This graduate seminar investigates the challenges that contemporary computation poses to cultural analysis. Our starting premise is that computation is no longer simply a ‘tool’ for human thought to make sense of the world, but destabilises the sensible and the thinkable, unsettling long-standing methods of sense-making. We examine how questions of signification/representation can be recast as questions of operations/actions, looking at how signs are made to operate within the confines of computational media, and how this shift from signification to operation reframes the problems and challenges of analysing and narrating the ‘real.’ 

Weekly sessions are organised around close reading of theoretical texts alongside contemporary aesthetic/artistic/activist practices that engage with computation. These practices serve as testing grounds for experimenting with new forms of writing and narrating cultural analyses. Graduate students are expected to move fluidly between theoretical reflection and hands-on engagement with the practices under discussion, developing their own vocabulary for intervening in or describing operations that unfold at different scales or reality. 

Interested Research Master’s (RMA) or PhD students affiliated with a University in the Netherlands are welcome to register directly for the seminar on the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).