COMP 295 Topics in Computer Science
Automation: Politics and Aesthetics
In the course “Automation: Politics and Aesthetics” students will examine “automation” in capacious historical, geographical, and conceptual senses. In dominant United States-based discussions of these today automation is described as something that is produced by Silicon Valley, or happens to “American” workers, or takes place in direct interfaces between a “user” and a “computer.” The course will instead meet Occidental’s Global Connectionsrequirement that students “develop a global, transnational and/or comparative understanding” by asking them to reconsider both the geographies of automation as well as the artists and theorists who have put automation at the center of their work. One of the course’s guides for this will be Kate Crawford who in the book Atlas of AI and the art work Anatomy of AI (with Vladan Joler) shows how immediate AI interfaces actually mobilize global infrastructures. We will also look at work by, for example, Louis Chude-Sokei about how 19th popular culture compared early automatons and enslaved African Diasporic peoples, as well as how contemporary artists like the Raqs Media Collective, or filmmakers Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman and their movie Neptune Frost, look at how automation involves contemporary factory workers in South Asia as well as coltan miners and computer programers in East Africa. Alongside this, the course will look at how automation has been the focus of work by U.S.-based artists and theorists of the 1960s and today like Robert Morris and Anika Yi, and Shulamith Firestone, Neda Atanasoski, and Kalindi Vora, andin doing so ask students to make connections between the local and the global and the present and the past, and to consider how “automation” is always connected to questions of social difference and economics.Additional Core Requirement met: Global Connections. Same as ARTH 295 with the same subtitle.
Computing in Real Life Internship
Students will work with LA-based non-profits such as STEAM:CODERS, a Pasadena-based organization that teaches local middle and high school students to program, or the Association for Women in Mathematics, a national organization that promotes women in computation. Students will complete weekly reflection papers and a final presentation describing what they have learned about computation IRL. Open only to students enrolled in the Computing IRL semester.
Cross Listed Courses
Automation: Politics and Aesthetics (Spring 2024) - X List with ARTH 295 Topics Course. Automation is a key term of the present. On any given day one is likely to encounter numerous stories about self-driving cars, AI artists, and algorithmic finance. The list goes on. Prominent among these stories are those about automated job loss and in these, especially, automation is treated as both an inevitable outcome of technological development and a radical paradigm shift in the organization of the economy and society. However, automation is far from a new concern and modernity can be defined in terms of the cyclic return of the automation discourse. In order to understand our automated present, the course will look at contemporary theory and arts related to the labor, ethics, and geologies of AI, algorithmic, and automated technologies. We will also turn to the histories of racialized and gendered technological development dating to the beginnings of plantation slavery and colonialism, the development of the factory system in the 19th century, and what James Baldwin called the “cybernetics craze” of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so the class will think about the ways that automation, and technological change more broadly, is connected to race, gender, sexuality, class, work, (neo)colonialism, the planet, and what it means to be human. Above all, we will look at how political thinkers and artists working in multiple mediums have struggled with and against these developments. Paralleling the popular tendency to see automation as a new phenomenon, there is also a tendency to conceptualize automation and AI as spatially discrete; for example, an automated factory or a one-on- one interaction with an AI program like Microsoft/Open AI’s “Sydney.” However, the course will have students think about how interfaces like these only function by mobilizing planetary-wide, and socially differentiated, networks of labor and geologic extraction. These contemporary networks are also themselves often extensions of those created during European colonialism. In the course we will look at how many of the tropes about automatons which so obsessed people in the imperial centers of the 19th Century were connected to the organization of plantation slavery throughout the Americas. We will examine these spatial connections in both scholarship and in works like Neptune Frost about a rebellion of coltan miners in Burundi or, alternatively, Workers Leaving the Googleplex by Andrew Norman Wilson and Finally Got the News by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, both of which focus on the labor which makes “automation” possible and though set in specific locations in the United States, show those sites and social relations to be global in nature. Additional Core Requirement met: Global Connections.