ADMIN-OBS A Plastic Telephony Primer

3 Credits

• PHOT-621P-XX

This course charts a skewed path along the history of the telephone and the massive significance it continues to have in all its different forms and applications. Unlike many of the other significant 19th century developments that reconfigured so much of the contemporary landscape, the telephone has been largely neglected as an area of study. The course will provide an accounting of its history, intercut with the phenomenological; the familiar yet uncanny rending of a voice from its body. The study of this quality--a technology's ability to transfer some human aspect into a form that can be dispersed and recognized as real to modern eyes and ears--will also be extended to the photographic field. In superimposing the two, the course hopes to find new parallels and tangents that will help us to better understand the before and beyond of this convergent period ushered in by the smartphone.