“Why Tesla’s Cybertruck captures the hearts of millennials” — a look at an obsession with low ploy

Last semester Professor Robert J. King and I co-taught a course at Columbia University on New Media Art designed to mixed theory and practice. For the final assignment, the class created a Medium publication titled “Emergent Concepts in New Media Art.”

Each student wrote an article for the publication consisting of a thousand-word text exploring a concept of their choosing, either from the existing literature covered within class or of their own creation.

Students concepts were illustrated with examples from at least two new media artworks, one of which had to be outside of those studied in this class. To that end, their article needed to be designed dynamically, illustrated with embedded videos, images, gifs, etc., and hyperlinking to other pages within the publication.

A requirement was that each student must engage ideas from at least one of the course readings and two further secondary sources not included in the syllabus. These sources could include books, essays in edited collections, and journal articles. Internet-native sources could be used in addition to these three sources, but not as a substitute.

Click here to read the publication.