listening to repeating

I’ve just finished the course site, including the syllabus, for BISIA 213, New Media Production: “Animating Print Texts,” at the University of Washington, Bothell.  Last year, in the spring, I taught a similar version of the course, which essentially asks students to use Adobe Flash and Audacity to animate selections from a literary something’s print version—to make text move, with sound.

Learning from a few mistakes during my last go at the course, I’m thinking of adding more constraints to the students’ animation process, especially time-based constraints (e.g., how long the animation should be).  I also want to spend more time on audiovisual synchronicity, since I only spent one module on it in 2009.  After all, persuasively synchronizing moving text with sound is one of the biggest challenges in the class.

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Photo by Steven Byeon

Sara Grimes and Steven Byeon at The Daily (of the University of Washington) have composed an article entitled, “Reading 2.0.” I dropped a few quotables in there. Here’s a clip:

Jentery Sayers can pin his growth as a teacher on one specific book.

Silence by John Cage is the work that inspired the English doctoral candidate to use collaborative teaching methods in his English 111 classroom. Sayers never comes to class prepared for a lengthy lecture anymore. Instead, he comes equipped with an open mind, ready to engage with students in an interactive setting.

“Cage says: ‘There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound,’” Sayers said. “With those two sentences in mind, I’ve tried to listen to students more and talk at them less.”

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Burroughs and Gysin wrote The Third Mind.  Sometimes, I wish I’d never read the thing. For one, that book—or perhaps the formulaic depression I endured after trekking through Pynchon’s generic Inherent Vice—is likely responsible for my recent inability to read a print novel.  Not because novels are long, or that I lack the requisite attention span, but because I want to see language do something other than construct a story, a character, a point of view . . .

Elsewhere, I’ve heard it.  The kids.  With their low attention spans, they don’t read books anymore.  Or, if they do, they consume vampirish texts destined for filmic adaptation.  So the last thing to advocate is a move away from the literary novel.  Because, if you do, then you are simply endorsing the abbreviating thumbs of  a multitasking generation.  Cursory thinking and micromedia (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) take over.

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The class site for my University of Washington, Bothell, course is now live.  The class is BIS 213, Art Techniques: New Media Production, and the course theme is “Making Animated Objects.”   (As I was writing the syllabus, I was thinking how cool it would be, in the near future, to have a new media class with a “Shaping Things” theme.  Of course, students would be making spime instead of Flash animations.  Hmmm… writing the modules and prompts in my head right now.)

This class is most certainly assuming a workshop format.  I’m relying far less on lecture, literary criticism, or media theory than I am in, say, “Mapping the Digital Humanities.” We’ll be looking at a few examples of new media and electronic literature composed in Flash, and I’m using Lev Manovich’s work for terms and concepts.  Other than those pedagogical moves, the workshops will consist of modules on how to use Flash and, to a lesser extent, Audacity, in order to refashion a print text (e.g., a poem, an excerpt from a novel, or the like) and “make it move.”

Critically, the focus will be on how refashioning is an act of interpretation and how it necessarily alters how audiences perceive and navigate literature.

Technically, I’m reducing Flash to a software for animating text.  I’m not teaching Flash for web design, for instance.  (For one, I’m not really a fan of Flash-based web design.)

The class is portfolio-driven and project-based, and each student is completing six short stages in the process.  While I’ve drafted the modules and prompts for the stages, I’ll be posting them on the web as the quarter progresses.  Given it’s a workshop, I don’t want to have a set structure for learning until I’m more familiar with the learning climate and student expectations.  In short, while teaching students the basics in Flash, Audacity, and refashioning, I want to be as flexible as possible and see what emerges.

One thing I’m particularly excited about: One module includes an excercise where students “swap” Flash files, modify each other’s work, reanimate it, and share the changes.  It will be like peer review, but not at all.  Funny thing is: I would be reluctant to do such an exercise with an academic paper or essay.  I’d instead ask for margin or end comments.  Why is that?  Is it just me?  Or what is it about textual practices in academic writing that seems more . . . proprietary than with the modularity and variability of new media?  I need to flesh the answer to these questions out.   For one, I’ve been thinking more and more about how to use new media IN and AS my academic work.

I’m teaching a course at University of Washington, Bothell (in Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) this coming spring.  I’m quite excited about it. Here’s the description.

BIS 213, Art Techniques: “New Media Production”

New media, but how to make it?

This course’s primary aim is for students to have the time, space, and materials to acquire some basic technical skills in “new media” production. According to Lev Manovich (in The Language of New Media), new media are (1) composed of digital code, (2) modular collections of discrete elements, (3) highly automated, (4) variable, and (5) a blend of a “cultural layer” and a “computer layer.”

With this definition in mind, the course will be concerned less with conceptualizing new media and more with making, manipulating, and circulating it. Our meetings will be conducted in a computer-integrated classroom and will be module-driven. That is, the majority of class time will be spent working hands-on with new media instead of relying heavily on lecture. Since the course meets only once per week, for a little over two hours per meeting, we will narrow new media production to two domains: Adobe Flash (object-based animation software) and Audacity (an open-source sound editor). Given the vast array of possibilities that each domain affords, the course modules focus on animating print texts by taking an excerpt from an existing poem, novel, or short fiction, digitizing it, and making it move.

By the end of the quarter, students should be able to produce their own, text-based Flash work, add sound to that work (using Audacity for sound editing), and assess (in writing) how effectively their work refashions a print text through a digital medium. To this end, students will develop their own Flash projects over the course of the quarter, offer written and verbal feedback on the work of their peers, and circulate their projects for others to modify.

There is no text book for the course. The course modules on new media production will be circulated via a class website and examples of new media (e.g., Flash poetry) will be engaged in class.

Both Flash and Audacity are available on the computers in the classroom and elsewhere on campus, and no technical skills in Flash or Audacity are required for the course. However, those who are curious about the course content, especially Flash poetry, are encouraged to peruse the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, as well as the work of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

2008 saw the publication of N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature and with it the circulation of a CD-ROM for Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1.

What this book and CD-ROM do for the study of electronic literature is give it both a concise set of critical terms and the framework for what might be called a canon.  Indeed, some of us might have adverse responses to words like canon; nonetheless, through this book-CD combo, Hayles (with the help of Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland) offers a productive launching pad into electronic literature and its relation to print.

I don’t think I’m alone here in saying that the book not only legitimates the work of those of us who study electronic literature; it also gives us a handy text to mobilize in the classroom—something I managed to do in three of the courses I taught in 2008.  Put this way, Electronic Literature is less a final say on what electronic literature is and more a trajectory for anticipation, development, and increased complexity.  Indeed, it poses questions aplenty for scholarship to come.