Welcome to the longest running website maintained by a professor at Georgetown University. I am the Founding Director of Georgetown's Communication, Culture & Technology Program (CCT), and have been a professor at Georgetown for over 20 years. I set up the first website at Georgetown in 1993, and began developing websites for courses in 1994. When I launched the CCT Program in 1995-96, I began developing individual sites for each graduate course with web syllabi, readings, and lecture notes. I set up the first pilot implementation of Blackboard, the leading CMS for education, at Georgetown in 1998, but prefer to develop my academic material in an open Web environment. I also maintain an archive of lectures, essays, bibliographies, and presentations for students and those interested in the fields I work in.

My teaching philosophy entails using the Web to implement real-time teaching: moving students out of the black box of the classroom and into a world of practice where already transmitted institutional knowledge is continually challenged by networked, multidisciplinary information. My seminars are laboratories for making interpretive interventions in an always evolving complex array of interconnected and interdependent sources. We are all digital followers Heraclitus (revised 1.2): you can't step into the same flow of information even once. Our received disciplines flow in an always-already state of internal divisions, contradictions, and institutional configurations, all subject to ongoing reinterpretation and interdisciplinary redescription. Welcome to the academy as networked knowledge remix: there's no there here outside the nodal points of interconnection and interdependence that we inhabit and remake.

My teaching and research interests span several fields and disciplines: theory and philosophy of technology and culture; semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy of language; media and communication theory and history; art theory and history; popular culture and intersections in art, music, film, and visual culture. I have provided links to course syllabi, lectures and presentations, and published work for use by all students and anyone interested in my various projects.

CCTP 725: Cultural Hybridity: Remixing Media, Music, Visual Culture

CCTP 748: Media Theory and Digital Culture

CCTP 797: Technology / Theory / Culture

CCTP 738: Contemporary Visual Art: Theory, Practice, Institutions

CCTP 510 (2005): Institutions of Visual Culture (archive)

CCTP 510 (2004): Globalization in a Post-9/11 World | Intro Topics | Readings and Bibliography | (archive)

CCTP 737: The Post-Internet University (archive)

I maintain a Seminar Wiki site for student discussions and contributions to the real-time knowledge-building purpose of seminars. Wiki architecture allows students to write weekly seminar comments in a peer-dialog context, and to publish rich-content essays and research projects. Student work is accessible on the Web, indexed by Google and other Web indexing sites. The Wiki provides a fixed URL for reference and use by students in resumes and future professional work. See my teaching statement on the seminar Wiki.

My Seminar Wiki is now hosted at Georgetown University. The Metapedia Wiki is now an archive; it has been my ongoing Wiki for Seminars and Student Projects since 2006, and maintained on a personal server. See the archive of student projects.

The Work on the Street: Street Art and the City (book in progress)

Artworlds: Art, Media, and Networked Culture (book in progress).

Meaning and Mediation (book in progress). My synthesis of semiotics, mediology, cognitive semantics, network theory and media theory.

"Keith Haring's Visual Language." Presentation at the Brooklyn Museum for the Keith Haring Retrospective exhibition, June 10, 2012.

Martin Irvine, "The Work on the Street: Street Art and Visual Culture" (pre-press pdf). Chapter in The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood. London and New York: Berg, 2012, pp. 235-278. See also thumbnail list of images cited (pdf).

Street Art and the Digital City: Presented at the Theorizing the Web conference, University of Maryland, April 9, 2011.

Interview, on curating the Image/Fame/Memory photography exhibition, Worn Magazine, March 2011.

"Cultural Semiotics," Interview with Montana Mathieu, Paris, 2009.

Bibliography of publications in CV.

Writing to be Read: A Rhetoric for the Digital Age. A guide for structuring your argument in essays and theses, and supporting your writing with authoritative sources in any medium, whether writing traditional "papers" or rich media essays on the Web.

I founded and directed Irvine Contemporary, a leading art gallery in Washington, DC from 2003-2011. Over the past eight years, I've had the good fortune to work with many of the leading artists, photographers, and musicians of our time, including Shepard Fairey, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Swoon, Gaia, Hasa Elahi, Billy Name, Gerard Malanga, Kate Simon, Moby, Yoko K, and many younger and emerging artists. I have curated over 30 exhibitions, written many exhibition curatorial essays, published catalogs of artists' works, and placed works in leading museum collections. I am available for independent curatorial projects in all media, especially contemporary hybrid and digital media.

Martin Irvine
Communication, Culture, and Technology Program (CCT)
Georgetown University
3520 Prospect St., NW, Suite 311
Washington, DC 20057
phone: 202-687-3097
email:  irvinem@georgetown.edu

University CV  |   Professional Resume (brief)

"I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars." --Jorge Luis Borges, from "The Garden of Forking Paths"

"Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future." --Mikhail Bakhtin