Spring

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.

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the “material turn” in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

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.

Over the last several decades, reality television has become a central ingredient in media diets all across the world. One can practically trace a line from early hits like Survivor and Big Brother, which were quickly formatted for global circulation, to the recent viral success of Squid Game, a fictionalized account of a death-game tournament that spawned its own reality show. Why do audiences everywhere find reality TV so entertaining? What moral lessons do viewers take away from these shows? And what might scholars learn by taking this popular aesthetic form, in all its cultural variation, seriously? This course brings together media studies, aesthetic criticism, area studies, and the sociology of religion to try to answer some of these questions. The course will help students to think about the moral and spiritual beliefs embedded in popular cultural forms, but also to understand how these forms are now circulated and consumed in our contemporary media environment and what they tell us about late-stage global capitalism. Course readings will introduce students to scholarship in television studies, aesthetic criticism, religious studies, and cultural studies, providing them with the necessary foundations to analyze reality TV from multiple disciplinary perspectives. We will also screen examples of reality TV and its offshoots, with a specific focus on East Asian shows and the competition or elimination format. Students will develop skills in visual analysis, interpretation of secular religion and belief structures, social theory, and basic research and writing methods.

This seminar draws on media technology studies, game studies, and feminist science studies to think about care as a concept that can help re-frame our understandings of contemporary technology. The class considers media representations of caring technologies: technologies that give care and technologies we care for and about. We will also be concerned with how care itself is mediated by technology: on whose behalf do technologies care? What does technology care about? What does it mean to care in a technogenic world? Readings and assignments will draw on video games, animations, and films, but also treat technoscientific objects as media objects: machine learning algorithms, decaying infrastructures, and medical devices are designed and calibrated to mediate flows of information and material, producing ways of seeing, knowing, and relating. We will address three primary axes of technological care: (1) imaginaries of caring and being cared for by technologies, (2) the care and maintenance of techno-social infrastructures, and (3) technologies that mediate care-giving relationships between people.

A reading-intensive graduate seminar designed to explore key writings by members of the "Frankfurt School," especially Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Particular attention will be paid to writings on aesthetics and politics; art and experience; and film and mass media.

Film noir refers, most generally, to a range of films produced during the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood that share distinct formal and ideological features. At the same time, it also signals a rich area of inquiry for academic film studies that has motivated new questions, debates and critical approaches. In our course, we will think about noir as a group of films that seem to have within them the sorts of paradoxes that criticism gravitates toward.

This class focuses on old and new ways of recombining, reconstituting and remaking cinema. At this moment a rapidly growing barrage of AI-based algorithms seek to unlock data latent in images. With these new tricks, what tools and viewing situations can we make oriented towards the construction of new moving-image works and logics? At a time when we are perhaps further away from the stable objects of cinema than we have ever been, when digital streaming repackages and recomposes film in front of our very eyes, or when virtual, augmented and mixed realities embed and dissolve cinema's frames in new and virtual spaces, what new positive opportunities for scholarship and creation can we find?

Today we are witnessing a strange convergence between forms previously held to be radical and fringe with the everyday experience of browsing YouTube — the boundaries between found-footage experimental films, underground pirate mashups, illegal documentaries, high-art gallery pieces and rights management dodging super-cuts all seem to suddenly interpenetrate.

This class is open to graduate students regardless of their production, coding, film-making experience. If you have any curiosity around the potentials and mechanisms of computers seeing us, seeing our film and video, helping navigate and bootstrap new digital humanities approaches or just curiosities that shade quantitative or algorithmic, join us in this class — there's important work to be started here.

Digital media has changed what work looks like across all sectors while simultaneously facilitating more play than ever before. The particularities of mediation are key to the current blurring of work and play: in our play time, video games and social media are feeling more and more like work, as gamification and content creation increasingly become the primary modes of interaction. And work feels more like a game as bosses are replaced by algorithms and all anyone wants to do is ‘game the system.’ Surveillance ecosystems abound, capturing our data and quantifying our actions, rendering us all working players in a socially mediated video game of life.

Making video games for a living or becoming a social media star are jobs that, while fun and highly sought after, are paradigmatic of the contemporary work environment: precarious, aspirational, passion driven, and full of work and play. What happens to us when we're working and playing, at the same time, all the time? How can the frameworks of mass gameplay and ubiquitous sociality help us theorize the contemporary moment?

From terrorists to "good Muslims," standards in the racial, cultural, and religious representations surrounding Islam have fluctuated across U.S. media. How do we conceptualize the nature of visual perception and reception? The history of colonialism, secular modernity, gender, patriarchy, and the blurred distinctions between religion and racialization have all contributed to a milieu of visual cultures that stage visions of and arguments about Islam. Hostility towards Muslims has not abated as we venture well into the 21st century, and many remain quick to blame an amorphous media for fomenting animosity towards the “real” Islam. We use these terms of engagement as the start of our inquiry: what is the promise of a meaningful image? What processes of secular translation are at work in its creation and consumption? Is there room for resistance, legibility, and representation in U.S. popular culture, and what does representation buy you in this age? We will pair theoretical methods for thinking about imagery, optics, perception, and perspective alongside case studies from film, stage, comedy, streaming content, and television shows, among others. Students will critically engage and analyze these theories in the contexts from which these works emerge and meld into a mobile and diasporic U.S. context. Together, we will reflect on the moral, political, and categorical commitments vested in different forms of media against historical trends of the 20th and 21st century.