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Undergraduate: RTF 359 WEIRD SCIENCE!
Action Between the Worlds
Graduate: RTF 393Q Alien Encounters: The Crack Between
the Worlds
ACTLab courses are concept-driven, rather than skills-driven; but we believe that theory flows from the act of making, rather than the other way around. The point of each ACTLab course is to help you define, develop, and produce a project that reflects on the social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and personal issues raised in that particular class. For undergraduates and for masters students doing projects and reports, our aim is to teach you critical thinking about media and technology and to help you develop a portfolio of representative projects to take with you when you graduate. For masters students doing theses and doctoral students, our goal is to quicken your appreciation of technology's foibles and potentials, but to ask research questions that interconnect with these technologies and their social, economic, aesthetic, political, and personal environments.
Our motto is make stuff. We offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge technologies, but we also encourage you to view these as tools rather than as ends in themselves. Make sure you're taking advantage of technology, rather than waking up to find that technology is taking advantage of you. That's why we encourage critical thinking, and offer you the opportunity to engage cutting-edge theory along with making stuff.
ACTLab courses have a broad range and allow for multiple topics. You can taste a course or two or work intensively over time, and even repeat courses because course topics always change.
In 1992, the ACTLab began in a closet. Now it's housed in a converted TV / Film production studio on the 4th Floor of the CMB building on the University of Texas campus. We completed a first, and very preliminary, renovation in Summer 2000. The ACTLab space is, and always has been, a work in progress. Currently besides state-of-the-art digital and analog equipment we provide theatrical lighting, thrust stage, theater-sized quadraphonic sound system, seminar tables that can be rolled away to open up floor space for movement activities, environmental performance, and installation work.
The ACTLab is available 24/7/365 to current ACTLab students. Unlike other labs on campus, we encourage food and drink -- well-nourished students make better stuff. Caution: working in the ACTLab can be addictive. We find that of their own volition some labbies practically live around the clock in the ACTLab at end-of-semester crunch time.
Undergraduate:
RTF 359
WEIRD SCIENCE! Action Between the Worlds
Sandy Stone, Instructor
TTh 12-3 in the ACTLab (cmb studio 4b)
In the boundaries between mainstream "legitimate" science and science fiction lurks the realm of Weird Science, the hotly contested liminal universe where the real action is and where imagination counts as much as experiment.
Like all ACTLab courses, Weird Science is both theory and practice. Through reading and discussion you will explore how different knowledge systems work, how facts are socially constructed and fought over, who polices the boundaries between science and fiction, sex and gender, imaginary and real, human and cyborg, cyborg and monster.
There are no written exams. Instead you will use the theories and tools
you acquire during the semester to make stuff about
some aspect of weird science. What you make can be in any form: sound,
installation, video, computer animation, collage, sculpture, assemblage, performance
-- you name it. You will do this in stages, starting with simple projects
and moving to more complex ones, using humor, irony, uncommon approaches, and
bizarre techniques.
Take risks! Amaze us! We'll provide
you with technical assistance. Your final project presentation will be
open to the public. In ACTLab courses we assume a high level of motivation
on your part and your willingness to self-start, set your own goals, think independently,
collaborate with others, seek help when you need it, and take risks.
Only serious, hard-working would-be scientists, filmmakers, musicians, storytellers, hackers, and risktakers of all kinds need apply.
Graduate:
RTF 393Q
An ACTLab/Media Studies course
Alien Encounters: The Crack Between the Worlds
Allucquére Rosanne Stone, Instructor
Monday, 6-9pm in the ACTLab (cmb 4b)
This is a graduate level course situated at the collision point of fugue states, borderland experiences, genetic manipulation, lost worlds, shamanism, real and hysterical cures, and (ghasp!) theory. From that troubling and productive collision point we will examine monstrosity as figurative device for Otherness and its potential for social and epistemic disruption.
Like most Stonely seminars, this one is about our research -- yours and mine -- and the points at which they entangle or spark. We rely heavily on your willingness to present and examine your own work in light of the seminar's organizing themes and metaphors. The results of that examination provide seed points for larger discussions. Hopefully the result is to deepen and complexify your own research.
Although you may do so if you insist, you are not required to submit a text in order to receive a grade. Rather, I encourage you to make stuff in the ACTLab tradition -- things that reflect on theoretical social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and personal issues raised in the seminar. Your making can take any form. Suggestions include sound, installation, video, computer animation, painting, collage, sculpture, assemblage, and performance. For a change, let making inform theory, and see what happens. I encourage edgy thinking, risktaking, humor, and allowing room for chance to speak through you. We provide technical help if you request it.
This course takes place in the ACTLab, home of a unique, freewheeling research
group working at the hotly contested intersections where technology, art, and
culture collide. Our uniqueness doesn't come from our courses or physical plant,
but from the special qualities of our community and participants, the guiding
vision of our directors, visiting artists and lecturers, and our students' broad
spectrum of interests and projects.