EN 5217 Culture and Technology:

Assignment Three

You may answer on disk with hypertext resources if you wish. In which case you may hand in a short project evaluating the internet as a medium and form of cultural production.

Or you may simply

Answer one of the following questions:

1. With one or two examples, comment on the type of relationship that K has with the villagers in Kafka’s The Castle.

2. Give a short account of the role of the visual in modern culture, taking as an example any fine art, photography, moving image, or any other technology of the visual image.

3. Provide a short account of some of the ways in which virtual reality, hyperspace or hypertext, has caused us to look at culture differently.

4. Descartes looks through windows. Edgar Allan Poe looks through Windows. Kafka looks through windows. Artists, writers and philosophers throughout the modern period have looked through windows. What is the significance of the window for modernity?

5. Walter Benjamin’ notion of the flâneur--the wanderer of city spaces (or even the window shopper or frequenter of malls)--might or might not belong to that more general type of modern figure--the wanderer or traveller. With reference to any texts provide a short discussion of the role of wandering. You may look at travel in the ordinary sense, travel as flâneurie, or travel in the metaphorical sense, which includes the virtual journey, where you actually don’t go anywhere.

6. Give a brief account of any example of music that makes significant use of mechanical technology.

7. Technology always seems to be going wrong. Conversely, we find many examples of the ways in which technology has been used for purposes it wasn’t intended for. Give an example of any of the ways in which technology’s potential for going wrong has been used productively, creatively, or usefully.

8. Broadcasting and Cinema are fundamentally different media, though they each peddle the moving image. What do you think are the essential differences and similarities between the two media?

9. Computer technology has opened up a world of suggestively subtle visual images that make graphic use of recent mathematical discoveries. Provide some thoughts on the implications of chaos theory and fractals for cultural production.

Your answer should be roughly 1000 words long and should be to the point and coherently presented.

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