Postgraduate course in Cultural Innovation: arts, digital media and popular culture
The postgraduate course in Cultural Innovation: arts, digital media and popular culture provides the basic concepts needed to understand and analyse the changes and transformations related to culture and society as well as knowledge about new artistic and contemporary cultural productions that have been transformed by information and communication technologies, the dynamism of cultural industries and globalization.
Pablo Valbuena. Light and architecture workshop. Image: Marcos Morilla
Introduction
The postgraduate course in cultural innovation: arts, digital media and popular culture provides the basic concepts needed to understand and analyse the changes and transformations related to culture and society as well as knowledge about new artistic and contemporary cultural productions that have been transformed by information and communication technologies, the dynamism of cultural industries and globalization.
Conscious of the need to understand, adapt to and become involved in the transformations of contemporary culture, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial and UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya are conjointly organising a postgradute programme with the objective of providing the tools necessary to understand and interact with the culture of today from an interdisciplinary perspective in connection with the important themes being dealt with internationally in the arts, humanities, communication and the social sciences.
The complexity of today’s culture and the speed at which it changes require an analysis that unites academic and professional perspectives in official institutions, industries and cultural systems. In the context of the changes and transformations of the culture of the knowledge society, it is crucial that adequate tools for research, development and innovation in society and culture be established.
This postgraduate programme will integrate different analytic perspectives to understand and improve the relation between culture and society, technology, the economy, the communication media and the arts. To achieve this, we will examine the most relevant case studies and will collaborate with specialists from the art world, as well as experts in culture, research, the media and industry, analyzing in real time those elements that we examine on the theoretical, methodological and practical level.
The programme fits in with professional studies in the arts and humanities as well as with advanced communication studies, but it also has a clear connection with creative industries and cultural management. Therefore, the course is intended as much for those who want to study the arts and culture of today as well as professionals and artists working in the field of the arts, culture, communication media and creative industries.
Signed:
Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Director, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Pau Alsina, Director of the Postgraduate programe in cultural innovation, UOC-LABoral
Objetives
- learn how to analyse new practices and realities for research or action from the point of view of everyday experience, technological mediation and changes in industry and cultural institutions.
- understand and analyse in a critical manner new and emergent artistic and cultural practices by taking a look at different traditions in the studies of art, communication and culture.
- learn how to critically conceptualise, analyse and study the cultural field in a way that encompasses individual and collective creativity as well as its social expression.
- develop a critical understanding and learn how to identify the central role of technological mediation and the communication media in culture and its social manifestations.
- learn about and analyse emerging economies resulting from technological, social and organizational changes in creative industries.
- learn how to analyse, understand and apply in a critical fashion innovative processes associated with digital art and culture from a historical and contemporary perspective.
Information and registration
Edition: 1st edition
Starting date: 20th. October 2010
Duration: 1 year
Number of credits: 30
Venue: UOC virtual campus
Virtual Campus language: Spanish
Teaching language: Spanish (some complementary use of English)
Price: 2,335 Euros
Registration: http://www.uoc.edu/masters/eng/master/web/
Personalised consultation: 902 372 373 (Monday to Friday, from 9:00 AM to 8:00 PM)
Study materials
The postgraduate courses of the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya may require the study of materials in printed or digital format. The materials are given to the students as the course progresses.
The materials are one of the great elements provided in this course, given that they comprise a careful selection of significant readings that deal with the course’s subject matter. In some cases they have been translated from English or taken from practical case studies especially for this programme. It is thanks to this meticulous selection that the course can enrich and improve the students’ understanding of the link that relates the arts, culture, technology and society.
Admission requirements and degrees awarded
A legal university degree is required to enter the programme. In the case where an applicant does not have such a degree, an admissions committee will evaluate the knowledge and experience of the applicant on the basis of their resume.
Once the student has completed the programme and been evaluated, UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya will grant a Postgraduate diploma in Cultural Innovation: arts, digital media and popular culture UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya -LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial to those participants that already have a university degree considered legally valid in Spain.
In the case where the particpant does not have such a degree, he or she will be granted a Certificate in Cultural Innovation: the arts, digital media and popular culture UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya -LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial.
Programme
The post-graduate course consists in five courses, one post-graduate Project and a multidisciplinary work space.
Courses
1. Art, consumption and current culture: between distinction and authenticity
1.1. Art, the market and current culture: thinking about culture
1.2 Power, social distinction and conformism: social articulations of culture
1.3. Resistence, creativity and authenticity: the paradoxes of modern individualism
2. Culture, innovation and industry: a critical look
2.1. The culture and industry binomial
2.2. Cultures of production and the production of cultures
2.3. Creative economy, innovation and the city
3. Technology, media and culture: mediations
3.1. Materialities, daily life and cultural practices
3.2. Mediations in practices of cultural innovation and production: a pragmatic focus
3.3. New media, new technologies and… a new culture?
4. Innovation in digital art and culture: past, present and future tendencies
4.1 Art history and theory of digital culture. New tendencies
4.2 Curatorial, documenting and archiving of art and digital culture
4.3 Processes of innovation and economic policies of art and digital culture
5. Ludic culture and digital entertainment: new cultural agents
5.1 New media and ludic culture in today’s world
5.2 Spectators, users and consumers as protagonists
5.3. Changes and transformations in creative industries
6. Post-graduate Project
The Project will be evaluated on the basis of participation in the debates, excercises related to the readings and a Project in which students will apply what they have learned throughout the programme to concrete examples from contemporary popular culture.
Directorate and Professors
Advisory Board
Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Director, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial
Derrick de Kerckhove, former Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Professor, University of Toronto and Faculty of Sociology at the University of NaplesFederico II
Roger Malina, Executive Editor, Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, San Francisco; Director, Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence; Co-director of the art-science program of IMERA Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies
José-Carlos Mariátegui, investigator, London School of Economics, London; founder, ATA-Alta Tecnología Andina and Escuelab.org, Lima
Christiane Paul, Director of Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School, New York; Adjunct Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Benjamin Weil, Chief Curator, LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón
Academic directorate
Pau Alsina, doctor in Philosophy (UB), Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, researcher in the group GRECS on Culture and Society and director of the magazine Artnodes on art, science and technology
Invited professors
Jim McGuigan, Professor of Cultural Analysis and Sociology Programme Director, Department of Scocial Science Loughborough University, Leicester
Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky, writer, artist and musician, New York
Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor in the Sociology of Communications, Department of American, Cultural and Linguistic Studies, Università degli Studi di Napoli 'L'Orientale, Napples
Professors
Dr. Pau Alsina, doctor in Philosophy (UB), Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, researcher in the group GRECS on Culture and Society and director of the magazine Artnodes on art, science and technology
Isaac González, Master’s degree in Sociology and Master’s degree in Anthropology, Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC and researcher in Sociology of Culture and Education
Dr. Daniel López, doctor Social Psychology, Professor of Psychological Studies and Education Sciences at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and researcher in Social Studies of Science and Technology
Dr. Roger Martínez, doctor in Cultural Sociology and a Master’s degree in Information Sciences, Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a researcher in Cultural Sociology
Rubén Martínez, Codirector founding member of the cultural producer YProductions and researcher in Cultural Economic Policy and Innovation
Dr. Raquel Rennó, doctor in Communication and Semiotics, consulting professor at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and rfesearcher at the Mackenzie University of Sao Paulo in the field of Comunication and Society
Ana Rodríguez, Master’s Degree in Art History, Professor of Art and Humanities Studies at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and researcher in the History of Cinema and Cultural Economic Policy
Dr. Israel Rodríguez, doctor in Social Psychology, Professor of Psychological Studies and Educational Sciences at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and researcher in Social Studies of Science and Technology
Pau Waelder, Master’s degree in Art History, consulting profesor at the UOC-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and curator, art critic and researcher in Art and Digital Culture
