Fall 2001 • 112 S. Michigan Avenue • Thursdays • 9-4pm

Instructor: Tiffany Holmes • tholmes@artic.edu • 312.345.3760

Class web pages: Section A

Overview: Technically, this short four week course introduces the basic concepts, strategies, and techniques associated with creating art using Lingo, a simple object-oriented programming language and HTML, the basic syntax for publishing on the world wide web. Conceptually, we will create electronic sketches that deal in some way with a common subject: fast food.

Each week a "sketch" will be assigned in class to help you see the range of possibilities the computer offers artists working in multimedia. These problems are intended to encourage an in-depth awareness of process rather than product–these sketches may be intentionally raw or unfinished. The final project will be a more resolved creative resolution of a problem given previously in any of the three instructors’ classes. During critiques, you are expected to demonstrate the ability to discuss your ideas and thinking process. Please have work ready on the day specified.

Class meets on Thursdays from 9am to 4pm. We will start class promptly. Each unexcused absence will lower your participation grade–three unexcused absenses may result in failure of this course. Chronic lateness will also result in the same (three late arrivals equals one absence). Also, if you are physically present, but do not engage in class discussions, critiques, and demonstrations, this will be regarded as an absence as well.

• EMAIL ADDRESS AND ARTIC ACCOUNT: also subscribe to Rhizome artist profiles (www.rhizome.org)

• spiral notebook or bound composition book (bring daily to class)

• ZIP disks (2 to start with; always back up your work on 2 disks)

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/timeline/index.html

http://ftp.arl.mil/ftp/historic-computers/

http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/other/museums/computing.html

http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/

http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/

 

Recommended Reading (p.1-57 required)

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.) Available at most bookstores and used (hardcover) at Amazon for around $15.

Overview of recommended reading:

On any given day, one out of four Americans opts for a quick and cheap meal at a fast-food restaurant, without giving either its speed or its thriftiness a second thought. Fast food is so ubiquitous that it now seems as American, and harmless, as apple pie. But the industry's drive for consolidation, homogenization, and speed has radically transformed America's diet, landscape, economy, and workforce, often in insidiously destructive ways. Eric Schlosser, an award-winning journalist, opens his ambitious and ultimately devastating exposé with an introduction to the iconoclasts and high school dropouts, such as Harlan Sanders and the McDonald brothers, who first applied the principles of a factory assembly line to a commercial kitchen. Quickly, however, he moves behind the counter with the overworked and underpaid teenage workers, onto the factory farms where the potatoes and beef are grown, and into the slaughterhouses run by giant meatpacking corporations. Schlosser wants you to know why those French fries taste so good (with a visit to the world's largest flavor company) and "what really lurks between those sesame-seed buns." Eater beware: forget your concerns about cholesterol, there is--literally--feces in your meat.

Interesting jargon from the book: flavor factories, E. coli 0157:H7, USDA, high turnover, minimum wage opposition, feedlots, Congress, adolescent advertising and global realization.