VISU3092: Special Subject: Early Modern New Media (40 credits)

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• VISU3101 Special Subject: Early Modern New Media (20 credits)

• To explore the nature, material qualities, affordances, capacities, limits, and conceptualisations of art and non-art media.
• To explore how early modernities in the Arab world, the Caribbean and the Americas, East Asia, and Europe complicate and expand and transform present-day understandings of what media are and do.
• To examine the specific material, communicative, and representational qualities of media (ranging from quipu to diagrams to paintings to drawings to writing to the book and to other print media), and what these qualities were understood to do in their historical moments.
• To explore the contention that media are always new, and that attending to the newness of media at a given time bring out perceptions and conceptions of their transformative properties.
• To explore intermedial circulations of images, words, and other forms of information, and what happens when ideas, images, and/or words are transmitted from one medium to another, or take form in different media.

• The module will be structured around a set of framing questions/topics that will be consistent (and developed over time) each year in which the module is taught, and a set of specific case studies that will vary from year to year according to staff availability and interests.
• Framing questions/topics include:
• Definitions of medium and media, and how the forms, materials, affordances, and practices of media not only convey and filter images, ideas, words, and information, but also produce them.
• Introduction to the visual construction of knowledge (e.g. diagrams)
• Problematizing of both the association of newness with the present, and of the media revolutions trope of current popular discourse a trope often heavily invested in Eurocentric narratives of progress.
• Case studies will be drawn from the following:
• Native American media, specifically Maza/Aztec codices and Andean quipu, the kind of knowledge inscribed in them and their modes of circulating knowledge, and their interactions/coexistence with the introduction of alphabetic writing to the Americas with the Spanish conquest. Indigenous appropriation of alphabetic writing and their ways of using European media.
• The changing visual representation of America and its peoples in European sources, from woodcuts to engravings to paintings and stage performance.
• Illustrations in European and colonial medical texts (either focusing on print or addressing the relationship between manuscript and print conventions and the affordances of each); representation of sex difference in anatomical and surgical sources and analysis of their interplay between image, contextual period prose & indexical linguistic signs.
• Histories of the book; the affordances of late medieval and early modern manuscripts as books, to think, also, about how the page more broadly can be used, including the shape of text, the use of margins, and how material features such as tears can feed into meaning.
• The epistemology of Islamic art.
• The prehistory of long-distance image transmission; why, around the world, the affordances of manuscript or xylography were thought to be far more preferable to moveable type; how lithography, rather than steam presses, would be a better way of grasping co-eval global print modernities in the nineteenth century.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• An understanding of the practices of and theoretical reflection on media across cultures and historical periods in the light of wider historical, philosophical, technological, scientific, and artistic developments.
• Understanding of media as an assemblage of material and social practices of the recording, shaping, production, and communication of information, images, words, ideas.
• Understandings of the visual presentation and constitution of knowledge, and the relationships between the production of knowledge and its material supports (paper, ink, knotted cords, print, the page, the diagram, picture surfaces, etc.).
• Understanding of ways of thinking about media as active parts of their historical contexts. E.g. rethinking the uses of media in colonial settings, how media has a lot to do with notions of civilization/barbarism in early modernity, and how early modern cases of contact zones suggest that the uses of media (their social role) are culturally and historically constructed.
• Ideas of what can be thought by putting diverse and specific locations of culture in conversation with each other, and/or tracking their translation/movement/circulation.

Subject-specific Skills:

• By the end of this module, students are expected to possess:
• The ability to interpret media in terms of their formal, material, and aesthetic properties.
• Knowledge of interdisciplinary methodologies appropriate to the critical analysis of a variety of media.
• Enhanced knowledge of the specialised language required to talk and write about media and visual culture.
• The ability to critically evaluate and apply a range of methodologies in order to perform the above analyses.

Key Skills:

• By the end of this module, students should / will / are expected to:
• Be able to engage with the materiality of the media of primary materials, using Durhams special collection holdings.
• Use digitized primary sources
• Ways of viewing and reading visual displays of information
• Critical and analytical thinking
• Enhanced range and fluency of expression.
• The ability to formulate arguments coherently and to present them in written and oral form.
• The ability to identify an appropriate set of research questions and to pursue a guided programme or self-directed study, leading to the production of an extended piece of written work.
• Undertake independent interdisciplinary research projects

• This module will be taught weekly throughout the academic year.
• Weekly seminars (2 hours) will facilitate sustained discussion of the key topics, developing students grasp of theoretical material as well as practising visual and performance analysis on a weekly basis. Seminar will be interactive; students will develop their communication skills and skills in critical reasoning. In the second term, students will take responsibility for presenting topics and leading the discussion.
• Small-group tutorials (2 x 1 hour) will allow students to explore and develop their research questions and plans, responding to questions from the group and giving and receiving peer feedback.
• The assessment (dossier in T1 and research essay in T2) will allow students to develop their skills in academic writing, as well as demonstrating other skills and knowledge that the module seeks to develop.

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