Student Essays on Interactive Web Sites

Representation and Beth Stryker's DissemiNET by Michelle Kraft

Beth Stryker's and Sawad Brooks's
DissemiNET Webspace + DissemiNETion Installation by George Bauer

5366 Instructional Technology in the Visual Arts

Use the textbook (i.e., Postmodern Currents), course handouts, your notes, and individual research for this course to write a final take-home essay exam. The essay is worth 20% of your course grade and is due 12/15/99 at 6:30 p.m.

Full credit will be based on meeting the following criteria:

___ Used APA (4th edition) style and citation format-including on-line citations.
___ Has no spelling or grammar problems (used a grammar and spell check)
___ No less than 1500 words and no more than 3000 words (give a word count at the bottom of your last page).
___ Essay dealt with several of the topic questions listed on the course syllabus.
___ Essay discussed the artist's examination of representation using concepts drawn from course readings, class presentations, and research conducted for your course presentation. Essay analysis supported with citations.

Artists using contemporary technological means for their art practice can assume many stances in today's climate. On the one hand they can engage in a modernist art practice that assimilates technologically based work within the same conceptual framework as drawing, painting, and sculpture without using it as a means of cultural critique. It then becomes sublimated as a tool for art-making. On the other hand, they can fully engage electronic media in a practice which critically analyzes contemporary media-dominated cultural contributions using the very tools which power it. Whether they choose technology either as a medium or as a tool for their work, contemporary artists have access to concepts, themes, and methodologies for creating artworks which reflexively examine the process of representation itself. (Lovejoy, 1997, pp. 260-261)

Select one artist from the following list of artists below or from an artist referred to in Postmodern Currents (you may use more Web sites and references on a selected artist than listed below). Discuss the artist's examination of representation using concepts drawn from course readings, class presentations, and research conducted for your course presentation.

Beth Stryker:
DissemiNET [with Sawad Brooks]
http://disseminet.walkerart.org

Crossexxxaminations [with Virginia Barrett, et al]
http://www.thing.net/~bstryker/xxx

Radarweb [with Sawad Brooks]
http://www.thing.net/~sawad/radarweb

Bowling Alley [with Christa Erickson, Sawad Brooks, and Shu Lea Cheang]
http://bowlingalley.walkerart.org

Lynn Hershman
http://pubweb.ucdavis.edu/Documents/Hotwire/Lynn.html

Lynn Randolph
http://asuam.fa.asu.edu/randolph/randolph.htm

Simon Penny
http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/www-penny/

Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/parkbench/

Victoria Vesna is an artist working with electronic
http://nmi.sfsu.edu/newmedia/victoria.html

Eduardo Kac
http://www.ekac.org/

Esther Parada
http://www.rtvf.nwu.edu/Homestead/eparada/ep-1.html

Nathaniel Bobbitt
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/8693/life5a.htm