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.