This course proposes to analyze the roots of artistic practices and social intervention based on both analog and digital subcultural networked art, showing that the current artistic challenge of the Web 2.0 platforms lies in the invention of new courses of action and new contents developed by grassroots communities.
A thread that connects networked art such as mail art, culture jamming and hacker art with Web 2.0 social networking practices.

Special thanks to the mail artist Vittore Baroni for his advice and involvement in the project creation. Vittore dedicated to the course 3 pages of the Arte Postale! - issue 99, mail art-zine founded in Italy by Vittore in October 1979.
Download the pages of Arte Postale! about the networking course from here (PDF)

Objectives of the course:
1. To investigate how to activate an open process of creation, producing new models of technological and cultural intervention, connecting the development of hacker ethics with the new generation of Internet-based services and social networking platforms;
2. To compare the diverse use of art and technology among grassroots communities of artists and activists involved in networking processes during the last half of the twentieth century, with the contemporary Web 2.0 content sharing platforms;
3. To sort out the different types of effects of collective art practices in the aesthetic, so-cio-political and economical fields of intervention;
4. To know the fundamental literature and artworks on networking and culture jamming, analyzing international networked art practices;
5. To develop networking projects, creating visual collective experiments, which are shown in public sessions at the end of the course.

The students presented their Networking Project on May 18, 2009, during a public session at Aarhus University.