Interdisciplinary Studies Course, Konstfack

Course Background:

As we spend more and more of our time socialising and conducting the business of our everyday lives Online, we see the rise of economies of the virtual; over the past eight years alone, Real-money trade of virtual property ('RMT') has burgeoned into a 2 Bn USD market. With the emerging visibility of new relationships and communities we see the emergence of new forms of ownership related to the accumulation of meta-data; these can be seen as attempts to obtain outwardly extending, all- encompassing ownership of information as opposed ownership of content, or enclosures of information. In order to identify and meet the challenges these developments pose to our lives in general and work in particular, we need to understand human experience in these environments. Exploring relationships between embodiment and enclosure as related to ownership is a central concern, obliging us to revisit what we know about how and what it is that distinguishes between how we function in bodied and disembodied contexts.


Course Description:

We are de-constructing idea of ownership as related to embodiment and the boundaries of integrity or “the state of being whole”. This obliges us to revisit what we know about how and what it is that distinguishes between how we function in bodied and disembodied environments. With its central concern being the understanding of implications of “post human” experience and embodiment, the course finds its natural home and setting in Second Life (SL), the Linden Labs online platform, and students are expected to participate in related seminars and lectures . Students are also expected to make presentations that explore and relate the different aspects of implementation using the Second Life platform with ones they make in a designated physical space.