media theories (M. McLuhan, F.A. Kittler, V. Flusser to P. Weibel, L. Manovich, P. Levy, G. Lovink, M. Fuller), scientific concepts (from Shannon and Weaver, N. Wiener, A. Turing, Maturana and Varela, Bateson, Prigogine, Clark) and philosophical approaches (Serres, Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda, Latour, Stiegler, Badiou, Plant, Harman, Stengers, Massumi, Negri) to articulate a trans-disciplinary view of computational culture and system-based modes of interactivity.

This transdisciplinary view emphasises the necessity of rethinking computation away from immaterial idealism and material empiricism to develop new concepts that can critically engage with the abstract culture generated by this fast evolving field.

This module requires you to actively participate in the seminars. In the first week, you will be (arbitrarily) divided into groups of max three to max four members to make one presentation of max 10 minutes about one or two of the key readings designated for each week. These presentations will not be assessed or impact on your overall evaluation. They are only designed to encourage participation (and self-learning) in the theoretical development of the module.

Taught by Dr Luciana Parisi

Spring term

Software Studies is specifically concerned with the inter-relation between the cultural, social, and the technical. The module provides key theoretical tools for understanding digital technologies and the software that underlies them. It provides an essential interface for modules that aim to link cultural and social concerns and practices with the technical.

During this module, you will read and work with current and historical documents from the history of computing and computing culture, alongside those from cultural theory, as such this is be a uniquely interdisciplinary module that brings together and works through different approaches to the problematic of effective and inventive working in contemporary creative and social technologies.

Software studies is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged over the last decade amongst an international range of scholars and has a particular strength in Goldsmiths. It combines approaches from the arts, humanities and social sciences with those drawn from computing, in order to develop a creative and critical approach to the theories and practices of computing. Software is understood to be a core, yet under-theorised, aspect of contemporary culture and society. This module examines how software, and computing more broadly, is deeply implicated in the development of aesthetics, political forms, social agency and the generation of new forms of subjectivity. It follows a line of enquiry that draws together inventive critical thinking from technologists, hackers, computer scientists, philosophers, artists and cultural theorists, thus providing the context for a rich discussion on the nature of contemporary software cultures.

You will write an essay or investigative report into a software system, a programming language, an aspect of the history of computing, work of software art, or other such topic.

Taught by Professor Matthew Fuller

First 5 weeks of the Autumn term

We use a series of defamiliarisation techniques to create an environment of enquiry rapidly producing small projects. As the lab work is student centered, the specific experiments undertaken depend on the current mix of students’ backgrounds.

Subjects covered might include Introduction to Media systems and Media ecologies; Linux command line; Formal Language vs Informal Language; the dissection of a unix file; Eco-media;programming Perl; variables lists, hashes, modules; editing with Vim; introduction to networking; introduction to electronics; introduction to physical computing (Arduino); Free-media; Radio waves including video sniffin; Telegraphy, submarine cables; garden hose telephones; introduction to Relational Machines- Database; introduction to Natural Language processing.

This module culminates in a group project and presentation. During previous years the module has culminated in the creation of a network of Coin Laundries, in a performance, reconfiguring a Laurie Grove Bath House as a media-scape. Working with world renowned artist Shu Lee Chang on Moving Forrest in 2011, students have created performances on the Thames as an analogue computer. In 2013, students have produced Evil Media for YoHa at Transmediale. 

Taught by Graham Harwood

Lab: Monday 10am–4.30pm LGB 107