spring 2002

Topics in Convergent Media: Graduate Seminar:
Tod und Verklaerung / Ktahmet 'i Merran'tu / Death and Transfiguration:
Technologies of the Nearly Apprehensible

Most of what we commonly think of as "technology" had at its moment of origin deep connections to discourses of boundary and invisibility. E.g., Edison (and Tesla) believed the phonograph was an apparatus for communicating with the dead; and his work on that aspect of prosthetic apprehension, taken up by others, continues to the present day. Near the beginning of the XXth century Jules- Etienne Marey conceived of photography as a device through which Nature could attest to itself, without the problematics of human intervention and consequent interpretation. And in the 1970s a group of Stanford physicists designed a machine by which Nature might communicate with humanity by means of text.

In this seminar we will consider technologies of apprehension and the boundaries of the apprehensible, and their inflection upon the powerful human drive to create the illusion of order where no order exists, moving in and out of the liminal and hotly contested boundaries between Death (dissolution, disappearance) and Transfiguration (emergence, reorganization). Our thread will include Gestalt psychology, cognitive science, spiritual mediums, Fortean phenomena, the placebo effect, Avital Ronell's telephone, Joseph Davis's musical bacteria, Surrealist Anthropology, brain/mind machines, and subliminal communication, plus other examples we will ferret out over the course of the semester. Our organizing principle will be a discourse of the human drive for closure and its expression in apparati of vision, hearing, and other human senses -- the realm that we will call Near-Legibility. As part of the course you will design and build one or more apparati (in the larger sense) whose function is to play in the boundaries between the perceptible and the imperceptible. No specific manual skill is expected of you, but the desire to imagine, to think strangely, to take conceptual risks, and to manifest your imaginings in forms that others can experience, is.

The course is organized as a series of discussions. I will provide a framing narrative, a link to which will be created here during the week of January 8, 2002. Each week at the start of the seminar a student will present their own work, both for its own sake and in terms of its relationship to the theme of the seminar. The week's discussion will emerge from that presentation. As in previous seminars, I prefer unconventional methods of presenting work, both during and at the conclusion of the semester.

The success of the seminar depends upon what you bring to it. I rarely lecture; instead, I guide discussion. This approach has its risks as well as its rewards. Some days nothing happens. When we can't kickstart a discussion for whatever reason, rather than requiring all of us to sit and stare at each other I will send you home. Other days the heavens open and Truth descends in a fiery chariot. It's unpredictable. Go figure.

Topics in Convergent Media: Narrative: Telling Stories: Bodies, Voices, Experience

This is a course about storytelling, plain and simple: Narrative as physicality, voice, presence -- one human creating experience for other humans through judicious use of speech and gesture. The course includes narrative techniques applied to online communication (i.e., you can choose to tell a story using animation, sound, or other technological approaches), but first and foremost it is about the atavistic, challenging, and scary act of spinning an effective tale in realtime around the (real or virtual) campfire.

fall 2001

Topics in Convergent Media: Performance: Performing Bodies, Performing Theory

In this course we will experiment with methods of performance in the post-theatre age of technological prosthesis. Some of these experiments will involve the use of communication technologies such as digital animation, sound, and motion detection. We will consider performance in relation to social presentations of self, gender, and persona, online and in face to face interaction, in all cases grounding our discussions in actual performance work. At the end of the semester you will present an individual, group, or whole-class performance involving the principles we will develop over the course of the semester.

Topics in Convergent Media: Sound: SoundScapes

Sound and its concomitant, noise, define our spaces of interaction and creation, provide clues to social roles, enhance or inhibit sensuality, produce and modulate emotion. Sound can not only define spaces of action but can create plausible worlds. This semester we will study a broad range of topics under the general rubric of sound, but we will focus on using sound as a machine for creating active space, sonic environments through which one physically moves, which may change in response to human presence and action, and which evoke emotional response. We will use computers, sensors, and objects we make as means to achieve this. You will learn to think in 3-d; these aural spaces are analogous to the environments you would create if you chose sound design for film as your work.

spring 2001

Topics in Convergent Media: Performance: Performing Disaster

Topics in Convergent Media: Science: Weird Science

fall 2000

Topics in Convergent Media: Performance: Performance Art

Topics in Convergent Media: Sound: Sound and Disaster

spring 2000

Special Topics in RTF: Theory and Methods of an Unnamable Discourse

This seminar is an intensive general introduction to the principles and practice of human interaction. Class consists of a discussion period followed by a practicum during which you will develop in physical form the things you talked about during discussion. The emphasis in this class is on making, producing physical evidence of your thought processes. Since New Media means any medium used in new ways, you have a wide choice of materials from which to select your medium -- photography, computers, performance, dance, storytelling, found objects, etc.