In the Fall, I'll be teaching:
(production
course)
The design and use of media projects are embedded in ever-evolving
historical predicaments and complex social contexts of meaning production.
Creative and practical questions of how to design a media project, and
social-economic-political dilemmas of staging media-based environments and
events, are never settled once and for all. As a result, key concepts in the
field of Media Studies have remained active sites of creative engagement,
contention, invention, and revision across decades. These concepts include: “audience,” fiction/nonfiction, the
role of aesthetic experience in media design and use, the “agency” of media in
human affairs and social change, media and “reality,” media ethics. We will use
a production-based approach to trace the historical trajectories and staying
power of these issues. Students
will choose one of these issues and use it to (re)consider an existing or new production
project and/or theoretical interests in media studies. They will produce
experimental iterations and test sites that directly engage and address their
chosen issue, and explore its power to shape and strengthen their project—and
the power of their project to set the issue in motion once again.
Hybrid Media Practices
Hybrid Media Practices
considers “hybrid media” and “media practice” from a very particular
perspective. We examine how and why
individuals and groups are inventing hybrid media practices in response to the
emergence of new social realities. We consider how current scales, speeds, and
complexities of social change are encouraging and rewarding hybrid media
practices.
For our purposes, “hybrid
media practices” refers to approaches to media production and use that cut
across research, design, art, communication, science, participatory
citizenship, speculation and action. We
track what practicing media producers actually make of “hybridity,” and
how. We question what hybrid media
practices make thinkable and possible for media forms, styles, modes of
address, and uses. We focus on hybrid
media practices involved in knowledge production, documentary, information
dissemination, and interpretation of contemporary conditions of daily life.
The readings and conceptual
framework of the course draw from theories of “hybridity,” “assemblage,” and
“translation” and we use that framework to inform field- and case studies of
media producers who actively invent and employ hybridized media practices.
Students contribute written
responses to weekly readings and/or case-studies. They also produce a final
project in the form of a prototype, field study or “test site” that tries out a
hybrid media practice in order to identify both potentials and limitations that
it holds for a particular media studies project. This final project will be built step by step
and iteratively throughout the semester, through the short weekly readings
responses and the four “semester project assignments.”
