Think of it as New Media production. But that's just a phrase, and not even a good one. Occasionally there are naming races among people who do similar things, and a gazillion names are springing up -- digital media, digital arts, intermedia, transmedia, convergent media, transvergent media, etc., etc. -- since the people who began this stuff (maybe I'm one of them, depending on who's counting) started doing it in the early XXth Century. You can call it whatever you want. For me it means doing new things with old (and new) tools.
We use a lot of digital stuff, but I'm not head over heels in love with the catchword "digital", except as digital equipment enables new forms of creativity. Digital is lovely and highly seductive, like tulips in the 1600s. Creativity, on the other hand, is unruly by nature and unsettling while in progress. My focus is primarily on creativity and secondarily on technology, on circuit bending rather than using prepackaged devices, on ripping up technology, reassembling it in unfamiliar forms, and making it do unexpected things.
A quote from Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Mother of All New Media Programs (The MIT Media Lab) and CEO of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, may be helpful here:
"One of the saddest but most common conditions in schools is the students are being trained to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools."
When the Yale School of Architecture asked what we called our discipline, the class sat down and wrote random syllables on pieces of paper. We put those in a box and shook it up, to the accompaniment of tribal noises. I drew two slips out of the box, and on the basis of that I went to New Haven and told them what we did was called Fu Qui.
I've designed a program and a space. That, in a nutshell, is my pedagogy. Collectively, it's called the ACTLab. The ACTLab is a moving target, defined by the students, the TAs, me, and people we call repeat offenders -- students who have taken more than one ACTLab class and can help newbies understand the unusual expectations we have for them. Currently the symbol we use for the ACTLab is an umbrella. To get a better idea of the significance of the umbrella, and for a potted description of the theory and pedagogy of the ACTLab, read Under the Radar. (To purchase umbrella swag, go to the ACTLab TV store.) I was invited to write Under the Radar for the ISEA (Inter Society for the Electronic Arts) publication Switch as a thought piece for their 2006 conference in Silicon Valley, in association with ZeroOne San Jose.
People who work best with me have had some experience in the world, may not understand technological or mechanical stuff but are not unduly intimidated by it, and are interested in an interdisciplinary approach to learning. Some of my students go on to start odd programs of their own, which may be the highest compliment they can pay me.
If you want to understand who I am, don't talk to me. Talk to my students.
My research and scholarly interests
Primary areas of interest include:
New Media production, video production, performance, installation, gender and sexuality with emphasis on Transgender, and fantasy/science fiction. All my current work involves making stuff, though inevitably the stuff is theory-laden.
Secondary areas of interest include:
body, desire, technological prosthetics performance and performance theory phenomenology of interface and interaction virtual systems gender and sexuality transgender studies nonpredicate communication the complex interplay of science fiction and fictions of science and the traffic in the boundaries between art and technologyThe courses I teach
There are eight ACTLab New Media courses, and I teach two of them per semester. Each is a combination of theory and making, with emphasis on making. Ideally, six of the eight courses make up a rich New Media sequence in which we cover almost everything I 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 on the ACTLab courses page. 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 here: Courses page.