Net.Practice

The web is riddled with "state of the art" sites and pages. Its designs and functions are "common knowledge", either commercial (Amazon, booking.com,...), social (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,...), informational (Wikipedia,...) or otherwise oriented, but in all cases well-established in terms of its visual aesthetics (One Pagers, responsive design, a little bit of parallax now and then... Following Elizabeth Grosz, we could claim that the web is an economic playground, and as such conceiving and creating works in the digital sphere is but the "successful arrangment of practices, methods and goals that we know in advance." The constant recreation of the already known. With Olia Lialina we could also say: "Designers killed the web." There are, however, many examples of artistic, playful, frivolous or simply different ways to use the net. None of them mutually exclusive... In the course of this class, students will be asked to explore the field of web-related art and come up with their own "design" of an artistic use of the world wide web. That is to create concepts, illustrations or even prototypes of web related works that question the current - oversaturated - state of the art of contemporary web production.