listening to repeating

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.

Here are my closing remarks from yesterday’s symposium for the Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities. Thanks to all who made it out.

Over the past eight weeks, as part of the seventh annual Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, I had the privilege of working with a group of faculty and undergraduates from across the disciplines, and the awesome variety of work presented today should give you, if nothing else, a taste of what that work looked like, how it came to be, and where it’s going. To sum up that work in my closing remarks would be neither sufficient nor fair enough to anyone in the room. Still, what I can do today is briefly address what I have learned from each of these students and faculty and articulate the ways in which that learning altered how I understand undergraduate research in the arts and humanities.

One thing I learned is that, in highly interdisciplinary contexts, both students and faculty can easily fall back on foundations—on what they are experts in. Obviously, we are most comfortable conversing about what we know, and this knowledge base often gives academics a feeling of control, a sense of place, and a steering wheel for knowledge-making. In this sense, expertise is framed around the individual, who is a person with a specialized set of skills and an authority on a particular subject. Yet what is striking to me about the very word “expert” is that, at least in the English language, it was a verb before it was a noun. While, starting in the 15^th century, “expert” was a verb meaning “to experience” or “to know by experience,” it was not until the 19^th century that it became a noun implying a person who is an authority or a specialist. That former definition—”expert” as an action—is now recognized as obsolete. However, from what I witnessed during the Institute, it is anything but. This summer, the most productive learning and novel creations occurred when “expert” shifted from a noun to a verb or from a person to an experience.

Premised on this shift, undergraduate research during the Institute attended not to effects or products, but to process and revision. Specifically, it emerged from collaborations among students—collaborations which did not assume agreement as a necessary ingredient, yet never failed to generate new and exciting lines of inquiry. It also emerged from an openness to and emphasis on change and flexibility. During the Institute, I saw students undo a day’s worth of their own labor, learn software that was new to them in a short span of time, rethink assumptions that subtended their previous work, drastically alter how they were imagining their projects, and, perhaps most importantly, take some serious risks, be they institutional, artistic, or even personal. That said, research was not only experiential; it was experimental. Last week, during their “In Process” exhibition, students turned the Jacob Lawrence Gallery into a laboratory for the arts and humanities, with many of them literally soliciting feedback from their audience, others presenting in a gallery space for the first time, and all of them realizing ways for others to inhabit and participate in their ideas. I could stand here and commend each of them for all of these things and validate their work; but I don’t have to. They already know they have succeeded, because they experienced success and know how to recognize it. As experts of a new sort, they developed competencies and proficiencies—and not just skills—that will allow them, in the very near future, to mobilize their experiences during the Institute for new conversations, here on campus and elsewhere.

For the kind of interdisciplinary, undergraduate research I have witnessed this summer, thanks both to the students and the faculty, is about listening, not just talking; it’s about unpacking what motivates a question, not simply posing one. And, of course, it does not do away with expertise; it displaces it and refigures it. These are the marks of creativity. And, this summer, I was fortunate enough to see and hear such creativity in action, and I learned so much from everyone involved. For this opportunity and on behalf of the students and faculty involved in the seventh annual Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, I would like to thank the Undergraduate Research Program, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, Undergraduate Academic Affairs, the Office of Research, UW Educational Outreach, and the Mary Gates Endowment for Students. Because of support from programs and offices such as these at the University Washington, the expert in undergraduate research is well on the way to becoming a verb again.

The symposium for “Media and the Senses” is this Friday, August 15th, in Odegaard Library 220 (map). Here’s the schedule:

8:30-9:00: Refreshments

9:00-9:30: Welcome and Opening Remarks

Kathleen Woodward, Director, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Professor of English

Jennifer Harris, Associate Director, Undergraduate Research Program, Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Axel Roesler, Assistant Professor for Interaction Design, School of Art

Carrie Bodle, Visiting Lecturer, School of Art

9:30-10:25: Session I

Kendal Lund, English

William Damon, English and Law, Societies & Justice

Nishali Nanayakkara, Comparative History of Ideas

Andrew Franks, DXArts

Sohroosh Hashemi, Business Administration

10:25-10:40: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session I

10:40-10:50: Break

10:50-11:45: Session II

Julia Bruk, DXArts

Jennifer Mao, Photography and Psychology

Nichole Poinski, Comparative Literature

Christopher Stevenson, English and Creative Writing

Justin Vice, Comparative History of Ideas

11:45-12:00: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session II

12:00-1:15: Lunch

1:15-2:10: Session III

Gretchen Cook, Design Studies and Women Studies

Ari Kirby, Classics, Greek, Linguistics and English

Seungwha Lee, Art History and Communication

Regina Wandler, Community, Environment & Planning and Comparative History of Ideas

Sarah Wang, Informatics

2:10-2:25: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session III

2:25-2:35: Break

2:35-3:30: Session IV

Brittany Dennison, Philosophy and Creative Writing
Claire Fox, Comparative History of Ideas and Comparative Literature

Sol Hashemi, Photography

Jason Hirata, Photography and Comparative History of Ideas

Laura Paul, Comparative History of Ideas and DXArts

3:30-3:45: Q&A and Closing Remarks for Session IV

3:45-4:00: Closing Remarks

Jentery Sayers, Teaching Associate and PhD Candidate, English

If you are in Seattle this Friday, then I hope to see you there.

The “In Process Exhibition for the Seventh Annual Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities” is just around the corner.

Here are the dates, times and location, together with a brief description of the exhibition, a flier (in .pdf), a link to the Facebook event page, and a student-made video:

In Process Exhibition

@ the Jacob Lawrence Gallery (University of Washington Art Building, Room 132)

Opening Reception and Student Presentations: Monday, August 4th, 12-4pm

Exhibition Duration: Monday, August 4th – Saturday, August 9th, 2008, 12-4pm

The 2008 UW Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities (SIAH) In Process Exhibition presents student project work-in-progress as a means for experimentation with concepts and work at the intersections of the 2008 SIAH theme, “Media and the Senses.” This is the first year that the SIAH student work has been shown in-progress and highlights academic production as an on-going process. These projects have emerged from the first five weeks of SIAH. In these first weeks, students examined such topics as the perception of time and space as place, space, and experience; site specific, installation and new media art; affect; making and production; and the reception and distribution of media.

Flier for the exhibition (in .pdf, including names of all participants and a list of sponsors)

Exhibition event page on Facebook

I hope you can make it to the Jake Gallery at some point next week. Or, if you are not in Seattle, stay tuned for ways to see and hear work from the In Process Exhibition online. Thanks!

Per Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping site:

Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last four years with more than 1500 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops and consulltations, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-eplore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.

When searching for material to prep for the upcoming Summer Institute on “Media and the Senses,” I wanted to see what digital projects are currently storing and communicating sense data. Turns out that Nold is using GPS and galvanic skin response sensors to record, map, and transmit people’s affective relations (e.g., fear, sexual feelings, and anger) with their urban environments.

What’s particularly interesting to me about Nold’s biomapping is — related to Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual – how bodily states that are not necessarily “cognized” or “filtered” can nevertheless be documented and networked. If, per Massumi, we understand affect as unqualified intensity (e.g., the behaviors of the autonomic nervous system), then it seems as if Nold’s biopolitics are in excess. They are a means of action through what we do not volitionally act upon, but can nevertheless digitally capture and — thanks to Nold — situate within a system of potential, unarticulated relations. And, to return to Turing for a moment, let us entertain the notion that the represented body is the qualified body. The interrogator receives and interprets this representation, which is consciously transmitted from the enacted body on the other end. What, then, is the body (or, more specifically, the sensory data) that is biomapped?

It seems reductive (and just foolish) to say that Nold’s biomaps do not correspond with thinking bodies, even if “thoughts” are not exactly being transmitted and geolocated. On the other hand, is it fair to say that Turing’s interrogator, who attempts to determine who/what is thinking, is really “analyzing” representation for potential? (“This writing could indicate that the writer is a human.” Or, “This writing could indicate that the writer is capable of conscious thought.”) I’m not sure. But if it is fair, then we need new forms for measuring thought, and Nold is already on that trajectory.