The Artistic Operating System

A file, a folder made of pixels on a desktop screen, a form, "please wait here", a credit card, monthly quotas, profile 82% complete, "press 1 for"... We spend much of our time dealing with corporate/bureaucratic systems through a mix of social and technical interfaces: let's call them Operating Systems. In this course we will look at these mechanisms, to consider the metaphors, semantics and utopian ideals that inform their design. And then, we can start to come up with our own Artistic OS's for political resistance, creative practice, social life and everyday experience. We will get a bit nerdy and take some inspiration from computer science but this is not an IT course.

Brendan Howell was born in Manchester, CT, USA in 1976. He is an artist and a reluctant engineer who has created various software works and interactive electronic inventions. Currently, he lives in Berlin, and teaches at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany. He has also done research and led courses at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule, Merz Akademie, Fachhochschule Potsdam and the Kunsthochschule Berlin, Weißensee.

http://www.wintermute.org/brendan/