This hybrid media theory and practice course directly engages the interrelationship between discursive and creative production. Classes will include screenings, lectures, discussion, and hands-on experiences in producing and collaborating on digital media projects. Topics courses may be repeated with a different topic for credit.
Experimental Gamemaking
In this hybrid theory/practice course, students will view, play, and make video games that follow the lineage of contemporary experimental and avant-garde game makers. In addition to practicing the fundamentals of game engines, game programming, and introductory 2D/3D asset making, we will trace the history of transmedia storytelling through experimental game making, from Colossal Cave Adventure to Disco Elysium. In the process, students will learn about the pitfalls and bottlenecks of modern game production, while being introduced to alternative aesthetic, sociopolitical, and creative discourses around gaming, and the innovative strategies deployed to challenge and change the video games industry. Throughout the course, students will conduct a series of experiments ranging from short prototypes for visual novels to Machinima, and they will expand one or remix multiple prototypes into a larger game. No previous experience with games or programming necessary.
Media Activism through Participatory Video
This is a combined theory and practice course that will engage students in looking critically at what participation means when working with members of a community. In participatory video, who holds the camera often determines who holds the power. By gaining an understanding of documentary film and ethics, we will question the relationship between filmmaker and subject. Students will learn about working with community, developing relationships and trust, and how to collaborate using participatory methods. Through readings, screenings, and guest lectures, the course will explore the potential of using digital media tools to engage communities in media activism. Students will be introduced to a variety of methodologies that will lead up to a final collaborative project that will engage a local community in participatory video. This final project will result in a series of public workshops, screenings, and exhibition.
Reframing the I/Eye: The Politics of Autobiographical Media
In this course students will historicize, watch, debate, and make their own autobiographical media works utilizing the digital technologies and platforms that pervade our lives. The rise of identity-based social movements in the late 20th century coincided with the emergence of consumer video technologies, sparking a profusion of autobiographical media works by female-identifying, LGBTQ+, and BIPOC individuals who were not simply demanding representation in media, but that such representations be complex, intersectional, and self-produced. These autobiographical works served as hard-fought corrections, both to the essentializing, extractive, colonialist legacies of documentary production, and to the traditions of autobiography—until then a largely literary tradition cultivated by white men expounding on their lives of privilege. In our own 21st century moment where digital video can increasingly be recorded, edited, and distributed via our phones, how have the politics and poetics of self-representation changed? Can autobiography still function as a political act, or has it become a digital commonplace, lost in the noise of selfie-culture and personal branding, and tinged with the looming spectre of surveillance?
The Archival Imagination: Found Footage Filmmaking
How can we approach found media in ways that unlock latent elements in the original material? How can personal archives be re-contextualized in order to reflect on the time of its creation? How can advertisements and other disposable media be used to reveal historic progressions, disrupt nascent power structures, or speculate on the nature of truth itself? In this course, we will explore multiple techniques for working with archival material, through a combination of screenings, readings, and making. Exploring techniques that include autobiography, détournement, reflexive critique, collage, live narration, and speculation, this class challenges students to surface their own cinematic voice using materials created by others; to draw out the unconscious properties latent in the media itself. In the largest sense, this class is about time and knowledge: how do residues from the past carry meaning, and how can we both honor and question those meanings?
Game Design Workshop
This course will introduce students to the foundational concepts of game design through the practice of creating video games. Video games are products of culture, and this course approaches video games as media artifacts worthy of analysis, critical design, and purpose-focused production. In this course, students will learn digital tools for video game creation, such as an introductory-level game engine, basic programming skills, and audiovisual design. Students will also question and critique theories and foundational practices of game design. Readings, lectures, and in-class exercises will explore the expressive and political possibilities of games as cultural productions. No previous programming or game design experience is required.
Reimagining Social Media Practice
This course seeks to dismantle conceptions of the internet and social media as distribution platforms and instead critically and creatively reimagines them as a production medium, one capable of producing unprecedented media content, communities, and cultural interventions. Students will engage with theories of social media and online communities by engaging with projects that explore these issues from a practical hands-on perspective. Students will become social media and online content creators to accomplish three main goals: become literate in the social media content creation process, understand current research and theories on social media and online communities, and transgressively examine the implications of a culture imbued with social media and online content. Topics to be explored in the class include influencer culture, cyberbullying, the Alt Right, strategy, public crises, identity communities, election hacking, fake news, and psychological and social implications of social media use.
Digital Tools for Radical Change
This theory and practice course takes a critical look at the use of media communications and social media in resisting oppression and organizing for social change. Readings, class discussions, and creative assignments will engage a variety of case studies in which digital and social media were used to shape debates, advance causes, build networks, and encourage civic participation, including #BlackLivesMatter, @realdonaldtrump, and the ACLU's Mobile Justice app. Throughout, emphasis will be placed on the art of communication as the single most important aspect of effective community organizing, activism, and advocacy. Students will put theory into practice by conceptualizing, executing, and evaluating a digital advocacy campaign via social media. Their work will be supported by skills-based workshops and class visits with Los Angeles media activists and social media influencers, which will help equip them with practical tools and insight into digital and creative practices for achieving specific goals. This course is being linked to a Cinematheque series and will include a few mandatory screenings on Thursday nights.
Remix Media and Culture Jamming
What is Remix media? Remixing, reusing, and reworking separate media elements from different sources to produce an entirely new work with a different meaning. What is Culture Jamming? Coined by Oxy alum '82 Marc Dery, "culture jamming" is an anti-consumerist tactic used to disrupt or subvert dominant media culture, including (but not limited to) corporate advertising. This theory/practice course takes a critical look at the history of remix culture—from Dada to Machinima—along with the gamut of aesthetic, political, and social concerns addressed by remix artists and musicians and the reception (and even appropriation) of their work by the corporate entertainment industry. Students will put theory into practice by producing their own remix projects including a subvertisement and remix video. We will also explore issues around copyright and fair use in the sampling of both commercial and independently-produced works.
Public Media and Alternative Exhibition Strategies
For over 25 years Anne Bray and her Los Angeles organization FREEWAVES have created public media art events that bring diverse audiences and independent media artists together in dialogue on current issues in nontraditional, community-focused exhibition contexts. This hands-on course will engage students in theoretically and practically exploring past precedents and future possibilities for innovative and people centered media curation and exhibition. Students will work with Bray to conceptualize and realize alternative public media programming interventions on campus, in Los Angeles, and online, examining critical questions of space/venue, audience/community, and outcome/social engagement.
Media & Social Movements in Los Angeles
This theory/practice course focuses on the relationship between media and social justice struggles in the greater Los Angeles region. Readings, class discussions, and creative assignments will address the use of media tools as a form of local and global resistance against various forms of economic, racial, sexual and gender oppression. Students will learn about the theoretical and material tensions between the global political economy and local grassroots media movements, ranging from Asian American video collectives of the 1970s to the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (a.k.a. L.A. Rebellion film movement) of the 1980s. In the latter half of the semester, we will examine contemporary sites of media activism online, including but not limited to #blacklivesmatter, QWOCMAP, and the Asian American Oral History project. Weekly labs will provide opportunities to explore various media forms and strategies in order to critically analyze why certain platforms have emerged within different movements and what political possibilities still resonate. While labs will focus on audiovisual production and social media, there will be room to experiment with other forms of media resistance including ‘zine-making, comic books, and musical performance (e.g. critical karaoke, flash mobs, etc.). We will be joined throughout the semester by media activists and local community organizers, who will share their perspectives on contemporary struggles and, at times, lead skills-based workshops. The course will culminate in a final project in which students conceptualize and begin to execute a media campaign with a Los Angeles-based community organization. Additional Core Requirement Met: United States Diversity.