University of London, Queen Mary

The course consists of two parts, each of fundamental importance for any serious approach to Computer Science: logic and discrete structures. Logic plays a very important role in computer architecture (logic gates), software engineering (specification and verification), programming languages (semantics, logic programming), databases (relational algebra and SQL the standard computer language for accessing and manipulating databases), artificial intelligence (automatic theorem proving), algorithms (complexity and expressiveness), and theory of computation (general notions of computability). Computer scientists use discrete mathematics to think about their subject and to communicate their ideas independently of particular computers and programs. In the course, students consider propositional logic as well as predicate calculus. Students treat propositional logic and predicate calculus as formal systems. Students learn how to produce and annotate formal proofs. As application students briefly consider the programming language Prolog. 

This course explores the political and artistic aims and effects of non-theatrical performance in the 20th century and contemporary urban environment. It explores how the city is sometimes conceived as a dystopian site of potentially enormous social oppression. And it examines everyday, artistic, and activist performative responses to this potential subjection, responses which imagine the city as, instead, a utopian site of personal and social liberation. Students contextualize and historicize our analysis through studying various theoretical analyses of urban experience (e.g. Baudelaire, Benjamin, Debord, Lefebvre) as well as a variety of artistic practices (e.g. everyday interventions, activism, public art). Throughout the course, students work to map the ideas and practices we encounter, many originally grounded in Paris, in our own experiences of London. The course concludes by imagining what performance might do next to contest the particular challenges of living in the city now and to explore and exploit its opportunities.