My first playwrighting teacher, Adrienne Kennedy (Funnyhouse of a Negro, 1964; A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, 1976), challenged my explicit and implicit assumptions about different groups, and through active listening and collaborative writing exercises enhanced my ability to successfully communicate across the complex web of my own identity and of those around me. Subsequently, in my teaching practice, I recognize a need for a fundamental understanding of history, language, philosophy, psychology, and politics. My pedagogy, shaped over a decade of undergraduate and graduate-level teaching experience, includes theatre, performance studies, film, media, language, and composition courses. This approach builds on an interdisciplinary field of humanistic study at the center of performance, film and media studies, digital humanities, and artistic practices developed in conjunction with the ascension of digital media. I ask students to confront these systems of thought in their work of not only comprehending but producing complex texts as they combine historical, theoretical, and practical forms of inquiry from a range of disciplinary orientations: cultural theory, the history and philosophy of technology, literary and narrative perspectives, alongside specialized areas of media/performance history and theory as well as comics studies, game studies, television studies, and media art.
The class explores cultural and political resistance through the documentation of performance or Live Art. While class discussions engage with the performance itself, the focus of the lectures will fall on the creativity and authorship of the documentary maker, exploring how performance documentation is a creative collaboration between artists and deserves to be considered a genre in itself. We’ll explore different mediums of performance documentation, including photography, cinema, music videos, and television. The class will begin by considering the social and historical context of the formation of performance documentation as a specific genre within the documentary tradition, and the creation of an authorial position that emerged with graphic art and photography. We will explore photographers such as Alexy Brodovitch, Paul Strand, Agnes Varda, Stanley Kubrick, and continue through with the work of Annie Liebowitz and Hiroshi Sugimoto. As the genre developed cinematically in the 1960s, we will examine artists and media texts such as Shirley Clarke, D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, 1967; Monterey Pop, 1968) Robert Frank (The Rolling Stones, 1972), and later Martin Scorsese (The Last Waltz, 1978), as well as Jonathan Deme (Stop Making Sense, 1984; Swimming to Cambodia, 1987). These films allow us to discuss the ways that cinema can be used as a tool of resistance while students also interrogate the limits of the documentary form in representing identities and social issues. The course incorporates other mediums of performance documentaries including television: Louis Valdez (El corrido: Ballad of a Farmworker, 1976), Chris Maker (Junktopia,1981); music videos: Spike Lee, Anton Corbjin; web streaming Beyonce (Homecoming, 2019) and Chris Rock (Total Blackout: The Tamborine Extended Cut, 2021); and social media with K-pop. The course addresses key issues in cultural, film, media and performance theory by pairing these visual texts with readings pulled from those disciplines. Lectures and discussions will focus on analyzing the structures, performers, and acts of resistance, rebellion, and revolt not just in the captured Live Art event but represented in the documentation process (camera angles, editing, coloring, etc.) A main goal of this class will be to explore performance documentation in the context of different cultural and political movements, such as farm labor organizing, the politics of race and representation, and ideas of authenticity. We will also consider the specific aesthetics of the genre of performance documentary which at its best creates intrigue and suspense and prompts questions of ethics, credit, and ownership among artist, subject and audience. Finally, the course requires a hands-on component, encouraging students to experiment with methods of the digital humanities, media art, and other creative practices in their final project.
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As an introductory study of film/media theory, this course is designed to offer you an in-depth foundation in theory through an examination of historically significant writings that analyze media/mediums and their social functions and effects. The course is primarily organized thematically, with a focus on particular theorists, schools of thought, the forums in which many key writings have appeared, and relations between theory and practice. Through this reading list, we will consider how ideas have developed and transformed, often in dialogue with one another. Our purpose will be to understand the arguments at stake in these works and to create our own dialogue with these theories.
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The course aims to help students develop their own answers to such questions as, what does the creative process look like?; under what conditions does it flourish and what ignites a creative spark?; how does technology impact the creative mind; as well as “what should I study when I study media?”; “how should I think about creativity when I am thinking about media, film, or the arts?” by introducing and comparing key theories of creativity, media, and technology. Attempting to answer these questions, our class will explore ways creativity has been understood: what we prize and fear about creativity and its wellsprings; how writers, artists, scientists and inventors describe their own creative processes; how psychologists, philosophers, and scholars theorize it; ways in which creativity has been represented, particularly in 20th-century films; and creativity in everyday life, including our own lives.
Readings include and essays by Lester Bangs, Jim Jarmusch Joan Didion, Guermo Gomez-Peña, Alice Walker, Oliver Sacks, and others. In addition, we will watch video profiles of choreographer Pina Bausch, architect Maya Lin, writer and TV host Anthony Bourdain, and artists Jean-Claude and Christo.
Since the Happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, work labeled “site-specific performance” evolved as highly structured works of art designed around, for, or because of place: on street corners, in fields, deserts, forests, garbage dumps, abandoned buildings, on the border, aboard boats, etc. The design of such performances has the power to mark our sense of locational identity and investigate notions of community and space/place/non- place. As site artists confront the social forces and overlapping communities that relate to a certain place, their aesthetics, creative processes, designs, and goals provoke a myriad of questions including, but not limited to: How are we blurring the lines between art and activism, art and urban renewal, art and spirituality, art and technology, art and real life? How can art and architecture/design renegotiate the “res publica” – a space for a multitude of voices – the fundament for community? Texts by theoreticians such as Bachelard, Lefebvre, Bataille, Foucault, Harvey, Fraser, Hayden, Hollier, Bourdieu, and Klein just to name a few will be intertwined within the lectures.
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Understanding Media is designed for students who have grown up in a rapidly changing global multimedia environment and want to become more literate in different media forms, as well as critical consumers and producers of culture. Through an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical lens, the course defines “media” broadly as including oral, print, theatrical, photographic, broadcast, cinematic, and digital cultural forms and practices. The course looks at the nature of mediated communication, the functions of media, the history of transformations in media, and the institutions that have defined media’s place in society.
Over the course of the quarter, we will explore different theoretical perspectives on the role and power of media in society in influencing social values, political beliefs, identities, and behaviors. Students have the opportunity to analyze specific genres of media (such as films and television shows) and explore the meaning of changes that occur when a particular narrative is adapted into different forms. We will look at the ways in which the politics of class, gender, and race influence both the production and reception of media. Through readings, lectures, and discussions as well as your own writing and final, creative project, students have multiple opportunities to engage with critical debates in the field as well as explore the role of media in their own lives.
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