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Pedagogy

Cut to the Chase

ACTLab stands for Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory.  The name began as a serviceable acronym for the New Media program of the department of radio-television-film (RTF) at the University of Texas at Austin.  People used to ask us if we taught acting.  We don't.

The ACTLab is a program, a space, a philosophy, and a community.

Before I tell you about those things I'll mention that if you intend to build a Trans-fu program of your own, it's crucial to know that the ACTLab would be impossible without our primary defense system:  The Codeswitching Umbrella.

The Codeswitching Umbrella

Conceptually, the ACTLab operates on three principles5:  

Refuse closure;

Insist on situation;

Seek multiplicity.

In reality you can't build a program on that, because (a) refusing closure is the very opposite of what academic programs are supposed to be about, and (b) insisting on situation means, among other things, questioning where your funding comes from.  Also, if time and tide have shown you that your students do their very best work when you offer them almost no structure but give them endless supplies of advice and encouragement, you have precipitated yourself into a surefire confrontation with people who are paid to enforce structure and who, in order to collect their paychecks, are responsible to people who understand nothing but structure.  We all have to get along: the innovators, the bean counters, and me.  So to make this smooth and easy for everyone, we actlabbies live beneath the Codeswitching Umbrella.

(Stone whips out her notebook and scribbles frantically.  Then she holds it up...)

Figure 2: The codeswitching umbrella.  The umbrella is opaque, hiding what's beneath from what's above and vice versa.  The umbrella is porous to concepts, but it changes them as they pass through; thus “When's lunch?” below the umbrella becomes “Lunch is at noon sharp” above the umbrella.  In this conceptual model the lowest subbasement level you can descend to, epistemically speaking, is the ACTLab, and the highest level you can ascend to, epistemically speaking, is Texas.  Your mileage (and geography) may vary.  This particular choice of epistemic top and bottom expresses certain power relationships which are probably obvious, but then again, you can never be too obvious about power relationships.

The codeswitching umbrella translates experimental, Trans-ish language into blackboxed, institutional language.  Thus when people below the umbrella engage in deliberately nonteleological activities, what people above the umbrella see is organized, ordered work.  When people below the umbrella produce messy, inarticulate emergent work, people above the umbrella see tame, recognizable, salable projects.  When people below the umbrella experience passion, people above the umbrella see structure.

When you think about designing your program, you'll realize that institutional expectations chiefly concern structure.  Simultaneously, you'll be aware that novel work frequently emerges from largely structureless milieux.  Structureless exploration is part of what we call play.  A major ACTLab principle is to teach people to think for themselves and to explore for themselves in an academic and production setting.  We use play as a foundational principle and as a homonym for exploration.  How we deploy the concept of play is not just by means of ideas or words; it's built right into the physical design of the ACTLab studio.

The ACTLab studio

Figure 3:  The ACTLab studio.  Legend:  (A) Seminar table (the dotted line shows where the two rectangular tables join);  (B) Pods; (C) Thrust stage; (D) Screen; (E) Video projector; (F) Theatrical lighting dimmerboard and plugboard; (G) Workstation connected to projector and sound system; (H) Wall-o-computers, which I could claim is there merely to break the interactivity paradigm but which in fact is there because we ran out of space for more pods; (I) Doors; (J) Quadraphonic speakers (these are halfway up the walls, or about twenty feet off the ground); (K) Couch.  Actually the couch is a prop which can be commandeered by production students doing shoots, so it's sometimes there and sometimes not.  Although my lousy drawing shows the space as rectangular (well, my notebook is clearly rectangular), the room is actually a forty-foot cube with the lighting grid (not shown) about twenty feet up.

It's hard to separate the ACTLab philosophy from the studio space, and vice versa.  They are co-emergent languages.  The ACTLab studio is the heart of our program and in its semiotics it embodies the ACTLab philosophy.  At the center of the space is the seminar table.  The table is a large square around which we can seat about twenty people if we all squeeze together, and around fifteen if we don't.  The usual size of an ACTLab class is about twenty, so in practice fifteen people sit at the table and five or so sit in a kind of second row.  Because the “second row” includes a couch, people may jockey for what might look like second-class studentship but isn't.

Ideally the square table would be a round table, because the philosophy embodied in the table is there to deprivilege the instructor.  Most other classrooms at UT consist of the usual rows of seats for students, all bolted to the floor and facing the instructor's podium.  We needn't emphasize that this arrangement already incorporates a semiotics of domination.  Whatever else is taught in such a room, the subtle instruction is obedience.  There's nothing obvious about using a round table instead, but the seating arrangement delivers its subtle message to the unconscious and people respond.  The reason the table is square instead of round is that we need to be able to move it out of the way in order to free up the floor space for certain classes that incorporate movement and bodywork.  In order to make this practical the large square table is actually two rectangular tables on wheels which, when separated, happen to fit neatly between the computer pods; or, if we happen to need the pods at the same time as the empty floor, the two tables can be rolled out the door and stored temporarily in the hall.

The computers in the studio are arranged in three “pods”, each of which consists of five workstations that face each other.  When you look up from the screen, instead of looking at a wall you find yourself looking at other humans.  Again, even in small ways, the emphasis is on human interaction.  (As we grew, there wasn't room to have all the workstations arranged as pods, so newer computers still wind up arranged in rows along the wall.  We'll fix that later...)

Let's get the sometimes vexing issue of computers and creativity out of the way.  Although we use computers in our work, we go through considerable effort to place them in proper perspective and deemphasize the solve-everything quality they seem to acquire in a university context.  In particular we go to lengths to disrupt closure on treating computers as the wood lathes and sewing machines of our time; that is, as artisanal tools within a trade school philosophy, tools whose purpose and deployment are exhaustively known and which are meant to dovetail within an exhaustive recipe for a fixed curriculum.  While we're not luddites, our emphasis is far more on flexibility, initiative, creativity, and group process, in which students learn to select appropriate implements from a broad range of alternatives and also to make the best possible use of whatever materials may come to hand.  In this way we seek to foster the creative process, rather than specific modes of making.

Besides the seminar table and the inescapable computers, the ACTLab studio features a large video projection system, quadraphonic sound system, thrust stage, and theatrical lighting grid.  These are meant to be used individually or in combination, and emphasize the intermodal character of ACTLab work.  We treat them as resources and augmentations.

As with our physical plant, ACTLab faculty and staff are meant to be resources.  Thinking Trans-fu here, as I encourage us to always do, we shouldn't take the idea or definition of resources uncritically, without some close examination of how "resource" means differently inside and outside the force fields of institutional expectations and nomadic programs.

Rethinking resource paradigms

ACTLab curriculum

When you build your Trans-fu program you will be considering what your prime directive should be.  The ACTLab Prime Directive is Make Stuff.  By itself, Make Stuff is an insufficient imperative; to be insitutionally viable we have to translate that into a curriculum.  The purpose of a curriculum is to familiarize a student with a field of knowledge.  Some people believe you should add “in a logical progression” to that.  With New Media the “field” is always changing; the objects of knowledge themselves are in motion, and you have to be ready to travel light.  However, when we observe the field over the course of the last fifteen years, it's easy to see that although this is true, some things remain constant.  For the purposes of this discussion I'm going to choose innovation, creativity, and play.  The ACTLab curriculum has a set of specifics, but our real focus is on those three things.2

As we discuss curriculum I want to remind you of the necessity to keep in mind the nomadic imperative of Trans-fu program building: refuse closure.  When you want to focus on innovation, creativity, and play, one of your most important (and difficult) tasks is to keep your curricular content from crystallizing out around your course topics.  We might call this approach cyborg knowledges.  In A Manifesto for Cyborgs, Donna Haraway notes that cyborgs refuse closure.  In constructing ACTLab course frameworks, refusing closure is a prime directive: we endeavor to hold discourses in productive tension rather than allowing them to collapse into univocal accounts.  This is a deliberate strategy to prevent closure from developing on the framework itself, to make it difficult or impossible for an observer to say “Aha, the curriculum means this”.  Closure is the end of innovation, the point at which something interesting and dynamic becomes a trade, and we're not in the business of teaching a trade.

Still, we have to steer past the rocks of institutional requirements, so we need to have a visible structure that fulfills those requirements.  Once again we look to the codeswitching umbrella.  Above the umbrella we've organized our primary concerns into a framework on which we hang our visible course content.  The content changes all the time; the framework does not.  For our purposes it's useful to describe the curriculum in terms of a sequence, but this is really part of the codeswitching umbrella; in practice it makes no difference in which order students take the courses, and in fact it wouldn't matter if they took the same course eight times, because as the semester progresses the actual content will emerge interactively through the group process.  The real trick, then, the actual heart of our pedagogy, is to nurture that group process, herd it along, keep it focused, active, and cared for.3

Figure 4:  The ACTLab Prime Directive, which is based on messy creation and the primacy of play, filters through the codeswitcher umbrella to reappear as a disciplined, ordered topic list.  In this instance the umbrella performs much the same numbing function as Powerpoint.  (Also notice that my drawing improves with practice; this is a much better umbrella than the one in Figure 2.)

There are eight courses in the ACTLab sequence, and we consider that students have acquired proficiency when they have completed six.  We try to rotate through all eight courses before repeating any, but sometimes student demand influences this and we repeat something out of sequence.

The ACTLab pedagogy requires that graduate and undergraduate students work together in the same courses.  We find that the undergrads benefit from the grads' discipline and focus, and the grads benefit from the undergrads' irreverence and boisterous energy.  

As I mentioned, our curricular philosophy is about constructing dynamic topic frameworks which function by defining possible spaces of discourse rather than by filling topic areas with facts.12  With this philosophy the role of the students themselves is absolutely crucial.  The students provide the content for these frameworks through active discussion and practice.  The teacher acts more as a guide than as a lecturer or a strong determiner of content.

For an instructor this can be scary in practice, because it depends so heavily on the students' active engagement.  For that reason, during the time that the program is ramping up and acquiring a critical mass of students who are proficient in the particular ways of thinking that we require, we spend a significant amount of time at the beginning of each semester doing “boot camp” activities, in which we demonstrate through practice that we don't reward rote learning, question-answer loops, or authority responses, but do reward independent thinking, innovation, and team building.

I'll list the titles of the eight active ACTLab topics here, but keep in mind that in a Trans-fu curriculum model like the ACTLab's the courses do not form a sequence or progression. There is no telos, in the traditional sense. That's why we call them clusters. Their purpose is to create and sustain a web of discourses from which new work can emerge. Like the Pirates' Code, the titles are mere guidelines, actually:

Weird Science

Death

Trans

Performance

Blackbox

Postmodern Gothic

Soundscapes

When Cultures Collide

Because the course themes are not the point of the exercise, we're always thinking about what other themes might provide interesting springboards for new work.  Themes currently in consideration, which may supplement or replace existing themes, depending upon how they develop, are:

Dream

Delirium

(You probably noticed that some of these topics read like headers for a Neil Gaiman script.  I think a topic list based on Gaiman's Endless would be killer:))

A brief expansion of each topic might look like this:

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.

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.

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

Performance:  Performance and the performative, performance as political intervention, history and theory of theatre, masks, puppetry, spectacle, ritual, street theatre.

Blackbox:  Closure, multiplicity, theories of discourse formation, studies and practices of innovation, language.

Postmodern Gothic:  Theories and histories of the gothic, modern goth, vampires, monsters and the monstrous, genetic engineering, gender and sexuality, delirium, postmodernity, cyborgs.

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 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 retired or at least put into a secondary rotation like songs that fall off the Top 40.)

When Cultures Collide:  Language and episteme, cultural difference, subaltern discourses, orientalism, mestiza consciousness.  (This topic has a multiple language component and we had a nice deal with one of the language departments by which we shared a foreign (i.e., not U.S. English) language instructor.  With visions of Gloria Anzaldua dancing in our heads we began the semester conducting class in two languages: full immersion, take-no-prisoners bilinguality.  Three weeks into the semester he suddenly got a great gig at another school, and the course sank like an iceberged cruiser.  Since then I've been wary about repeating it, and I suspect that -- unless I can find an instructor who will let me keep their firstborn as security -- it's not likely to come up in the rotation again any time soon.)

So that's what I consider to be a totally useless description of the ACTLab curriculum, useless because the curriculum itself is a prop for the Trans-fu framework which underlies it.  Remember the curriculum is above the codeswitching umbrella.  And therefore it's important to those necessary deceptions that make a Trans-fu program look neat, presentable, and legit.

ACTLab pedagogy

When we discuss Trans-fu pedagogy I always emphasize the specifically situated character of the ACTLab's pedagogical imperatives.  I think the default ACTLab pedagogy was heavily influenced by having come of academic age in an environment in which our mentors were, or at least were capable of giving us the illusion that they were, all very comfortable with their own identities and accomplishments.  There was no pressure to show off or to make the classroom a sounding board for our own egos.  This milieu allowed me the freedom to develop the ACTLab's predominant pedagogical mode.  It primarily consists of not-doing.  Ours is the mode of discussion, and you can't create discussion with a lecture.  Those are incompatible modes.  You may encourage questions, but questions aren't discussion, and though questions may take you down the road to discussion it's better to bushwhack your way directly there.

Other faculty have their own teaching methods, some of which are more constructivist, but I encourage people to teach mostly by eye movement and body position.7  Usually class starts off with someone showing a strange video they found, or a soundbyte, or an odd bit of text, or someone will haul out a mysterious hunk of tech and slap it on the table.  Most times that's enough, but in the event that it isn't, the instructor may ask a question.6  For the rest of the time, when it's appropriate to encourage responses, the instructor will turn her body to face the student.  In this situation the student naturally tends to respond directly to the instructor, and when that happens, the instructor moves her eyes to look at another student.  This leads the responder's eyes to focus on that student too, whereupon the instructor looks away, breaking eye contact but leaving the students in eye contact with each other.

That's a brief punch list of what I consider the minimum daily requirement for building a useful and effective program based on Trans-fu principles.  The ACTLab's pedagogical strategies, together with semiotically deprivileging the instructor through the design and position of chairs, tables and equipment in the studio, plus refusing closure, encouraging innovation, and emphasizing making, help us create the conditions that define the ACTLab.  I think it's obvious by now that all of this can be very easily rephrased to emphasize that the ACTLab, like any entity that claims a Trans-fu positionality, is itself a collection of oppositional practices.  Like any oppositional practice, we don't just live under the codeswitching umbrella; we also live under the institutional radar, and to live under the radar you have to be small and lithe and quick.  We cut our teeth on nomadics, and although we've had some hair-raising encounters with people who went to great lengths to stabilize the ACTLab identity, we're still nomadic and still about oppositional practices.

I'm writing this for ISEA at this time because, although we've been running a highly successful and unusual program based on a cluster of oppositional practices for almost fourteen years now, a new generation of innovators are about to begin their own program building and I've never said anything publicly about the details that make the ACTLab tick.  I'm also aware that our struggles tend to be invisible at a distance, which can make it appear that we simply pulled the ACTLab out of a hat -- which I think is a dangerous misconception for people to have if they intend to model their programs to any extent on what we've done.  People who've been close up for extended periods of time tend to be more sanguine about the nuts and bolts of putting such a program together.  Some very brave folks who have crouched under the radar with us have taken the lessons to heart, gone out and started Trans-fu programs of their own.  Some of them have been very successful.  Usually other programs simply adapt some of our ideas for their own purposes, but very few have actually made other programs like the ACTLab happen.  Recently we've talked about how people who've never had the opportunity to participate in our community would think about New Media as an oppositional practice, and what, with a little encouragement, they might decide to do about it.  I'd like to close by saying that however you think about it or talk about it, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is taking action.  I don't care what you call it -- New Media, Transmedia, Intermedia, Transitivity, Post-trans-whazzat-scoobeedoomedia -- whatever.  The important thing is to do it.  Music is whatever you can coax out of your instrument.  Make the entering gesture, take brush in hand, pick up that camera.  We're waiting for you.

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People:

Contact:

Brandon is the founder of ACTLab TV, as well as the President of the Foundation for Decentralization Research. He is pursuing a Masters Degree in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As the Co-founder of Freenet, and inventor of Alluvium, he is one of the foremost experts on peer-to-peer technology. Check out his ACTLab website for more information

Joseph is a student at the University of Texas at Austin, pursuing a Masters Degree in Media Studies. He is the co-founder of ACTLab TV, as well as the builder of all of the office hardware. On top of all this, he also runs a Hi-Fi Shop in Austin, TX called Concert Sound. Check out his ACTLab website for more information

Sandy is the ACTLab TV goddess, she provides the inspiration, motivation and heart that makes the existance of ACTLab TV possible. Check out sandystone.com for more information.

Robert is a Senior at UT Austin. He works on the scheduling and setup of the audio stream, while also digitizing and transcoding content. He also is producing original content, merchandise for ACTLab TV, maintaining the website, public relations, and promotion. He has lots of experience in this area as a regular DJ for KVRX 91.7 Student Radio, where he is the RPM director, managing the Electronic section of their music library. Check his show out at the chill zone. Check out his ACTLab website for more information

Randy is an undergraduate Radio-Television-Film student at the University of Texas at Austin. His duties at ACTLab TV include scheduling, digitizing, transcoding content, producing original content, working on merchandise for ACTLab TV, maintaining the website, public relations, and getting coffee! In his spare time, Randy makes movies. Check out his ACTLab website for more information

Evan is an undergraduate English student at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined the team in spring 2005, though he originally began helping out in the fall of 2005 with the ACTLab TV release party (the picture here is of him DJing at that party). Evans duties include making bumps, general grapic design, organization and many other things. In Evans free time he DJ's and makes cool videos. Check out his ACTLab website for more information.