Spring

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 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 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 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 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.