Our Digital Worlds (ARTS10003)

See like a camera / listen like a microphone / track like a satellite / read like an algorithm. Big data is everywhere, the flow is constant, we remix our environment by just being present in it. We live in a digital world. How did we get here? And where are we headed?

This subject makes the invisible visible, by revealing the hidden digital infrastructure of everyday life. You will learn the key concepts required to understand digital technology and explore how this infrastructure has been built up over the 70 years of the digital revolution. Through weekly contextual studies students will encounter a range of issues and concepts such as data literacy, techno-ethics, digital activism, the attention economy, digital storytelling, surveillance capitalism, Indigenous data sovereignty and speculative futurism.

In this subject, you will produce your own digital space and critically engage with a range of media: games, literature, film, music and industry case studies. You will have the opportunity to ask important questions of the digital zeitgeist: How has digitalisation changed the ways we interact, our sense of place and the means by which knowledge and understanding are created and shared? How does culture reflect and speculate on our experience of working with and living through, algorithms and their platforms? And perhaps most urgently, as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly bridging the gap between the virtual and physical worlds, how should we be thinking about the design of the next iteration of our digital world?

This subject will benefit students who are interested in both the historical and contemporary socio-political impacts of digitalisation across a range of disciplines including music, art, science, government, media design, creative writing and history.