Spring

This course will trace developments in the videogame medium and videogame cultures in the first decade of the new millennium. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: the rise and influence of the open world/sandbox genre; the spread of online gaming with Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, networked First-Person Shooters, and virtual worlds; changes in the embodied experience of play introduced by rhythm/music games, motion controls, and touch screen interfaces; the proliferation of independent game development and online distribution; the rise of "art games" as a distinct (and debated) category; the reemergence of "retro" styles and repackaging of vintage games; the blurred boundaries of the "magic circle" and everyday life in Alternate Reality and Augmented Reality gaming; the increasing popularity of mobile and casual gaming; and the emergence of Videogame Studies as an academic field. This class will be a mix of history and historiography. We will not only learn about the history of the decade, but also discuss the unique possibilities and difficulties arising from the study of recent history - and put these discussions into practice through research-based assignments.

Aesthetics and Politics: Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lowenthal, Lukacs; this PhD seminar will build on the work covered in Marxism and Modern Culture to examine in more detail and where possible in the original German the arguments about the intersections and frictions between aesthetics and politics in high, middle, and mass cultural forms of literature, performance, film and other media, in the work of the above theorists.

How do images compel beliefs, enable knowledge, or encourage experiences of doubt? This course will introduce students to a range of artworks, films and media to explore historical changes in modes of perception, attitudes and responses to visual media. While photographic images are often claimed to hold a privileged relation to what they represent, we will consider historical practices of photographic and digital trickery, as well as the ability of visual representations to conjure, deceive, and maintain illusions. The class will combine critical, historical and philosophical readings with careful analysis of artworks and films from the nineteenth-century to the present, including trompe l’oeil paintings, spirit photographs, early trick films, staged and manipulated images, and works that seek out and entertain uncertainty through technical means such as speed, slowness, blur and glitch. Through close analysis of visual media as engines of belief, we will address their role in shaping or undermining social relations, claims to knowledge, and conceptions of the world, including the capacities of photography to reveal otherwise invisible or unseen phenomena, relationships between media and evidence, and the ways in which traditions of magic have shaped experiences of the cinema.
 

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."

This course will allow students to continue working on projects begun in the Intro to 16mm Production course (or developing a new small-scale project), in addition to developing skills with the following: sophisticated approaches to cinematography (comparative and reflective light metering, color negative exposure); varying workflows for post-production editing (analog and digital); and sound recording and design. Students will meet as a group for lectures, technical demonstrations and a shooting workshop. Course meeting time will also be set aside for individual conferences with the instructor to address project development and completion. Students should expect to budget between 120.00-500.00 for their filmstock and processing costs, depending on the project. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Instructor permission 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.

How have media technologies changed the way we perceive and understand the world around us? What role have aesthetic strategies played in the production of scientific knowledge? And how have scientific images influenced the development of modern art? In this interdisciplinary course, we will develop our skills in the perception, comprehension, and evaluation of visual media through an investigation of the intersections of art, science, and new imaging techniques from the early modern era to the present. Drawing on objects and texts from the art history, media studies, and the history of science, we will analyze the representational strategies at work in scientific images and discuss their impact on artists and filmmakers of the modern era. Instead of approaching scientific images as mere documents, we will learn to consider them as both aesthetic objects and provocations, spawning speculations about what might still lie waiting beyond the limits of perception.

This course will include a substantial amount of object-based study in the form of weekly site visits or film screenings, which will form the basis of our class discussions. Site visits will include trips to Special Collections at the Regenstein Library, the Smart Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and film screenings will feature a combination of scientific films, popular education films, and experimental cinema.

Bresson's films are known for their minimal and highly original style, the avoidance of any reliance on theatrical conventions, the use of nonprofessional actors ("models," he called them), unusual and "unnatural" editing techniques, distinctive pacing, and for its themes of grace, redemption, fate, moral severity, and several other philosophical and religious issues in the lives of the characters. This course will explore Bresson's innovations as aiming at a new form of contemplative cinema, one in which style is a matter of a kind of poetic thinking (as understood by Martin Heidegger), a reflective interrogation of philosophical issues that for which traditional philosophy is inadequate. We shall watch and discuss his films: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945); The Diary of a Country Priest (1951); A Man Escaped (1956); Pickpocket (1959); Au hazard Balthasar (1966); Mouchette (;1967); Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) and L'argent (1983). Readings will include, among others, Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson; Paul Schrader, The Transcendental Style in Film, selected essays about particular films, and selections from Heidegger.

This course asks one question—“How do (or how should) filmmakers approach the task of shaping cinematic material in time?”—and then approaches that question from the perspective of two different vastly cinematic practices. Half of the class will be devoted to American popular cinema since the 1970s, detailing emerging popularity of the three-act structure, the rise of screenwriting gurus, and the cementing of tried-and-true narrative formulas in an era of industry consolidation. The other half will be devoted to experimental cinema traditions over the same time period, including the rise and fall of structural film, subsequent experimentation in form and duration, new avant-garde practices that arose with video and digital technologies. Although the artists working in these two modes of filmmaking are rarely placed into conversation with one another, in this course we will examine how each of them engages issues in and problems around perception, understanding, and human attention in a shifting mediascape. 

Digital fabrication practices are transforming the way that the world of objects we interact with daily are designed and manufactured. Naturally, as those tools have become more available to the public, artists have latched onto them in order to develop their own projects, responding to and informing that world. In this workshop course, students will develop individual creative projects as a means of developing technical familiarity with digital fabrication techniques (particularly laser cutting and 3d printing) and exploring the ways these processes have impacted the material, social, and economic spaces in which we live. The course is primarily intended as an introduction to these techniques, software, and tools, so no prior experience is required.

Topics include: How are artists synthesizing digital fabrication techniques with those taken from more traditional material practices? How can we print "tools" that expand the range of work we can make beyond the technical limitations imposed by a laser cutter or 3d printer? What opportunities does digital fabrication present to intervene in or change our relation to the built environment?