Category: Book Chapters
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Video Literacy
“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” — Werner Herzog Students of the new liberal arts will need to learn to WATCH and LISTEN all over again. Basic literacy—reading and writing text—is no longer enough. Now, all media is transmitted through the window of a glowing screen. Television and web video have…
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Translation
If there’s anything at all that a modern curriculum should make clear to everyone, it’s that there’s no room for the monolingual any more. Because our modern world is so small today—and by small I mean globalized, rather than parochial, which is another kind of smallness; because in this world it is possible to know…
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Reality Engineering
“I don’t know where the artificial stops and the real starts.”—Andy Warhol Reality engineering is the study of how “The Real” is manufactured. Previous epochs have approached this discipline with frowning condescension (cf. Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky). We will eschew loaded words like inauthentic, spin, and fake. Instead, our coursework approaches the manufacture of reality…
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Play
Even before we learn to speak, we play. It’s how we begin to explore the world. Games exert a primal power over us; after we’re fed, clothed, and sheltered, we must entertain ourselves. Harness that power, and what might we create? Culture in the information age has taken a sharp turn towards play. Corporations seeking…
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Photography
FROM THE INAUGURAL ADDRESS FOR THE COLLEGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Apart from the exact sciences, nothing has transformed the idea of the liberal arts as profoundly as PHOTOGRAPHY—which enables not only the recording of still and moving images, but also their reproduction, transmission, and projection onto a page or screen. The classical liberal arts are arts…
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Negotiation
“Do you know what astonished me most in the world? The inability of force to create anything.”—Napoleon Bonaparte Negotiation is the art of reconciling differences without resorting to political, economic, or physical force. Negotiation is more than getting the other to give you what you want; it means understanding that other, in the full complexity…
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Myth and Magic
From Dionysus to David, Kali to Kerridwen: Since the beginning, people have created stories to explain, explore, and celebrate nature and the human condition. Similar themes and tropes—the Sun God, hair as sacred, cleansing rituals—have emerged in places as far apart as Aboriginal Australia and Aztec South America. Even in today’s age, where science and…
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Micropolitics
You can probably name your head of state, your chief minister of defense, and the main branches of your federal government. But do you know the name of your city manager? The head of your neighborhood association? The neighbor who hasn’t missed a city council meeting since the 1970s? So much of the texture of…
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Marketing
How are ideas sold? The answer to that question is the key to influencing the world. It’s how the popular kids in school sustain their status; how parents, teachers and peer groups affect the behavior of children; how Osama bin Laden draws new recruits into al Qaeda; how Apple launches new products. Ideas succeed not…
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Mapping
“When, for example, I observe an aerial view of the Ile-de-France, I contemplate an unfamiliar agglomeration I’ve never clapped eyes on or set foot on before; and even if the map of Paris is not the same as the urban territory, such cartography is infinitely more precious to me than its view from the air,…
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Journalism
Traditionally, professional journalists have presented themselves as mediators, whether between ideas and readers, events and historians, celebrities and the public, or the state and its subjects. Now that anyone can communicate to millions with just a cell phone, that gatekeeper role has grown less and less relevant. However, emergent forms of journalism continue to give…
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Iteration
How do you make things? You could lay out the process as a line. You start at one end with a bundle of goals and plans. As you work hard—designing, writing, rehearsing, or doing whatever else is required—you progress along the line. At some point, you get to the end, with a product, a novel,…
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Inaccuracy
Inaccuracy is the art of being intentionally inartful in an immaculate way; it differs from most other liberal arts in that it is not constricted by the singular political perspective ever so entrenched in academe. Thus, it behooves the modern renaissance 2.0 person-in-training to see the world as composed of the true dichotomies—conservatives and liberals,…
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Home Economics
It starts with a bunch of bananas at your local grocery store. As you look at them, you are thinking about the price per pound, and the nutritious benefits they give your body. But what are the broader implications of that bunch of bananas? Who picked them? Was he or she paid fairly for the…
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Genderfuck
No one is normal. Seriously, try to think of a few friends you consider to be pretty normal. And then remember the quirky things they do around you sometimes. And then imagine the freaky stuff they probably do that you don’t even know about. Think how cool it would be if every one of your…
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Food
You are what you eat. Food is part of every system. Humanity was created in the moment that nutrition was transformed into culture. There is nothing about this process that cannot be reversed. Food is the ultimate mutually dependent binary. Food is not food if it is not nourishing an organism. Organisms cannot survive without…
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Finding
NEW 10 INPUT “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING TO FIND?”, thing_to_find 20 PRINT “OK, LET’S FIND SOME ”; thing_to_find 30 FETCH ASSUMPTIONS 40 GET type_of_thing FROM all_types_of_things FOR thing_to_find BASED ON assumptions 50 GET all_resources_available 60 FOREACH resource IN all_resources_available 70 IF resource.type == type_of_thing THEN BREAK 80 NEXT 90 knowledge_biscuit = get_info_from_resource(thing_to_find) 100 IF…
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Creativity
Creativity should be studied as a field in its own right, and it should be included in the new liberal arts. To clarify, I’m not calling for psychology classes on creativity, though that would be great. I’m saying creativity should be studied as a kind of martial art. You should train to be a ninja…
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Coding and Decoding
This course is about the deep end, and building the courage to plunge into unfamiliar places. Using lessons derived from the practices of cryptography, programming, and foreign language acquisition, we will learn to deduce information from context and recognize new patterns. A language—of jargon, words, symbols, gestures, or images—is a collection of tokens. Shared language…
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Brevity
140 characters are the new 30 seconds. 30 seconds is forever. Anything important is worth saying quickly. By the time it has been said, it is already the past, and so the saying must become a moment of its own. Brevity is urgency and modesty at once. Attention is the scarcest resource. Millions are dying…
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Attention Economics
In this digital world, your attention, once in abundant supply, has become SEX increasingly scarce. Now, what did you take away from that sentence? Was it the thesis to this program? Or was it something else? You, my dear student, are going to need to study attention economics. In this age we are surrounded by…
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The 2009 Introduction
“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are…