Assessment

Project 1 30%
Project 2 30 %
Project 3 40%

Marks will be adjusted for attendance.

Project 1 (Due on Friday of Week 6 at 5:00 pm ).

Choose one of the following options:

1. Make an art work (video, installation, web site, etc.) based on the “phenomenological reduction” idea. We suggest that the work should address the relationship between sound and image. The work should be accompanied by an artist’s statement describing the relationship between the work and phenomenology. This statement should be at least one page long.

2. Write an essay describing in detail the concept of the phenomenological reduction, with special reference to the ideas of philosopher Edmund Husserl. Discuss its possible application to art and/or design.

Project 2 (Due on Friday of Week 10 at 5:00 pm )

Choose one of the following options:

1. Make an art work in any medium that addresses the question of embodied technology, affordance, or improvisation. The issue of designing for human action should be addressed. We recommend that you make an interactive work, but this is not required. The work should be accompanied by an artist’s statement describing the relevance of the work to the topics covered in class. This statement should be at least one page long.

2. Write an essay describing the philosophical ideas of “being in the world” and “embodied perception”, with reference to the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Project 3 (Due on Friday of Week 15 at 5:00 pm )

Choose one of the following options:

1. Make an art work that addresses some philosophical debate about “strong” AI and/or the nature of consciousness. The work should be accompanied by an artist’s statement describing the relevance of the work to the topics covered in class. This statement should be at least one page long.

2. Write an essay about a question pertaining to consciousness. For instance, the question of whether consciousness can be described computationally, or whether it is really a brain process. You may also address questions about the philosophy of consciousness in Chinese culture.
   

Important note : You may not choose to write essays for all three assignments. At least one must be a creative project. The project can be experimental, but this is not required. You are free to work in any format, even to make a classical science-fiction film addressing the topic of machine intelligence (for assignment three).

Grading criteria

1. Presentation/craft.
2. Relevance of the projects to the ideas discussed in class
3. Accurate understanding of the philosophical material
4. Ability to address this philosophical material by means of creative projects
5. Difficulty of the task attempted.

Course Outline

1. Introduction: What is cognition? Why study cognition in a media art school?

2. Introduction to phenomenology via modern art: The work of Pierre Schaffer as an instance of phenomenological practice. The idea of reduced listening. Basic concepts of phenomenology: consciousness and intention. The phenomenological critique of science. Phenomenology and visual perception. The form and identity of phenomenal objects (figure and ground, grouping, object permanence, constancy), the perception of depth and motion. The phenomenology of time consciousness. The method of free variation.

3. Alternatives to phenomenology: empiricism, reductionism, eliminativism. Is consciousness only a Brain Process? Recent developments in the study of the brain.

4. Naive realism vs. representational realism. Knowledge representation: the rationalist tradition. Different forms of representation: rules, concepts, schemata, frames, etc. Reasoning and problem solving. Cognitive theories of art and cinema. Vision and representation.

5. The critique of knowledge representation: Perception and embodiment. The ecological theory of perception. Embodied Perception and the Heidegger-Merleau Ponty tradition of phenomenology. Debates about the nature of planning: Improvisation, Situated Action, and human-machine interaction. The influence of embodied phenomenology on contemporary art and art theory. Technology as an extension of the body.

6. The mind as a machine: symbol systems. Classical AI grew out of the rationalist tradition: it assumed the idea of knowledge representation. Additional philosphical background: dualism, behaviorism, and functionalism. The computational theory of mind. Can machines think? Debates about AI. Short introduction to the question of consciousness. New trends in AI (connectionism, embodied AI) related to the question of embodied perception and traditional knowledge representation.

7. The so-called hard problem of consciousness. The question of what it is like to be something. This is a problem mainly for computational models of mind.

8. The self: the ego and multiple selves. Altered states of consciousness. Social Cognition. “Happenings”, contemporary art, and social cognition.
9. Buddhism and consciousness. Consciousness in Chinese culture.