Course Description
Death, Data & Desire
A Studio Lab Course on Creative Media Art Collaboration
Department of Media Study, SUNY at Buffalo
DMS419/533 SCH, Tuesday/Thursday, 3-4:50pm, RM 244
DMS418/518 SCH, Tuesday/Thursday, 5-6:50pm, RM 235
Instructors
Trebor Scholz, Assistant Professor contact | website
Tom Leonhardt contact
Office Hours
Trebor Scholz, DMS 247, Tuesday, 1-2pm and by appointment
Tom Leonhardt
Course Description
Death, Data & Desire consists of 2 joint classes, which in tandem offer an experimental, flexible, and playful setting for collaborative, socially aware media art production. Students are required to register for both classes concurrently to participate.
This intensive class is about production: the production of artwork, the production of process documents, and the production of texts. You decide the appropriate media for your project- from sound to radio, interactive online work, and installations, to performance, video or writing. Often in art and technology classes there is not enough time to do it all. "Data, Death, & Desire" gives you a context to get exposed to art, discuss, read, learn the principles of programming or other necessary production skills, and get introduced to the historical context of the tools we use. We will draw from texts in art history and cultural theory and focus on the creation of critical artworks. At the end of the semester we will create a platform to show your work. This could be in the university, in the city, or at a media art or film festival to which you apply as part of this course.
Death, Data & Desire (DDD) offers enough time for all aspects of production. We will frequently leave the lab to occupy spaces around campus. In media art, consultation, cooperation and collaboration are the default, not the exception. It's hard to discern new modes of cultural production that are not based on collaboration. As much as you'll need to learn production skills and get a media historical grounding-- you may realize the importance of a "collaborative toolkit" over the years to come. In this network society you will need to be able to work well with others. This ability is an art in its own right! While DDD will provide you with the ground rules for successful collaboration, you will have to test them out for yourself. We will form small media production groups that build on the synergistic potential of the collaborative process by sharing skills and knowledge. The goal of this course is to deepen and enrich your practice, and to enforce conceptual rigor. We emphasize the "why" over the "how" of media production. Students who successfully complete this class will gain the ability to visualize their working process on a designated research weblog. They will also learn to focus on criticality beyond technical minutia. The topics of readings, lectures by instructors, and your own oral presentations will be determined by the issues that are raised by your projects in progress. The mentioned instructional formats will alternate with skill-workshops, in which the instructors will teach you as much as you will teach other. We will use open source and proprietory software alongside each other.
Prerequisites
The course is especially suited for self-driven students with a background in some, but not necessarily all, of the following media production skills: video, photography, performance, installation, audio, animation, programming skills, writing skills, or an advanced interest and knowledge of cultural theory and history.
Both undergraduate and graduate students from areas such as Media Study, Art, Design, Comparative Literature, Informatics, Communications, Library Science, Computer Science and Education are encouraged to enroll.
The class is collaboratively taught by Trebor Scholz and Tom Leonhardt.
http://collectivate.net/courses/
