Filippo FIMIANI | Program Aesthetics of Apparatuses and Devices 2024/2025

Generalities: FILIPPO FIMIANI

Academic Year: 2024/2025

Study Class: Three-year Degree Communication Sciences

Teaching Activity: AESTETICS OF APPARATUSES AND DEVICES (6 CFU = 40 HOURS)

EDUCATIONAL GOALS

The first goal of the course is to provide essential elements and tools for learning the main themes and categories of contemporary aesthetics of apparatuses and devices, in an interdisciplinary perspective that is attentive to the rhetorical and technological, social and cultural aspects of the use of mobile tools and of the aesthetic and sensorial pervasiveness in ordinary lives and public policies and communication. Students will be methodologically able to know the main currents and to orient themselves with awareness in the contemporary interdisciplinary debate on the phenomena of their time, with particular regard to languages, media and experiences in the age of digital and convergent culture, as well as material and immaterial production and consumption.

Students will also be able to creatively test and stress their knowledge and critical skills by proposing and discussing audio-visual and textual labours during the course.

PRE-REQUIREMENTS

Would be desirable notions of semiotics, aesthetics, modern and contemporary art history, history of cinema and media.

CLASS CONTENTS

The term "dispositif" has different meanings and refers to different epistemological, pragmatic and technological domains, from legal to medical, from informatics to the ordinary. As a critical concept, "dispositif" emerges in Michel Foucault's studies and indicates the concrete operation of an abstract institution by means of a network, heterogeneous elements, and techniques of governance, control, and regulation (prison, university classroom, or webinar and FB); in law, a "dispositif" indicates the decision content of a legal act and what is prescribed by a judgment or order; "dispositif," in film studies, are the conditions of possibility and setting of the film (but also museum) experience, radically changed with the advent of portable and connected digital devices; in ordinary parlance, "dispositif" designates the setup of a technical and technological equipment and configuration, more or less complex, made up of mechanics, hard and software, formats, and, most importantly, a small "smart" device, exemplarily a mobile device; but also FFp2 masks are tools or disposable medical devices prescribed to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The course will examine such multiplicity of meanings and interpretations, discuss their semantic relevance and metaphorical richness to describe the possible relationships - strategic and tactical, utilitarian, narrative, creative and critical - between subjectivities, institutions/platforms and new technologies, and will focus in particular on the ordinary (and amateur) uses and consumptions of digital communicative content thanks to smartphones, today's most accessible and familiar, used and abused devices.

Thanks to the many textual - literary, theoretical and critical - and iconic - artistic and non-artistic, cinematic and filmic, documentary, social content etc.-, which will be presented and discussed, but also thanks to the practical and creative verifications with the student participants during an ad hoc workshop, the course aspires to provide the elements and tools useful for understanding the contemporary aestheticological debate on cell phone culture and communication, media, networks, assemblages and devices.

TEACHING METHODS

The course takes place in the first semester of the second year and comprises a total of 40 hours of theoretical and methodological lectures and practical exercises, workshops and seminars mandatory to attending students, carried out with the support of the Audiovisual Storytelling Laboratory-LABSAV and also held by experts, in which are discussed in depth exemplary cases and the audio-visual products and the papers requested from the attending students.

HOW TO VERIFY LEARNING

With the support of LABSAV, there will be constant inter-course, group and individual checks and tests and, for the students attending the course, the realization of a visual product and a textual work (such as a paper for a scientific journal or a talk at a conference), which will be evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively and will be duly considered in the final oral examination with marks in thirtieths.

REFERENCES TEXTS

STUDENTS WHO ATTEND CLASSES (WORKSHOP MANDATORY)

- Gilles Deleuze, Che cos’è un Dispositivo?, Cronopio 2007 [1988]

- Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un Dispositivo, Nottetempo 2006

- Francesco Casetti, Galassia Lumière, Bompiani 2012, Chap.3

Based on the chosen subject area, 1 of the following papers:
- Kaya Barry, Unsettling the aesthetics of air travel through participatory tourist photography, Tourist Studies 2021, 21(3), pp. 404–423

- Eleftheria J. Lekakis, Culture jamming and Brandalism for the environment: The logic of appropriation, Popular Communication -The International Journal of Media and Culture, 2017, 15(4), pp.1-18

- André Parente et Victa de Carvalho, Cinema as dispositif: Between Cinema and Contemporary Art, Cinémas, 19(1), 2008, pp.1-20

- Raffaele Pavoni, Pratiche hacking museali come appropriazione di spazi pubblici, Scenari, 2019, 11(2), pp.1-15

STUDENTS WHO DO NOT ATTEND CLASSES/WS AND ERASMUS

-Ruggeri Eugeni, Che cosa sarà un dispositivo. Archeologia e prospettive di uno strumento per pensare i Media, in Jean-Luc Baudry, Il Dispositivo. Cinema, Media, Soggettività, LA SCUOLA 2017, pp. 5-43

- Fulvio Carmagnola, Dispositivo. Da Foucault al Gadget, MIMESIS 2015

- Gilles Deleuze, Che cos’è un Dispositivo?, Cronopio 2007 [1988]

- Giorgio Agamben, Che cos’è un Dispositivo, Nottetempo 2006

- Francesco Casetti, Galassia Lumière, Bompiani 2012, Chap.1, 3

1 of the following papers:

- Imanuel Shipper, From Flâneur to Co-producer: The Performative Spectator, in Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.), Performing the Digital. Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Transcript Verlag 2017, pp.191-209

- Michele Bertolini, Device, in INTERNATIONAL LEXICON OF AESTHETICS, 2018

URL = HTTPS://LEXICON.MIMESISJOURNALS.COM/ARCHIVE/2018/AUTUMN/DEVICE.PDF

- Edgar Gómez Cruz, Photo-genic Assemblages, in EDGAR GÓMEZ CRUZ, ASKO LEHMUSKALLIO (EDS), Digital Photography and Everyday Life, ROUTLEDGE 2016, pp.228-242

- Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto,Le Dispositif introuvable as an epistemic Tool for Media Description and Analysis, in Diego Cavallotti, Simone Dotto, Leonardo Quaresima (EDS.), A History of Cinema without Names/2, MIMESIS 2016, pp.253-260