New Media Initiative: ACTLab Courses

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:  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 that unlike all the other topics this one has no website and is very specific, and because its specificity tends to limit the range of things the students feel comfortable doing, it's likely going to be replaced by one of the courses currently in development or at least put into a secondary rotation like songs that fall off the Top 40.)

There are two courses currently in development, tentatively titled Dream and Delirium. No, I'm not developing courses with Neil Gaiman. But wouldn't that be a gas? A sequence of courses named entirely after the Endless...

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