listening to repeating

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.

I discovered DoodleBuzz today.  It’s pretty hot.  While it took me a moment to acclimate to its expectations and handling, one of its points is to re-think the common, menu-based, user-friendly interface.  With that in mind, what DoodleBuzz does quite well is enable you to draw affiliations across information, producing an aesthetic of aggregation as you go.  It also gives you a sense of data vertigo.  You spin a lot as you search and make lines; and, as with any trajectory, you quickly lose your starting point.

Here are some stills of my doodle-buzzing. You can click on the images for larger versions, better resolutions.  (I also recommend listening to DJ Prepare’s mix tapes as you sketch out.)

Starting with “digital humanities”:

And then “cyborg”:

Toward “media ecology”: