Courses

This series of workshops—comprised of approximately 10 meetings—will provide support for students working on production theses across the entire academic year. It is taught by a production faculty member and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to systematically guide students through the necessary steps in the realization of a film project from pre-production to production to post-production.

This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.

This class will introduce a toolkit for thinking about and researching media, mediation, and new media cultures. We will begin with questions of technology. These will include the tension between technological determinism and the social construction of technology, as well as methods for investigating the historical evolution of media technologies. To explore how power operates within and through media, we will engage concepts and theoretical frameworks including algorithmic bias, transmedia, fan studies, platform studies, and media infrastructures. Students will develop critical and aesthetic perspectives on digital media, with special attention to games, participatory media, and code.

This seminar looks at the multiplicity of institutions that preserve, present, and interpret cinema for various audiences.  While cinema studies tends to focus on the entities that create films (i.e., directors, studios) and on the texts themselves, our research and teaching depend heavily upon the institutions that make films and related materials available to us.  We will look at the histories and practices of film archives and libraries, museums, distribution companies, festivals and related organizations to explore how their curatorial and technical work is far from neutral, but shapes scholarly and popular understandings of cinema.  The seminar will feature conversations with professionals in these fields and screenings of works they have archived, preserved, documented and circulated.

In this graduate seminar we will investigate theories and historiographic methodologies of approaching problems of evidence in film history, with a particular focus on approaches to nonextant film, film fragments, unidentified film, and other “mysteries” of film history. Some of these problems are about gaps: how has film history grappled with the absence and instability of the film artifact? Others, especially in a newly digital world, involve abundance: how can film history and historiography navigate the polyvalences of meaning brought about by an ever-expanding archive? This course will combine theoretical readings, analyses of case studies, and students’ own research. Topics to be covered include the use of extrafilmic evidence and primary paracinematic evidence, fiction and speculative approaches to history, theories of evidence, and archival theories and practices. We’ll also focus on the possibilities and limits of various historiographic methodologies, touching on the use of oral history, biographic research, and official and unofficial discourses. Cases will be drawn from the silent era to contemporary cinema, and from a range of film practices including avant-garde, Classical Hollywood, African American, European art cinema, and others.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works.

This course introduces basic concepts of film analysis, which students will discuss through examples from different national cinemas, genres, and directorial oeuvres. We will consider film as an art form, medium, and industry, and cover all the major film types: silent, classical, and contemporary narrative cinema, art cinema, animation, documentary, and experimental film. We will study the cinematic techniques: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, and learn how filmmakers design their works.

A required course for 2nd or 3rd-year students, Foundations serves as an essential introduction to the Media Arts and Design (MADD) program. It cultivates community, introduces core program values, foregrounds portfolio development, and prepares students for advanced MADD coursework. Through lectures, discussions, and collaborative activities, students will engage with the history, theory, and practice of media arts and design. This course also offers a guided exploration of MADD’s specialized “clusters.” Students will build a shared vocabulary and practical framework to explore the intersections of media art, design, and culture, preparing them to engage critically and creatively with the field.

Video games are written in code. They are inscribed into a computer's memory. Critics, designers, and enthusiasts alike refer to their mechanics as "verbs," like Super Mario's JUMP or Minecraft's BUILD. Sometimes, like other kinds of media objects, video games themselves are referred to as "texts." Starting from these premises, this course will investigate why it makes sense to use this linguistic vocabulary to describe video games. We will consider what theories of language have to teach us about video games, and what video games have to teach us about language itself and the worlds it reveals to us. Readings will include philosophers of language like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, digital media scholars like McKenzie Wark and Bo Ruberg, and literary writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Clarice Lispector. This will be a reading- and writing-heavy course: class meetings will consist of discussion of readings, and assignments will generally take the form of written responses and critical essays. Video games (or recorded video game playthroughs) may be assigned alongside films, video clips, and podcasts at low or no cost to students. This class does not require any special knowledge of video games or gaming culture! An interest in the topic is all that’s needed to succeed.

"Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought.

In "An Archival Impulse," Hal Foster describes the archive as "found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private." This is a hybrid seminar / workshop course that brings together making, researching and collecting with the goal of expanding the discourse around archives to address artificial intelligence. Foster's set of tangled binaries provide a foundation on which to build a formal and critical inquiry into the procedural, technological and institutional pressures involved in working with AI, particularly as an individual researcher or artist. Topics include: How do the datasets used for AI correspond to or differ from traditional physical archives? How does the speculative discourse around the potential for artificial intelligence inform data collection and usage? How has the archive's problematic history of informing and feeding on various "-isms" translated to the digital age and how do we respond to that situation? How can art be used to investigate or interfere with all of the above?

This course serves as an introduction to historical videogame studies through the franchise of Sid Meier's Civilization. We will play several iterations of the game along with other historical titles like Crusader Kings and Pentiment. Readings will focus on historical game studies and game studies broadly (Chapman, Bogost, etc.), with particular emphasis on the use of systems as historical argument. We will investigate the purpose of history in these titles - its function, its relevance, and its status as historiography. A familiarity with 4X strategy games is recommended though not required.

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.

This course seeks to develop skills in perception, comprehension, and interpretation when dealing with film and other moving image media. It encourages the close analysis of audiovisual forms, their materials and formal attributes, and explores the range of questions and methods appropriate to the explication of a given film or moving image text. It also examines the intellectual structures basic to the systematic study and understanding of moving images. Most importantly, the course aims to foster in students the ability to translate this understanding into verbal expression, both oral and written. Texts and films are drawn from the history of narrative, experimental, animated, and documentary or non-fiction cinema. Screenings are a mandatory course component.

This Arts Core course examines the rich and vibrant cultures surrounding cinema in Chicago, from depictions of the city on screen, to film production from the silent era to the present day, to moviegoing culture from movie palaces to microcinemas. Students will study past and current film cultures in Chicago by examining particular films, events, venues, and critics. Topics covered will include the cinematic image of Chicago, film exhibition, audience and fan culture studies (with attention to Chicago’s particular demographic contours), and contemporary television and digital media production in the city.

This course will explore the use of Greek mythological characters in video games through theoretical and practical lenses that focus the cultural adaptation of myth as meaning. Students will become familiar with theories of mythology and narrative; the evolution and reception of Greek myth along with the myths themselves; and specific game titles including Hades, Persona 3, and King's Quest VI, among others. Readings will span from Levi-Strauss' and Derrida's conceptions of myth to transmedia narrative theory from Ryan and Thon and include several close readings of our video game repertoire. Assessments will be multimedia game analyses and reflections. No prior knowledge of Greek myth, video games, or theory are required.

This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

Design is one of the most pervasive and influential forms of human communication, shaping everything from ancient symbols carved in stone to the digital interfaces that define modern life. This course offers a survey of design’s history, examining design’s evolution across cultural, artistic, and technological revolutions. This course traces the ways in which design has functioned as a critical tool for information exchange, artistic expression, and ideological influence. Beginning with the origins of writing systems and illuminated manuscripts, we will progress through the development of typography and printing during the Renaissance, the industrialization of design in the 19th century, the radical experimentation of modernist movements, and the global impact of digital media in the 21st century. This course examines both the dominant cultural ideas embodied by design, as well as the counter-narratives it generates to express diverse cultural identities.

What is “creative computing”? Are artists doing computing creatively or is the computing itself being creative? In this seminar course, students will learn to discuss, analyze, and contextualize artworks covered by the blurry and interdisciplinary “meta-medium” that is creative computing, beginning in the 1960s and working forward to the present moment. Through lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussions of assigned readings, students will gain familiarity with core techniques and concepts that inform contemporary digital art practice and develop their own critical vocabulary and opinions.

Course topics include: What (if any) are the medium specific properties of creative computing? How dependent are digital works on screens and other systems of display? How does creative computing allow us to delaminate, interject into, or interfere with the streamlined technological world around us? How do generative machine learning models connect to this conversation and how are artists working with them today?

This course surveys a particularly rich quarter-century of gaming history, in which the concept of “indie game” both gelled and evolved. As the 21st century brought an explosion in internet-based games distribution, small-scale game developers faced a definitional question: what does it mean to be “indie”? Does it describe a model of production? Or an aesthetic? (Or something in between?) From emergence of a distinct “independent style” in the late 2000s to the queer games avant-garde of the 2010s to the rise of boutique publishers such as Devolver Digital and Annapurna Interactive that dominate the scene today, this course maps the history of “independence” in games while drawing illustrative connections to earlier indie scenes in music and movies. Focal points range from individual games (Braid, Undertale, OneShot) to genres (walking simulators, cozy games) to platforms (Flash, Twine). To confront the turbulence of engaging with recent history, students will be expected to research and present on one or more games of their choosing outside the syllabus.

What is comedy, where is comedy, and to what end? This course foregrounds the function of comedy as a critical lens on and political catalyst for social change. We will explore how comedy and laughter emerge across both media and location, centering on Mainland Chinese moving image history. Rather than studying “China” and “comedy” as pre-established entities that then interact, the course investigates how area, genre, and media each come into being through their dynamic relations.
Each week centers on theoretical readings that conceptualize the functional definition of comedy and/or media. These readings are paired with primary texts ranging from films and animation to television shows and Internet shorts, organized chronologically from the early 20th century onwards. By the end of the course, students will have learned to (1) identify and engage a genealogy of Chinese comedy in moving image media, (2) articulate intricate relationships among area, genre, and media, and (3) produce their own critical position on the global-situated sociopolitical functions of comedy.

A practical and theoretical introduction to the design of brand identity, from logos to copy to moving image. In addition to experimenting with practical applications of branding, students will also use history and theory to engage with anti-consumerist post-branding approaches championed by artists and designers such as Jason Grant, Oliver Vodeb, The Yes Men, Barbara Kruger, and Adbusters. Students will practice the process and strategies used to benchmark, research, and ideate effective brand systems through assembled logo, type, color, illustration, imagery, and graphic elements while negotiating the ethically complex histories of branding in practice.

A hands-on studio course exploring how to critically consume, dissect, and create media in response to a fractured and fast-paced media landscape. Students will transform weekly headlines into rapid-response digital art projects, interrogating the urgency of contemporary culture through experimental design and creative critique.

This studio course playfully explores the methods, tools, and poetics of video games as art. Develop interactive new media art, machinima, and experimental 3D environments by using (and misusing) contemporary game engines. Projects will include hypertext adventures, walking simulators, abstract platformers, and metagames. By hacking, modding, and recontextualizing existing game assets, we will challenge the rules, mechanics, and interfaces of video games. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

This course explores the intersection of theater and digital interaction, reimagining interfaces as dynamic sites for performance. Borrowing foundational elements of theater—plot, characters, props, and stage—we will translate well-known narrative structures into media-driven digital performances.

Through hands-on projects and critical inquiry, we’ll unpack the metaphors embedded in UI/UX design: How do likes, swipes, and notifications choreograph your daily interactions with technology? We will question the role of users, interfaces, and systems. We will remix existing theatrical works, deconstruct traditional narrative arcs, and craft speculative interfaces that challenge conventional modes of interaction. No technical expertise required—just a willingness to experiment, play, and think deeply about how we perform with and through machines.

This course traces the development of African American humor in popular culture, and how it draws on and develops Black comic traditions and folk culture dating back to slavery. Focusing on film and television (from silent movies to streaming series), the course considers how Black humor speaks to the complex histories of American race relations and racialized performance. We will look at the relationships that obtain between Black self-representation and stereotyping from the “outside”; between performances for mainstream and for Black audiences; and between verbal and visual styles of Black comedic performance. We will examine Black comic works from the turn of the 20th century to the present by artists including Bert Williams, Josephine Baker, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Dave Chappelle, Issa Rae and Tyler Perry.

This hands-on class will serve as a wide-ranging introduction to “creative coding” in new media art, computer graphics, live performance and visual effects. But this is no normal class, for this is no normal time — all of these well ordered histories and practical skills are about to be transformed by AI and nobody knows what’s going to happen to “creative coding” next. What will sitting in front of a computer created with computation in these fields look like next year (or next quarter)? We’ll survey and reconsider both popular and oddball programming tactics and languages, the professional mainstream as well as historical paths not taken across visual art, music and mixed reality — all to form clues as to what might, can and should happen next to the tools we use to create with computers. And then we’ll see if we can get there first.

This course traces the history of home movies on Chicago's South Side as a robust creative, documentation, and screening film practice grounded in everyday life.  The course centers on the South Side Home Movie Project, founded by the instructor here at UChicago, which holds more than 1,200 reels from the 1930s-1970s shot by a diverse range of South Side residents.  We will look at their scenes of family and community life through the lenses of amateur filmmaking, the South Side’s intense racial segregation, and the rise of a Black middle class.  Lectures and discussions with SSHMP staff, donors and collaborators will cover digitization, cataloguing, oral history, public programming, and engagement with filmmaker families, educators, and artists. Students will have opportunities to contribute original research and creative re-use projects to the SSHMP website.

Nazi cinema.  An examination of a broad range of films produced under the National Socialist regime, from mass spectacles to domestic melodramas, from comedies to hagiographic bio-pics to dramatized propaganda. We will explore the national aspirations, formal organization, ideological inflections, and conceptual logic of these films in order to ask: what constitutes a National Socialist (film) aesthetic?  Readings in film history, film theory, and cultural theory.  No prerequisites, but a commitment to close readings – of film and criticism – and lively, thoughtful engagement will be essential.  In English.  If there is sufficient interest, we may add a German language discussion section.

This studio course introduces students to key theories and practices of game design. Our emphasis will be on board games, roleplaying games, and other analogue games. Through a series of collaborative projects, students will gets hands-on experience with the iterative loop - ideation, prototyping, playtesting, and evaluation - while developing familiarity with common mechanics and genres. These making opportunities will be paired with critical play sessions of preexisting games.

This course introduces you to the many roles that make contemporary game development work, from solo projects to small indie teams to full studio pipelines. Each week, we will dig into a different position, exploring the skills, responsibilities, and pathways that shape how games get made. You’ll research and analyze roles across disciplines and try on new hats. The course culminates in a collaborative project where you take on a role that aligns with your interests and contribute to a shared game concept.

In this course, students will learn how to use JavaScript and web-based technologies to create algorithmic musical compositions and experimental web-based instruments. Through the use of the WebAudio API and JavaScript libraries like tone.js, students will learn how to programmatically generate and manipulate sound, creating interactive and generative audio works that can be shared online. Along the way, the class will also survey works by artists working in this field and will feature a visiting artist who will walk students through their own practice. Themes of generative art, randomness and chance, originality and machine creativity, and the cultural implications of influential musical algorithms will also be explored. This class is an intermediate level programming course. A beginner to intermediate level understanding of core programming concepts (ideally in JavaScript) is required. While a background in music can certainly be beneficial, it is not required for success in this course.

In this class, students will learn how to create high resolution 3D model concepts for the production of video games. High resolution sculpting is an integral part of today’s 3D production pipelines. This course aims to focus on this stage of the production pipeline, and its role in creating high quality games. While this class will focus on creating assets for video games, digital sculpting skills can be applied to a variety of other industries, such as architecture, fashion and jewelry, to name a few.

We generally accept that computers and the Internet evolved outside of fine art contexts, in fields like science and mathematics. That said, the history of these technologies is a history of creative individuals collaboratively shaping one of the most important narratives of our time, "the Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization" (Heffernan). In this studio course, we'll learn what the Internet is, how it works, how it got here and how to engage with it as a creative medium. This means we'll be learning how to craft it from code, specifically HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets), but also studying its aesthetics, conventions and practices. We'll be drawing inspiration from various Internet art movements, from the net.art scene of the 1990s, to the digital folk art of GeoCities at the turn of the century, to the Web design and CSS art scenes of today. The goal of this course will be to cultivate our own piece of Internet art/design, informed by the research, discussions, exercises and experiments we'll make along the way.

Though the web was originally conceived as an online space for sharing hyperlinked documents, the modern Web browser has evolved into a creative coding playground capable of producing all manner of networked art and algorithmic compositions. In this course we'll learn JavaScript, the Web's defacto programming language. Throughout the quarter we'll experiment with various different Web APIs for creating generative and interactive Internet art including HTML5 video, Canvas (2D/3D animations) and Web Audio. We'll learn how to produce work that responds to various input sources (trackpad/mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, cameras, microphones) and how to fetch and incorporate data from external APIs elsewhere on the Internet.

Why do we work together? What does it mean to collaborate? How can we create digital environments and systems that encourage teamwork and working towards a common goal? This studio course centers on collaboration by asking the class to conceive, plan, and produce a single shared project from start to finish. Students map their individual skills and interests, then study models of teamwork and group decision-making. We compare traditional frameworks (like Agile and Scrum) with practices drawn from improv, community organizing, sustainable ecology, and arts collectives. These tools guide pitching, role assignment, critique, and feedback. Most weeks run as production sessions focused on updates, planning, and peer review. Technical workshops and visits from domain experts support development as needed. This course helps students practice core collaborative skills and functions as a practicum that mirrors real-world making, culminating in a finished, shareable work.

As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, strengthen their ability to give critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Throughout this course, students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between “the real” and “fiction” will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular—research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work.

Documentary Production II focuses on the shaping and crafting of a non-fiction video. Enrollment will be limited to those students who have taken CMST 23930 Documentary Production I. The class will discuss issues of ethics, power, and representation in this most philosophical and problematic of genres. Students will be expected to write a treatment outline detailing their project and learn about granting agencies and budgeting. Production techniques will concentrate on the language of handheld camera versus tripod, interview methodologies, microphone placement including working with wireless systems and mixers, and lighting for the interview. Post-production will cover editing techniques including color correction and audio sweetening, how to prepare for exhibition, and distribution strategies.

This course will introduce students to the burgeoning field of immersive puzzle design. Students will develop, implement and playtest puzzles that are suited for a range of experiences: from the tabletop to the immersive, from online puzzle hunts to broad-scoped alternate reality games (ARG). Students in this course will work directly with master puzzler, Sandor Wiesz, the commissioner of The Mystery League.

SFF Asia centers on science fiction and fantasy cinema and media in Asia. Through an exploration of key films, media franchises, and subgenres, the course will delve into genre criticism, sf theory, and the history of moving image technologies, to consider what is meant by “sff” and “Asia” at different places and times. Thus, while structured around “sff in Asia,” the course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema and media as distributed, polycentric, transnational processes.

The advent of video game soundtrack releases and live game music concerts substantiate the importance of music and sound in games, not just as accompaniments but as essential aspects of the gaming experience. This production course surveys the history of sound effects, music, and design in games beginning with the bleeps and bloops of the 1970s and concluding with the ambient, nonlinear soundscape of many contemporary games. Following the timeline media theorist Karen Collins presents in her documentary Beep, this course will explore electronic sound technologies including virtual analog synthesis, frequency modulation, bit reduction, General MIDI, and sample-based production. Each student will compose a game soundtrack demo for their final project. This course welcomes students who are both new to and experienced in sound production; the complexity of each assignment can be adjusted based on experience.

A studio class exploring techniques for creating realtime augmented performances, from VTubers to motion capture, mixed-reality to machinema. Students will explore the possibilities and opportunities of these emerging technologies, then create and perform their own virtual or augmented productions. No technical experience necessary, and perfect for writers, filmmakers, theater performers, choreographers, or musicians looking to elevate their practice.

This course focusing on “world cinema” from Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, includes an array of cinematic forms—films and other moving-image media, cultural artifacts, viewing practices, even theories themselves— that took shape amongst and between these areas. Combining viewings and readings, archival research and theoretical translations, we will explore the vibrant forms and circulation of cinema outside its imperial nodes. The course focuses on three historical moments in South Asia, Latin America, and Africa: the “global sixties” and its revolutionary ambitions; the politics of domestic spaces in the 1980s and early 1990s; and contemporary negotiations of gender, sexuality, and migration.

Digital and analog games are often defined in term of mechanics and systems—a feature they share with popular storytelling, which has its own genre mechanics and tried-and-true formulas. This class examines games and genre storytelling together as modes of rule-bound expression, with a special focus on games that take their inspiration from—and put their own unique mark on—genres borrowed from popular literature and cinema. How might we translate the longstanding rules of “fair play” in detective stories into game form? What is retained and what is lost from the tradition of romance novels and rom coms when dating sims gamify love? Can we laugh at our own pratfalls in slapstick games? In this course, students will play, discuss, write about, and collaboratively design their own games to answer these and other questions.

This course provides an overview of the state-of-the-art knowledge on how human minds and brains engage with and respond to film and media. Using such interdisciplinary approaches as neuroscience, experimental psychology, linguistics, analytical philosophy, film theory, and cognitive film studies, we will try to understand why we like to watch movies; how we process what we see and hear on the screen; why some movies attract more than others; how identity, politics, and culture may affect the viewer response; and what the nature of the mind’s engagement with art might be.

This studio-based course explores the practice, conventions, and boundaries of contemporary media art and design. This can encompass areas as diverse as interactive installation, app design, and the Internet meme. Through projects and critical discussion, students engage with the problems and opportunities of digitally driven content creation. Fundamental elements of digital production are introduced, including basic properties of image, video, and the global network. Further topics as varied as--though not limited to--web production, digital fabrication, interfaces, the glitch, and gaming may be considered. Sections will vary based on the instructor's fields of expertise.

MAAD 26210 Media Art and Design Practice is affiliated with HUMA 16000-16100-16200 Media Aesthetics: Image, Text, Sound I-II-III. Students satisfying the general education requirement in the humanities will have priority in enrollment for Media Arts and Design Practice.

This course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This course may not double count for general education requirements and the Media Arts and Design minor. However, it is a great way for students to explore a potential interest in these areas.

This studio-based course explores the practice, conventions, and boundaries of contemporary media art and design. This can encompass areas as diverse as interactive installation, app design, and the Internet meme. Through projects and critical discussion, students engage with the problems and opportunities of digitally driven content creation. Fundamental elements of digital production are introduced, including basic properties of image, video, and the global network. Further topics as varied as--though not limited to--web production, digital fabrication, interfaces, the glitch, and gaming may be considered. Sections will vary based on the instructor's fields of expertise. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This course may not double count for general education requirements and the Media Arts and Design minor. However, it is a great way for students to explore a potential interest in these areas.

From the birth of African American filmmaking to Spike Lee’s Chiraq; from the Chicago Defender newspaper to Ebony and Jet magazines; from the first broadcasts of Soul Train to Lena Waithe’s The Chi – for more than a century Chicago has produced much of the most visible, controversial and impactful African American media.  We will trace the ways that Chicago, as a center of African American entrepreneurship, journalism, artistic innovation and political organizing, has shaped media works and practices in film, television, publishing, radio.  We will study how Black mediamakers have navigated economic challenges and political threats in their efforts to convene Black publics, resist erasure and misrepresentation in mainstream media, and imagine more equitable futures.

Climate change is one of the most important and challenging problems of our times. How is cinema involved? This course introduces students to environmental cinema and to ecocritical approaches to film studies. Beginning with explicit representations of climate change in eco-documentaries and recent post-apocalyptic fantasies, we will interrogate cinema’s broader relationship to the environment through questions of film materiality, resource extraction, and climate control. Additional topics include extinction, weather, waste, infrastructure, toxicity, nonhuman life, and the Anthropocene. Each week, we will watch and discuss a film – from genres spanning science fiction, documentaries, anime, eco-thrillers, and propaganda – alongside key theoretical debates about energy and natural resources (oil, water, coal, electricity), the politics and ethics of visualization, and the materiality of analog and digital cinema. Filmmakers include Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Bong Joon Ho, and Agnès Varda, while written texts are taken from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing, and others.

Consciously or unconsciously, we learn a great deal about the world through moving image media. Programs such as Blue Planet (2001) teach viewers about ocean ecologies; YouTube videos offer knowledge on any number of skills, from changing a tire to cooking; but films like Conclave (2024) or Coco (2017) also seem to offer insight into real world practices, despite their fictional status. In this course, we will interrogate the various ways in which film, television, and video inform our beliefs and when those beliefs may be called knowledge. Key questions we will encounter in this course include: What kinds of knowledge do we gain from moving images? When do we recognize that we’re learning or learned something from moving images? When do we learn “on accident” and how may we come to recognize it?

This series of workshops — comprised of approximately 10 meetings — will provide support for thesis writers across the entire academic year. It is taught by the Director of Undergraduate Studies and supplemented by regular meetings with a designated preceptor. The workshops are intended to guide students through the process of thesis writing from developing a research question to determining the most appropriate research method for its exploration to integrating suitable theoretical insights to writing compellingly about media objects to the nuts and bolts of exposition.

What makes an artwork “original” today? How do we decide if a food dish is “authentic”? Who is the author of a digital meme? Is there a common metric which can rate the originality and authenticity of a film or a piece of music (Tomato-meter and IMDB ratings notwithstanding)? This course will investigate these and other questions to understand why and how authenticity and originality continue to matter in today’s world of global information and capital flows. Taking three case studies – cultural performance genres like traditional music/dance, cross-cultural film remakes, and digital publics – we will unpack how an ostensibly “foreign” cultural object becomes domiciled in a new cultural location. We will also discuss which practices and objects resist such adaptation.

We will read scholars and writers from a range of disciplines – anthropology, cinema and media studies, history – dealing with the construction of cultural authenticity and circulation. Our readings will be supplemented each week by a class screening where we will encounter materials which will serve as examples to analyze authenticity and authorship in today’s world. For instance, through the screening materials, students will be encouraged to examine if a film remake can ever be original, if the musical traditions of an itinerant community can be claimed as national, and how a globally circulating digital meme can come to acquire different meanings and significances in different places. Students will come out of the course with a better understanding of how the distinction of social and cultural forms is a result of constant negotiation, renewal, and repetition.

In this course, we will use a single franchise – Sonic the Hedgehog – as an access point to study media history, aesthetics, social and cultural practice, and the relationships between games, film, and other artforms. Originally released in 1991 for Sega’s Genesis console, the Sonic series has spawned over three decades of games, cartoons, manga, novels, films, music, board games, action figures, fan art, cosplay, and merchandizing. Both the volume and the variety of these texts allow the Sonic corpus to be a focal point for questions with broader stakes for the study of games and media in general. Some of the questions we will be considering in this course include: 

What has been the relationship between particular videogame characters and franchises and the business practices and strategies of entertainment industries? What form does stardom take in the world of digital games, and is it an appropriate concept to apply to a mascot like Sonic? How have established game franchises responded to major technological and aesthetic shifts in the medium? How might we understand the concept and practice of adaptation as applied to the digital games, and what does it reveal about the medium specificity of and the relationship between games, film, comics, novels, and other forms? What can a game franchise that has taken a wide variety of generic forms (platforming, racing, fighting, and pinball, to name just a few) tell us about how genre works as concept and system in digital games?

In this class, we’ll draw on an array of children’s film, television, music, games, and digital cultures to think critically about how media position kids, how kids engage with media, and how kids’ media fashion (and can possibly refashion) our “grown-up” perceptions, desires, and imaginations. This course attends to the aesthetics and affects that shape (and are shaped by) children’s media—ranging from the cute to the curious, the silly to the surreal, the plastic to the ludic, and beyond—and to the ideologies and counterpolitical possibilities embedded in these forms and feelings. Our investigations focus in particular on treating kids’ media as a site for interdisciplinary thought alongside relevant queer and trans, critical race, and feminist theories, where the figure of “the child” has long been a major site of tension. Students will learn to re/encounter children’s media as an often-forgotten space of (potentially radical) experimentation, marked by malleable forms, unruly affects, and unpredictable ways of seeing, hearing, being, and knowing. Designed around experimentation and play, course assignments combine short analytical writing with creative work. Students will collaborate on a final course zine, contributing short manifestos, keyword entries, curated lists, and/or other playful pieces that rethink what children’s media can offer—and imagine what becomes possible when we learn to “watch like a kid” again.

City planning simulators. Environmental advocacy projects. Citizen-science research platforms. Whether to engage and communicate with wider publics, as tools for modelling scientific concepts and processes, or as objects of study in their own right, games have been employed by innumerable research communities across the 20th and 21st centuries. This course will explore how a variety of scientific disciplines and research cultures have thought with, about, and through games. Examining and evaluating these connections can teach us about research and communication practices in these fields and about the multifaceted nature of game-based media. Each week we will address a different subfield in the physical, biological, or social sciences, each positioned to draw out a unique aspect of games' connections to scientific research, communication, and knowledge production. Readings will be inter-disciplinary, drawing from game studies, social studies of science, and the various research fields themselves. Many examples considered through our weekly case studies will be video games, but not exclusively, and students will also develop skills to address the material- and medium-specific affordances of different forms of games in both class discussions and through a tabletop game design project.

A portal opens: you step into a fictional world. This enduring fantasy of engaging with art involves a number of ideas that often go unaddressed. What is a “world,” and how do movies, games, TV, and books try to offer us one? Focusing primarily on cases from cinema and video games, this class takes a multifaceted and critical approach to fictional worlds. We’ll ask how different media formations and technologies support them, interrogate the theoretical concept of “world” and its cognates (“diegesis,” “worldbuilding”), and consider the politics of making, policing, and breaking worlds, from sci-fi games to art cinema to fan creation. Over the course of the quarter, you’ll undertake an ongoing study of a world of your choosing, delivering your report at our final session—a Worlds Fair.

This course will provide an introduction to genre history and theory in videogame studies through a focus on the “platformer.” Though not a common name outside of videogame culture, the platformer has introduced or popularized some of the medium’s most recognizable figures (Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong) and gameplay mechanics (running, jumping, avoiding enemies, and collecting items). The genre has also been instrumental in and reflective of changes across the videogame medium. This course will cover two decades (roughly 1990 – 2010), emphasizing both historical details and theoretical questions, such as: How have game genres been defined? How do distinct genres emerge and change over time? How do broader trends (technological, formal, industrial, discursive, experiential, etc.) influence individual genres, and what roles do individual genres play in these broader trends? What resources and methodologies exist for studying videogame genres? 

Throughout the course we’ll see the platformer alternate between an emphasis on linear, acrobatic movement across two-dimensional spaces and the free exploration of three-dimensional virtual worlds; between providing mascots for the biggest game companies and becoming a marker of independent, small-team production; and between being hailed as “revolutionary” and epitomizing the retro-nostalgic. Classroom lecture and discussion of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions on original hardware at the MADD Center.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this course will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct, and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection, and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative "VR cinema."

Virtual Reality (VR) as a storytelling medium is often discussed in terms of immersion and presence and how these media specificities tend to instill greater empathy. The common argument suggests that VR allows participants to experience someone else’s lived reality as if it were their own. This capacity of VR to increase empathy has been contested by scholars in various fields. In light of this critique, we will examine the potential of VR to tell stories of illness and debility beyond empathy. Using concepts from critical disability studies, phenomenology, narrative medicine, and media theory, we will learn to distinguish the roles that VR narratives offer their participants, ranging from being a witness to becoming the first-person experiencer of non-normative embodiments. Exemplary questions are: what are the limitations of empathy in VR illness narratives? How can illness narratives in VR critically reflect on binaries between healthy/ill?

Each week, we will focus on particular health issues as they are taken up by VR artists. We will delve into the ways VR enables experiences of pain in the absence of tissue damage or offer multisensory and nonlinear stories to give a sense of the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder. The literature provided will help guide us through the exploration of these VR experiences. We will also try out some of these VR experiences ourselves.

Taking advantage of recent developments in the field of sound studies, this course examines issues in film sound (technology, sense experience, histories of listening, sonic space, soundscape construction, the materiality of sound formats, etc.) that speak to broader concerns in the humanities, especially sound-related arts.  While we will focus on a film or films every week, from blockbusters like Gravity to avant-garde and experimental films, the readings and issues will touch on everything from noise pollution, architecture, musical performance and recording, and mp3 files. Students interested in installation and environmental arts, sound in literary studies, music, and other sound-focused fields are welcome.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the 1960s to the 2000s. The continued development of film style and form over this period — one of seismic changes in audio-visual aesthetics — will be one of the primary themes of the course. Additionally, lectures and discussions will wrestle with the rise of global film cultures, technological innovations and their effects on style (such as post-magnetic sound, and visual effects techniques), major international directors and the solidification of auteurism as both a commercial and aesthetic imperative, the increasing internationalization of Hollywood, and post-1970s genre reorientation elevating horror, science-fiction, and other genres to the highest levels of mainstream respectability, critical appraisal, and/or commercial success. Screenings are mandatory and include work by filmmakers including Pedro Almodovar, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Federico Fellini, Hollis Frampton, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cristian Mungiu, and more, in addition to a selection of music videos.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the course will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots, and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies.

The ‘Advanced Seminar’ functions as a capstone course for CMST majors. It will allow students the opportunity to explore in more depth key disciplinary and methodological questions related to the study of cinema and media. Particular topics will be determined by the individual faculty instructor, and will vary from the Autumn to Spring Quarters and from instructor to instructor.

This class introduces students to the popular forms of Sinophone cinema though the aperture of the New Year Film (hesuipian). The first movies advertised as New Year films date to the 1930s, when cinema-going became a part of the Chinese urban holiday routine in commercial port cities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong. Today, the popular movies that top Chinese domestic box office are almost always released in January or February as Spring Festival offerings. The New Year Film is thus both a holiday marketing category in Sinophone territories and a mass cultural phenomenon that vividly illustrates the cinematic organization of space and time. Over the nine-week winter quarter, we will launch a comprehensive inquiry into the kind of experiences—globalization, urbanization, migration, and diaspora—that mediate the transformations of the Chinese New Year Film, while enjoying a number of its incarnations together over the course of the Lunar New Year holidays. Open to upper-level CMS students: Instructor consent required for all other students.

Producers, Audiences, Films: This Advanced Seminar explores the history and development of Chicago film cultures from the silent era to the present day. We will begin with the emergence of film producers at the turn of the twentieth century, looking at the development of comedy shorts and the activities of Black film producers on the South Side in the silent era. We will then look at documentary film production through the case of Kartemquin and the engagement of local filmmakers with the practice of chronicling the city. Following film production, we will examine Chicago as a site of film festivals and contemporary film production, including the mission of the Chicago Film Office. The second part of the course will turn to moviegoing culture across the city, from movie palaces to microcinemas, examining moviegoing audiences in Chicago’s neighborhoods. The last part of the course will focus on the city on screen through four themes: the migrant city, the gangster and Noir city, the working and union city, and the youthful city. Through the case of Chicago, we will examine methods of doing local film history, approaches to reception, and questions of cinema and the urbanscape.

This is a course about how environmental concepts and aesthetics are mediated using interactive technologies, from video games to computer models. The environment has long been imagined as something constituted by interactions. We can think of Charles Darwin’s figuration of a “tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth… dependent upon each other in so complex a manner” to produce new and divergent species over time. Later, such interactions were captured in mathematical and computational models, e.g. of predator-prey dynamics. In this course, we will consider the history and theory of the interactive environment alongside interactive media, a genre that includes entertainment media like video games, ecological modeling software, analog toys/games, and social media platforms. The class explores the interactivity of environments through hands-on play, tinkering, argumentation and experimentation with interactive media. Students will learn to critically analyze popular imaginaries, aesthetic objects, and the tools of scientific knowledge production, and interrogate how each contributes to urgent conversations about how we interact with nature. 

The Methodologies course is a cornerstone of the Media Arts and Design program, specifically designed to equip students with essential skills and strategies for creative project development. This foundational course marks the beginning of their capstone project, exploring the intricacies of ideation, effective research, goal setting, design, and project scoping. Students will receive ongoing feedback and guidance from the professor and their peers as they continually refine their projects, an approach that mirrors real-world iterative design practices. Throughout the course, students learn to adapt and adjust their approaches, tackle challenges, and embrace diverse methods, fostering an environment of nimble experimentation. This prepares them for successful project execution and portfolio development, setting the stage for the subsequent Capstone II: Production course.

The Production course is the culmination of the Media Arts and Design program, offering students hands-on experience in bringing their creative concepts to life. In this course, students delve into practical project execution, guided by experienced instructors and equipped with state-of-the-art tools and technologies. From video game design to Internet art, this studio course provides the opportunity for students to apply their skills, refine their projects, and focus on craftsmanship and articulation, preparing students for the Capstone exhibition and beyond.

This course is designed to help the emerging writer focus their creativity into a viable feature film project and screenplay. This includes structure, format, exposition, characterization, dialogue, voice-over, and other aspects of visual storytelling for the screen. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, assorted readings and writing assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students should expect to deliver four to five pages of written material-including story development materials or screenplay pages-each week.

Technologies that turn human action, appearance and performance into data for storage, transformation and redisplay have a long history inside and outside of moving image arts. This class will look at the opportunities, aesthetics and politics of these approaches running through contemporary special effects, traditional and experimental animation, dance on camera and live performance at a moment when boundaries between these categories have become especially porous.

• One in-person seminar weekly + one in-person screening weekly

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

AI Video sits at a collision point: where polished promises meet unexpected errors and infinite slop. In this studio course, we'll explore the chaotic potentials of AI in video art-its quirks, cultural impact, and untapped possibilities. Using cutting-edge AI tools and techniques like prompt engineering, style transfer, and compositing, we'll create experimental time-based media projects. With a critical lens and playful approach, we'll embrace the weird, challenge the hype, and rethink the ethics and aesthetics of this emergent form. ✨