Results for: klimchynskaya
Technology and Aesthetics
New technologies regularly enable new mediums, styles, genres, and narrative forms as they offer us new ways to record the world, express ourselves, and tell stories. But the advent of each new artistic and literary form raises anew fundamental theoretical questions: what is the difference between an objective record of the world and an artistic rendition of it? Is what makes something art the creator’s intent or the viewer’s perception of it as art? That is, can something be experienced as art if it is not intended as such? What, even, is a narrative, given our minds’ tendency to resolve any random pattern into a coherent series of cause and effect? And, finally, as new technologies offer endless new creative possibilities, how can we continuously recalibrate how we define art and engage with it?
KNOW 36054: SIFK MAPSS Core: Ways of Knowing
Anastasia Klimchynskaya, Yan Slobodkin
This seminar introduces students to the practices and principles that guide the nascent field of inquiry into the formation of knowledge. “Ways of Knowing” examines how claims to knowledge are shaped by disciplinary, social, historical, and political contexts, as well as local cultural factors both explicit and unspoken. How do we know what we know? How have cultures and scholars contested, reconfigured, and defamiliarized accepted claims to knowledge? Building on social science perspectives and methods, this course will explore the formation of knowledge through key historical, sociological, and anthropological case studies. Furthermore, the course will take a expansive approach to knowledge formation by considering the interface of theory, practice, and social action. "Ways of Knowing" is a required seminar for all students wishing to undertake the Formation of Knowledge MAPSS track.
KNOW 40208: Man and/as Machine
Recently, Amazon employees fighting for better working conditions united under the slogan “We are not robots!” Recalling Karl Capek’s R.U.R., which coined the word robot (from the Czech word for slave), the slogan suggests the importance of the machine as an object and a concept in relation to which human identity has been – and continues to be – defined. Throughout the history of human thought, the machine has existed as both something that we are like (for example, Descartes comparing the brain to a machine) but also as an opposite to humanity (as in the aforementioned slogan). This course will trace this tension between the machine as an ‘Other’ and as a metaphor for our human self from the early modern period to the present. Beginning with theoretical and philosophical writing on the importance of oppositions and binaries to human identity and language, it will trace the history of the idea of the machine as it relates to the human in texts by Rene Descartes, La Mettrie, Emile Zola, Karl Capek, Alan Turing, and Donna Haraway, among others. In addition to confronting the complexity and ambiguity of a concept that ubiquitously shapes our lives today, students in this course will also wrestle with broader humanistic questions regarding the nature of the Self, the boundaries between self and other, and the relationship between human identity and technology.
KNOW 22011: Data: History and Literature
Alexander Campolo, Anastasia Klimchynskaya
Data is a notion that seems to characterize our contemporary world. Digital revolutions, artificial intelligence, and new forms of management and governance all claim to be data-driven. This course traces the origins of these trends to the nineteenth century, when new statistical knowledges and literary traditions emerged. Moving across disciplinary boundaries, we will analyze the ways in which practices of observation and calculation produced data on populations, crime, and economies. Likewise, the literature of this period reflected the ways that data shaped subjective experience and cultural life: the rise of the detective novel transformed the world into a set of signs and data points to interpret, while Balzac's Human Comedy classified individuals into types. Drawing on these historical and humanistic perspectives, students will have the opportunity to measure and analyze their own lives in terms of data-as well as think critically about the effects of these knowledge practices.
This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge
Watch a trailer of the class here.
KNOW 40310: Technology and Aesthetics
The idea of technological "progress" is a contested one, but it cannot be denied that innovation, at the very least, is a continuous process. Technological innovations regularly enable new mediums, new styles, new genres, and new subject matter as they offer us new ways to record the world, express ourselves, and tell stories. And because art is one of the fundamental lenses through which we see the world, the advent of new artistic and literary forms constantly offers us new ways to know. Each transformation in both creation and reception, however, raises anew fundamental theoretical questions: what is the difference between an objective record of the world and an artistic rendition of it? After touching briefly on the revolution brought about by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press, this class will span the 19th through the 21st centuries to explore how technological innovation has led to new literary and aesthetic forms. Though the primary focus will be on literary texts, the course is intended as an interdisciplinary one, incorporating visual art and media. Class sessions will include visits to the Rare Book Collection, local art museums, and, potentially, Chicago-area theatre performances. For their final projects, students will be able to choose between a research paper or a creative project that engages with the questions and concerns of the course.
The Scientist in the Nineteenth-Century Imagination
The nineteenth century saw both the professionalization of science and the specialization of its practitioners. In this age of “human empire” produced by industrialization, new technologies offered humanity unprecedented dominion over the natural world, and the “scientist,” a term coined in 1834, marked the advent of the idea of a vocation dedicated to that mastery. Moreover, by the end of the century, the natural philosophers and polymaths of earlier ages had given way to chemists, physicists, biologists, and statisticians, whose scope of study was necessarily both deeper and narrower. These developments produced a new social and political positioning for the scientist – an expert, an authority, a wielder of power. This class explores how nineteenth-century fiction writers, from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, engaged with these emerging and transforming conceptualizations of the scientist figure. We will pair our literary explorations with non-fiction readings texts by thinkers and scientists such as Humphry Davy, Karl Pearson, Claude Bernard, William Whewell, and Max Weber (“Science as Vocation”) about what the scientist should be and science should do. Additionally, we’ll consider how this literary genealogy influences both our fictional portrayal of science to this day as well as our perceptions of it – from our contemporary distrust of expertise to our fear of the scientist playing god. This course fulfills the elective requirement for a new MAPSS concentration on the Formation of Knowledge https://ifk.uchicago.edu/mapss/.