There are no prerequisites for taking this course. However, enrollment in the course Theories of the Subject, taught by Prof. Carlos Thiebaut, is recommended, as both courses will be taught in tandem.

The course consists of an introduction to the material and especially the technological basis of culture. General objectives: Understanding of the role of new technologies and media in the production of cultural meanings. Access to the main theories that interpret and explain this role. Specifically, the following competences will be developed: Understand the role of new technologies and media in the production of cultural meanings. To know and understand the main theories that interpret and explain this role. To acquire the conceptual and methodological tools necessary to understand and analyze the different factors that determine the role of new technologies in contemporary culture. To be able to analyze and critically judge the debates present in the different studies on the cultural role of new technologies. To know the relevant bibliography. To be able to use oral and written methods of study and criticism. Be able to produce academic texts, oral and written, related to the subject. Particular objectives: To understand material environments as environments in which identities are constituted. To know the main lines of material culture To understand the material bases of experience

TTechnology is the material production of intelligence in living beings, from bacteria to humans. Culture is the production of living beings that transmit their knowledge and the way of preserving the structures of their societies from one generation to another. The relationships between the two are mediated by the materiality of bodies, artifacts, and the materials, energies, and information that make them possible. The common thread running through the course is the continuity between culture, the mind, the body, and the materials of the world that constitute their foundations and conditions of possibility. This leads us to space-time dynamics in endless games of scale: from the geological to the cultural, from the short times of life plans to the deep times in which the foundations of culture are constituted, that is, from the everyday to the geology of culture. Temporality is the product of the dynamics of matter, energy, and information. The course will be intertwined with the course taught by Professor Carlos Thiebaut: Theories of the Subject. While this course focuses on technical mediations in the construction of agency and experience, the course on Theories of the Subject will address experiences of negativity and the unweaving of the world. 1. Materiality and temporality. 2. The order of agency: meanings, values, and artifacts. 3. Scales of production and destruction 4. The order of sensibility: configurations of experience 5. Towards a political geology of culture

The development of the subject will combine the schematic presentations of the teacher in theoretical classes with a permanent workshop in which students will present a critical analysis of objects chosen by them.