ACTLab Courses

There are ten ACTLab New Media courses, and we teach two of them per semester. Each is a combination of theory and making, with emphasis on making. Ideally, six of the ten courses make up a rich New Media sequence in which we cover almost everything we think you need to know in order to be an interdisciplinary practitioner in New Media production and studies. You'll find suggestions for a complete New Media course of study below.

Although the topic names are fixed, actual course content changes each semester, so you may take a course with the same name more than once. All the courses involve elements of boundary transgression, epistemic rupture, and play. In no particular order, the complete current list is:

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board experimentation in the ACTLab

Trans: Dangerous border violations. Transformation and change, boundary theory, transgender, gender and sexuality in the large and its relation to positionality and flow; identity.

Weird Science: Social and anthropological studies of innovation, the boundaries between "legitimate" science and fakery, monsters and the monstrous, physics, religion, legitimation, charlatanism, informatics of domination.

Blackbox: How facts become and how things mean. Closure, multiplicity, theories of discourse formation, studies and practices of innovation, language.

Postmodern Gothic Extreme Freestyle Hacking electronic suit PostModern Gothic: Monsters, desire, and epistemic rupture. Theories and histories of the gothic, modern goth, vampires, monsters and the monstrous, genetic engineering, gender and sexuality, delirium, postmodernity, cyborgs.

Death: Cultural attitudes toward death, cultural definitions of death, political battles over death, cultural concepts of the afterworld, social and critical studies of mediumship, "ghosts" and spirits, zombies in film and folklore; the spectrum of death, which is to say not very dead, barely dead, almost dead, all but dead, brain dead, completely dead, and undead.

Performance (Taking It to the Street): Practicum in culture hacking with a documentary component. Performance and the performative, performance as political intervention, history and theory of theatre, masks, puppetry, spectacle, ritual, street theatre.

When Cultures Collide: Building multinational virtual communities for purposes of social transformation. Language and episteme, cultural difference, subaltern discourses, orientalism, mestiza consciousness.

Soundscapes: Theory and practice of audio installation, multitrack recording, history of "music" (in the sense described by John Cage). (Note: This course description is in the process of being updated; please stand by. Soda can
phoenix sculpture by ACTLabbie

Dream/Delirium: An exploration of the space between waking and dream states. Consciousness continuums and the creative discoveries that emerge from this space. Where do dreams end and realities begin?

Extreme Freestyle Hacking: Investigation of hacking as the political art of "detournement" in all facets of society. The way we modify things to make them to things they aren't supposed to do.

(please note, this text was modified and mangled from www.sandystone.com, old actlab sites and unknown sources that showed up late one night.)