From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: a Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 SOFTWARE AND STUDIO ART Next year he will teach for a semester at North Carolina. The idea of moving to a big university that is interested in pushing technology intrigues him. In the meantime, he's got a classroom of Williams students finishing their projects in "Cyberscapes," an experimental course that crosses software skills with studio art. The students read philosophers and sociologists of postmodern culture, such as Jean Baudrillard, Sherry Turkle, and David Harvey. Mr. Taylor also asks them to create group works in hypertext, insisting that they learn to make arguments using sound, images, and text. "It's not the same thing done differently," he likes to say. "It's doing something different." He also gives a bracingly tough written exam, based on the readings. As the class winds to a close this month, student groups present their works-in-progress. One group shows how "truth" is constructed by the news media, with clips of news coverage of George Bush's Presidential inauguration. Another creates a "museum of the flesh," imagining a 21st-century world in which real bodies have been recreated in a virtual society, but only as attractions to be "visited" through the computer. William Blake, William Burroughs, Charles Mingus, and Antonin Artaud figure into that project. In that presentation as well as in others, students are shrewd about collecting images and sound bites, using on-line editing software to create 3-D worlds. But conceptually, much of the work is muddy, depending on trendy terminology. Mr. Taylor pushes them to sharpen their arguments.