(please note, this text was modified and mangled from www.sandystone.com, old acltab sites and unkown sources that showed up late one night.)
Death
This is a course about change, transition, breakage, and rupture, in which death means not necessarily finality but rather process. We will examine the peculiar and powerful place of death and its accompanying corruption in Western culture, but a great deal of our focus will be on death in the broad sense as a transformative idea, source of spiritual and aesthetic power, topic of narrative fascination, means of control, and all-purpose (ethnic) cleanser. Further, we'll expand the definition to include the undead, the brain-dead, the nearly dead, the apparently dead, the walking dead, the extremely dead, and the (your term here) dead.
As with all ACTLab New Media
courses, the main thrust of the course is making. There are no
written
exams. Instead you will produce two mini-projects
and one substantial final project during the semester, based
loosely on the theme of Death. All our classwork has the goal of
providing ideas and methods for these projects. You will start
with simple projects and move to more complex ones, using humor,
irony, uncommon approaches, and bizarre techniques. Projects may
be in any form, such as film, video, sound, performance, computer
animation, collage, sculpture, assemblage, or any other media or
combinations of media, but they must incorporate the theoretical
and methodological work of the semester.
Class is in studio and discussion format. This means that your active participation is a requirement of the course. During the semester we expect you to contribute your own ideas and arguments to the discussions, and to be willing to take the risks such contributions imply.
Here is a sample syllabus: Click Here
Here are some resources we use for the course: