Popular Culture and the Aesthetics of the A.I. Apocalypse

A Discovery Core Experience

May be taken as BCORE 104 (Arts & Humanities)

About This Course

This course focuses on popular representations of the technological singularity, or what some have referred to as the AI apocalypse. We will study primary and secondary texts to gain a better understanding of the role that film, video games, and visual art plays in shaping the popular imagination about advancing technology. This is an interdisciplinary course, and we will examine the core topics of popular culture, aesthetics, apocalypse, and singularity through various theoretical groundings and methodological approaches.

Assignments include reading journal, group presentation, and a final analysis paper or creative project.

Required texts/films

  • Course Packet: required (available to purchase at UW Bookstore)
  • Films: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 足彩app哪个是正规的 Matrix, Artificial Intelligence, I, Robot, Ex Machina, and others (available to stream through UW Library).

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will:

  • Demonstrate engagement with the topic and themes of the course in a variety of forms, including formal and informal writing assignments, class discussion, etc.
  • Develop and apply a critical vocabulary of key terms and concepts relating to the study of cultural depictions of technology and the end of the world.
  • Develop a historical and contemporary analysis of how Western aesthetic theory has informed conceptions of the individual, subjects and objects, art and reality, beauty and terror, and the imagined future of humanoid embodiment and consciousness.

Dr. Georgia Roberts

School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences

About Dr. Roberts

  • Ph.D. English, University of Washington, Seattle
  • M.A. English, University of Washington, Seattle
  • B.A. English and Ethnic Studies (minor), University of California, Berkeley

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