MEDS 250 - Exploratory Media Practices

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This course instructs students in a varied set of practical media skills in order to interrogate and possibly transform the uses to which they are habitually put. It grounds a creative reflection on the relation between theory and practice through the critical use of production technologies. Each semester is devoted to a topic or a question to be explored through three distinct kinds of media “making.” These techniques include graphic design, literary journalism, sound recording, book production, the digital still image and its sequencing, the moving image and post-production techniques, computer graphics and physical computing, user interface design. Students will compose a formally sophisticated, rhetorically inventive “essay” in three medium specific idioms. They will also be asked to determine how the three exercises go together, how they work as interlocking parts of a transmedia narrative or ensemble.

Topic for 2017/18a: Investigating critical media practice in the production of multi-media artifacts including sound, video and interactive 3D environments. Course work is organized around the concept of “mapping” as a metaphor for many kinds of media production. The course also addresses themes of preservation and waste; memory and forgetting; inclusion and exclusion. Thomas Ellman.

Prerequisite(s): MEDS 160 or permission of the instructor.

Two 2-hour periods.

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