Courses

Through an examination of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, photography. fashion and visual culture of the United States from 1750 to 1914, the course will explore how American artists responded to and operated within the wider world, while grappling with issues of identity at home. Addressing themes shared in common across national boundaries, the class will consider how American art participated in the revolutions and reforms of the "long" nineteenth century, and how events of the period continue to impact our country today. The period witnessed the emergence of new technologies for creating, using and circulating images and objects, the expansion and transformation of exhibition and viewing practices, and the rise of new artistic institutions, as well as the metamorphosis of the United States from its colonial origins to that of a world power, including the radical changes that occurred during the Civil War.  With many sessions taking place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the class will investigate how American art engaged with international movements while constructing national identity during a period of radical transformation both at home and abroad.

The use of artificial intelligence—propelled by deep learning techniques—to analyze, curate, and generate digital images is having a profound influence on visual culture, one that well exceeds Jacques Derrida's anticipations of the effects of technology on society as he described them in Archive Fever. While regulation around emerging technologies such as AI is being formulated across the globe with much urgency, a problematic concept of “tech ethics” is being espoused by the leading technology companies that imposes a simplistic moralistic framework on potential policies. Through examination of the creative applications of AI, the aim of this seminar is to foster a nuanced critical discourse on AI art that places the ethics of emerging technologies at center stage. This course provides students with an introduction to the history of AI art and explores the challenges and opportunities that this burgeoning field faces, especially in regard to the regulation of technology. Class visits to Mercer Labs, Artechouse, MoMA, and the Whitney will allow students to directly engage with the core concepts of the seminar.

The course begins with reflection on Adorno’s prescient statement that technical rationality is “the rationality of domination,” and challenges both the cynicism and optimism around emerging technologies and their effect on visual culture. We will question the accountability that art history and other fields of study have, if any, to steer the ethics debates spurred by today’s “culture industry” of digital images, and ask what the custodianship of this space entails by examining its structures of power, conveyed visually or through automated processes enabled by computer vision science. By interrogating the socio-cultural effects of the use of machine learning on images—such as algorithmic biases that lend to discrimination, or surveillance and privacy concerns in regard to facial recognition technologies—new and diverse perspectives on visual culture are investigated. Although the mechanisms that enable technology to develop may be lending to the commodification and homogenization of visual culture, the seemingly democratic promises that big tech touts keep us captivated yet surprisingly uncritical. If the transformative role of AI on our visual culture is constituting a new type of archaeology of knowledge, how do we critically lend to its discourse through the theories, methods, and experiments surrounding art and AI?

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia.

Introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent. The course covers the early art of Buddhism, rock-cut architecture of the Buddhists and Hindus, the development of the Hindu temple, Mughal and Rajput painting and architecture, art of the colonial period, and the emergence of the Modern.

Introduction to 2000 years of art on the Indian subcontinent. The course covers the early art of Buddhism, rock-cut architecture of the Buddhists and Hindus, the development of the Hindu temple, Mughal and Rajput painting and architecture, art of the colonial period, and the emergence of the Modern.

What do the robots in ancient Greek mythology have to tell us about today’s AI? How did slavery shape how Greeks and Romans imagined autonomous tools? Where does artificial intelligence come from, and why do we tell the stories we do about what it can do and how it will change the world?
This course offers an introduction to the intellectual history of classical antiquity and a critical examination of artificial intelligence in the current cultural and political moment. Students in the course will learn about a topic in ancient Greek and Roman thought — stories about autonomous tools — and how that topic relates to social history and culture in the ancient world. They will then use that knowledge to frame questions about artificial intelligence and robots in present society, and examine critical approaches to the large generative models that are garnering so much attention today. The goal is equip students with a) a basic familiarity with how ancient Greek and Roman thought relates to its cultural context, b) an analytical framework for approaching claims about technology in historical and present contexts, and c) an appreciation for how humanistic inquiry can answer urgent questions in their lives.
Prerequisites: none
The course is intended for students for little or no familiarity with the study of the ancient world, and as an introduction to the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Familiarity with texts encountered in the fall semesters of Literature Humanities or Contemporary Civilizations will be helpful, but is neither required or presumed on the part of the instructor.

This course looks at the narrative and the historical context for an extraordinary event: the conquest of the Persian empire by Alexander III of Macedonia, conventionally known as “Alexander the Great”. We will explore the different worlds Alexander grew out of, confronted, and affected: the old Greek world, the Persian empire, the ancient near-east (Egypt, Levant, Babylonia, Iran), and the worlds beyond, namely pre-Islamic (and pre-Silk Road) Central Asia, the Afghan borderlands, and the Indus valley. The first part of the course will establish context, before laying out a narrative framework; the second part of the course will explore a series of themes, especially the tension between military conquest, political negotiation, and social interactions. Overall, the course will serve as an exercise in historical methodology (with particular attention to ancient sources and to interpretation), an introduction to the geography and the history of the ancient world (classical and near-eastern), and the exploration of a complex testcase located at the contact point between several worlds, and at a watershed of world history.

 

Introduction to and analysis of major myths in classical literature. Topics include the changing attitudes and applications of myth from Greek epic to tragedy, as well as modern approaches to myth. Readings include Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. All readings in English.

**Admission priorities**

Priority will be given to CS students closer to graduation. Your number on the waitlist is not a factor in admission. But this class is large, and we hope to accommodate everyone who needs to take the class. Last year's class is a good model for what this year's syllabus will be: http://coms4170.cs.columbia.edu/2024-spring/

**Attendance required**
This class is highly interactive, and attendance for many of the lectures is mandatory. Especially in the second half of the class, students must attend in-class project mentoring sessions to get feedback from their TA and fellow students.

**Technical Preparation**
The first half of the class is quite technical, we introduce principles of usable design and integrate them in to technical assignments. There is a lot of programming in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Bootstrap, and Python (server-side). Whereas we do teach these technologies, we constantly find that students who have seen them before have a better time in class. Former students have advised future students to do an online web programming series like CodeAcademy (which is sadly no longer free). Advanced Programming is an advised pre- requisite, but the true pre-requisite is simply coding experience. You will be expected to figure out some of the programming aspects by yourself, and you need the maturity to do that. Hint: ask GPT. If you are going to email me about this class, please use a subject line
that says I read the SSOL message for COMS 4170 and I still have a question. I hope to see many of you in the spring :)
Lydia

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.

Prerequisites: Non-native English speakers must reach Level 10 in the American Language Program prior to registering for ENGL S1010. University Writing: Contemporary Essays helps undergraduates engage in the conversations that form our intellectual community. By reading and writing about scholarly and popular essays, students learn that writing is a process of continual refinement of ideas. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill. We give special attention to textual analysis, research, and revision practices.