New DAC course, English 380 – Media and Society: Game Culture

Stuart Moulthrop
English 380 – Media and Society: Game Culture
Fall, 2011 - Wednesdays 11:00 am – 1:40 pm


This is a first course in the critical study of games, especially videogames, and the culture of participatory media to which they belong. It will introduce the concept of games and play as pat of a meaning-making activity; it will survey forms, conventions, and practices that inform the design and reception of games; it will outline major theoretical trends within the emerging field of Game Studies; it will examine the place of games in contemporary culture, and consider some of the problems and challenges they pose.

The course is intended for students in any major who want to think critically, creatively, and yes, seriously about playful media. This will involve a certain amount of reading and writing (critical evaluation of games, applications and responses to theory), and also a good deal of game play, both in and out of class.

The preliminary syllabus can be accessed at http://www.tinyurl.com/gameCult.

Artists Now! Nate Larson at UW-Milwaukee

Nate Larson, Artists Now! Guest Lecturer
April 6, 2011
7 pm in the Arts Center Lecture Hall on the UWM campus.
FREE and open to the public!


Larson's photographic work uses visual and textual narrative to explore the way that individuals construct meaning in contemporary culture through the lenses of social networking, consumer behavior, organized religion, and other contemporary mythologies.


UWM's Department of Art & Design continues its Artists Now!, Wednesday evening lecture series designed for a broad audience with an interest in contemporary visual art. It presents a diverse group of artists working across traditional, hybrid and emergent disciplines.

Calling All Artists!

The UWM Planetarium is now accepting space-themed artwork for an upcoming benefit event hosted by The Manfred Olson Planetarium.

Requirements

Subject: Space-themed

Medium: Any

Please include artist name, email, and title of work.

Submissions are due by April 1 at 5:00 p.m. to Physics room 148.

For further questions or to submit work, please email RLHEBEIN[at]uwm[dot]edu.

Labor Dollars and Mythic Tractors March On Madison

From Lane Hall:

Madison was oh, so cold, but pretty amazing. I have posted a diary on
Kos, a reflection on tractors and spectacle.

I hope you enjoy it, and hope to see all of you on the streets, in the
rallies, and at the recalls. (Nice photo diary on Kos by "Kodiak54" if
you want to see some good pix)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/13/955895/-Mythic-Tractors-March-On-Madison

Best,

Lane

Michael Wesch Digital Ethnography, Today

Michael Wesch will be on campus today for a Digital Future address (remarks are at 3pm in the Zelazo Center Bader Concert Hall; reception/small group discussion is at 4:15 in Zelazo 250).
See http://www4.uwm.edu/acad_aff/digitalfuture/events/wesch.cfm
Also see his video, The Machine is Us/ing Us http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE


Dr. Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography
2008 U.S. Professor of the Year
Kansas State University


Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society. His videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over ten languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

Watershed: Art, Activism, and Community Engagement

Watershed: Art, Activism, and Community Engagement
January 28 - February 25
Opening Reception, Friday, January 28th, 5-8pm
Artist Talk: Betsy Damon, February 3rd, 7pm
Guest Presenters: Every Thursday in February at 7pm

From Lane Hall:
The Union Art Gallery is having it's first show of the semester, Watershed: Art, Activism, and Community Engagement which opens the first Friday of school, January 28th, at 5 pm. I hope you can make it to the opening. I have a number of collaborative pieces in the exhibition: an intervention at Sweetwater Organics filmed this last summer (Hall/Moline), a projection of micro/macro water life (Moline/Strickler/Hall) and an 18 x 20 foot chalkboard piece, titled "Basin" where I developed my ongoing graphical notation responses into a large flow diagram of water related issues, from privatization to invasive species: a new collaboration (Hall/Deal/Lampert) that I am really excited about. The show also includes a terrific installation by Visual Art prof Colleen Ludwig, and an elegantly functional aquaponic unit developed by Sweetwater, as well as a rich variety of documented educational and artistic public interventions.

From Colleen Ludwig about her project in the show:
Shiver is an immersive, interactive environment. The title refers to the chill or slight tickle felt on the skin if activated by light touch or closeness. Upon entering the artwork, visitors initiate trickling flows of water. These cling to, and seek paths along, the walls’ minor topographies. A sensor matrix tracks the direction and speed of people’s movement in the room. The information is used to move the curvy, crawling water rivulets along the wall’s surface. The reaction of the water flows gently bring visitors into a conversation with the artwork, encouraging them to move slowly and change perspectives in order to cause the room to react.
Shiver is supported by a Research Growth Initiative Grant and a fellowship from the Center for 21st Century Studies UWM.


About Watershed Exhibition:
Water is the most critical resource on earth. It has traditionally been held in the public commons, but is now being privatized by multinational corporations at a frightening pace. Water has become big business and the struggle over who controls water -- corporations or communities -- will likely define many of the social justice movements, political decisions, and wars of the 21st Century. Watershed: Art, Activism, and Community Engagement, organized by Nicolas Lampert and Raoul Deal, addresses the shifting ecological and political dimensions of water in Milwaukee and the Great Lakes Basin, and relates them to similar issues around the world.

Watershed features installations by Sweet Water Organics, Colleen Ludwig, Lane Hall and Lisa Moline, Raoul Deal, and Nicolas Lampert; Prints by students at the Bruce Guadalupe Middle School and the Walnut Way Conservation Corp in Milwaukee; Films by Laura Klein that document public intervention projects by Nance Klehm, Jesse Graves, Sarah Lewison, Amy Mall and Sherwin Ovid, Tiffany Holmes, Maria Cristina Tavera and Xavier Tavera, Katie Martin Meurer, Jenny Plevin and Al Westbrook, Ximena Sosa and Cristian Muñoz, Deal, and Lampert.

Watershed also features a series of Thursday night presentations in February by Milwaukee-based artists, scientists, and community activists, and a presentation by the Brooklyn-based environmental artist Betsy Damon.

"Out of Respect" Documentary Film Premiere

"Out of Respect" Documentary Film Premiere
February 24, 2011
Milwaukee Art Museum
Lubar Auditorium

Tickets range from VIP to free. Order here. http://www.creamcityfoundation.org/out-of-respect-film-premiere.html

In the Fall of 2009, Reel Life Films and J-Doc, a documentary film-making class at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, began production on a feature-length documentary about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender homeless young adults in the Milwaukee area. The film, Out of Respect, captures the social resistance and family-neglect that several homeless young adults face, as well as their strength to overcome constant adversity.

From Tess Gallun
Documentary Producer
Journalism & Mass Communication
University of WI-Milwaukee

Hi all,

After a year and a half of production... generous assistance from our department and J-doc students... my documentary feature on LGBT homeless youth is complete.

For more info on youth, here's link to a website created with support from Cream City Foundation: www.outofrespect.org

Kind regards,
Tess

Reel Life Films
reellifefilms[at]wi.rr.com

LIGHT SPILL: A moving image installation- opening reception

LIGHT SPILL by Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder - Exhibition Opening

Time
Thursday, January 27 · 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location UW-Milwaukee Art History Gallery
3203 N Downer Ave Mitchell Hall 154,

A moving image installation

Curated by Elena Gorfinkel

Exhibition runs January 27th - February 10, 2011

Gallery Hours: Mon-Thurs 10-4

Artists Statement:
In our installation work, we use projected light to articulate space and time. Film projectors and celluloid are the material base of our constructions in light and shadow, the elemental properties of cinema. These things are deeply imbued with a history of viewership in the dark of the theater. To remove it from darkness is to flood this history and cast a certain illumination upon it. A certain exposure. Light spills in the shifting of film from its native darkness in enclosed chambers (camera obscura) to the uncanny openness and defamiliarized illumination of installation. We are exploring the shift, elaborating the displacement, recasting the light mechanics of a peculiar estrangement of the medium. The art of cinema, yes. But more timely: the becoming cinema of art. That is the coming attraction for us. - Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder

About the artists:

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited their solo and collaborative performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), P.S.1 MoMA (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Diapason Gallery (NY), Redcat (LA), Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery (Houston), Ballroom Marfa (Marfa), Robischon Gallery (Denver), ICA (London), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Peter Kilchmann Gallery (Zurich), Viennale (Vienna), KW (Berlin), Hartware Medien Kunst Verein (Dortmund), TENT. (Rotterdam), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Museu do Chiado (Portugal), RIXC (Latvia), Image Forum (Tokyo). Their work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Museum of Contemporary Cinema Foundation (Paris), as well as numerous private collections. Gibson and Recoder are based in New York City.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=181785061844688

Media Law in the Digital Age

If you meet the prereqs, I would substitute this as a DAC conceptual analysis elective.

From Professor David Pritchard
Department of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION 661
Seminar: Media Law in the Digital Age
Spring 2011
5:00 PM-7:40 PM Mondays 01/24-05/12 MER 347

JMC 661 is designed to help you develop those skills in the context of the fast-evolving world of digital media law and policy. The course is a rigorous one, but if you accept the challenge you will gain a richer understanding of issues that are central not only to the future of the media industries but also to citizenship in the 21st Century.

REQUIRED READING

The readings for JMC 661 are very recent; most were published in the past few months. Required are a book (Keith B. Darrell, Issues in Internet Law, 2011), which you can obtain from http://www.issuesininternetlaw.com/, and a packet of legal materials and periodical articles available by January 18 at Clark Graphics.

English 312 Cinema and Digital Culture for DAC conceptual credit

Wow, check this course out for the Spring, For DAC conceptual credit elective.
  
English 312: Topics in Film Studies
Cinema and Digital Culture
Spring 2011

Instructor: Tami Williams
Office: Curtin 474 (by appt.) or our D2L site “Questions” forum.
E-mail: tamiw@uwm.edu

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

From the kinetoscope to the iPhone, moving image culture has never stopped reinventing or making itself anew. We will examine the nature of "new media" from a wide variety of perspectives: technological, economic, and particularly cultural and aesthetic. We will look at how new media, such as digital photography, video games, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web, refashion earlier media forms, such as cinema, as well as how the latter is itself influenced by emerging media. In addition to the shifts and changes effected by digital technologies in contemporary society, we will consider the place of the Self within the context of new media. To this end, in addition to reading critical texts, students will have opportunities to explore these questions on a personal and practical level, from blogging to video gaming. Class discussions will focus on weekly readings, film viewings and web visits.

There are no prerequisites for this course and you are not required to have any prior knowledge of media studies. However, you are expected to treat the material as a legitimate object of study. We will begin with the premise that film, and digital media offer much more than “entertainment” and, accordingly, a study of these forms is a serious undertaking that requires rigor and diligence.

ENG 417 Procedure and Play for DAC practicum credit

An awesome course that can be substituted for DAC Practicum credits.

Who Should Take This Class:

The class is intended for creative writers and students of literature who are interested in formal experiments in language and media, both current incarnations and historical foundations. While not addressed specifically to digital game culture, this class does stake out the intersection of language and play, where the line between text and game evaporates. An interest in games and interactive media is probably a plus; likewise, any commitment to exploration and experiment, or fascination with form.

There are no technical requirements or pre-requisites. This not a class in programming, computer science, or media design (though it will touch all three). You may benefit from previous study of Web technologies (HTML and CSS), but no such background is assumed. You will write some original code in this class, but you will be able to use existing models and templates. If you find it easier to tackle technical challenges collaboratively, you will have an option to work on some assignments in small groups.

About the Instructor

Stuart Moulthrop joined the UWM faculty as Professor of English in the fall of 2010. He has taught previously at Yale, the University of Texas, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Baltimore, where he co-founded the School of Information Arts and Technologies and helped create an undergraduate program in game and simulation design. An award-winning multimedia artist, Moulthrop serves on the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, the first international advocacy group for born-digital, word-based writing.

See preliminary syllabus here.

Conceptual DAC course Spring 2011

English 253 Science Fiction



In 1901, absurdist playwright Alfred Jarry penned what he called a “neo- scientific novel,” The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, in which he developed the theory of pataphysics – a “science of imaginary solutions.”

Using some simple ideas derived from Jarry, we will explore how novelists, poets, artists and filmmakers of the past century infused concepts of science and technology with imagination and humor in ways that warp, stretch, and rearrange popular expectations of “sci-fi.” We will read a handful of short novels, as well as novel excerpts, scientific essays, articles, manifestos, websites, and short stories (provided in .pdf format on D2L), covering a range of topics: time travel, quantum physics, alternate realities, cyborgs, and bio-engineering to name just a few.

Questions? Contact instructor: Matt Trease CRT 518 mjtrease@uwm.edu

MTAA-Participatory Performance Group at UWM

From DAC-fac, Nathaniel Stern
http://nathanielstern.com

MTAA: a PowerPoint lecture + some other stuff
Wednesday, 12/08/2010, 7:00pm - 8:00PM
Arts Center Lecture Hall, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Part of the Artists Now! Lecture Series
Free and open to the public


Since 1996, Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden have partnered as MTAA, incorporating participatory performances, group installations, aesthetic decision by popular vote and creative collaborations into their worked.
This talk includes a participatory art work!

More info: http://mteww.com/
Sponsored by Peck School of the Arts
Contact: Michael Passmore, passmom@uwm.edu, 414-229-6052

Glimpse. Your Stories From Abroad.

From Sarah Menkedick
Editor in Chief, Glimpse
982 Green St.
San Francisco, CA 94133
sarah[at]glimpse.org
Glimpse.org

A quick reminder that the application deadline for the Spring 2011 Glimpse Correspondents Program is just under two weeks away: November 28, 2010. This is a chance for students, volunteers, teachers, and other travelers to get stories and photography published at a National Geographic supported publication, and get paid for it.

Powered by Matador, and supported in part by the National Geographic Society, the Glimpse Correspondents Program provides talented writers and photographers with a $600 stipend as well as one on one editorial training and support to complete an independent journalistic work based on their experience abroad.

To learn more, visit: http://glimpse.org/correspondents , and please feel free to pass this email along to any other study abroad offices or individuals who might be interested in our program.

I hope to work with your students this Spring! Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,

Sarah Menkedick

_________________________________________________

Glimpse believes that independent travelers, particularly those who spend significant time abroad, have a unique and often overlooked opportunity to effect positive change around the world. This begins with bearing witness to place, people, culture, and especially the stories and struggles that might otherwise go unrecorded.

University of Iowa Intermedia Program seeks grad students

Student's in the course Media Art Lab projected on the exterior of the Studio Arts Building during Intermedia Open House, November 5, 2010

The University of Iowa Intermedia Program seeks creative, committed
students for its two-year MA | three-year MFA program

Application Deadline: February 1, 2011

Founded in 1968, Intermedia is one of the oldest programs in the United States dedicated to emerging media and interdisciplinary research in the arts. Intermedia emphasizes experimentation, collaboration, and research in New Media, community-based and social practice, experimental writing, installation, performance, social media, sound, video, and other time-based media.

We encourage social engagement and international experience through our collaborations with Iowa City Senior Center Television (ICSC TV) and the University of Rijeka Academy of Applied Arts, and Molekula, a media collective in Croatia. With ICSC TV, Intermedia encourages and assists in intergenerational video production for local television and online distribution. Through Projekt Oko Sokolovo, one MFA student annually is selected for a semester-long residency in Croatia.

Intermedia also works with the Virtual Writing University Experimental Wing, and recently launched the alpha site for XWRI, Experimental Wing Radio Intermedia, an online radio initiative.

Intermedia operates within the School of Art and Art History at The University of Iowa, a large public university with core strengths in the arts. The university is home to the world-renowned Iowa Writer's Workshop, strong departments of dance, music, and theater, and highly regarded studio arts MFA programs. The University of Iowa is located in Iowa City, a vibrant college town of 70,000 that was the third city to be honored with the UNESCO designation 'City of Literature.' The Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area has a total population of 425,000 and is about three and a half hours to Chicago by car or Megabus.

Intermedia offers excellent facilities in the Studio Arts Building, a 250,000 square foot creative warehouse shared by all studio arts programs. All Intermedia students are provided with studio space.

Funding for graduate students is very competitive, and teaching and research assistants are represented by the Committee of Graduate Students, a recognized labor union since 1996. Intermedia make every effort to provide a minimum quarter-time research and teaching assitantships to its graduate students. Its current students all receive support.

For more information on the program, see http://research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu. For more information on the School of Art & Art History, including images of the Studio Arts building, see: http://www.art.uiowa.edu.

Media Art History 2011 - Rewire

Fourth International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology
Liverpool, 28th September - 1st October 2011
Call For Papers now open - Deadline Monday, January 31st 2011

http://www.mediaarthistory.org

Host: FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), Liverpool
In collaboration with academic partners: Liverpool John Moores University, CRUMB at the University of Sunderland, the Universities of the West of Scotland and Lancaster, and the Database of Virtual Art at the Dept. for Image Science, Danube University Krems.

Following the success of Media Art History 2005 Re:fresh in Banff, Media Art History 2007 Re:place in Berlin and Media Art History 2009 Re:live in Melbourne, Media Art History 2011 Rewire will host three days of keynotes, panels and poster sessions.

Media Art History 2011 Rewire will increase the voltage and ignite key debates within the internationally distributed network of histories, which takes account of the questions surrounding documentation and methodologies, materiality, and agency. Rewire aims to up the current to illuminate the British contribution to media art, and by looking at our industrial heritage and contribution to the history of computing technologies themselves, we will open the discussion to how these contributions are manifested internationally. Considering the International scope of the histories of media art, science and technology, Rewire is also listed as part of the "McLuhan in Europe" programme, and will take place concurrently with The Asia Triennial in Manchester and Abandon Normal Devices, the North West's festival of new cinema and digital culture which returns to Liverpool in September 2011. The reviewers especially welcome proposals for presentations that resonate thematically with these events.

For the full Call for Papers, and to submit an abstract, please visit:http://www.mediaarthistory.org/rewire

Canada's Biotechnology Strategy: Struggles on the Knowledge Commons Featuring: Wilhelm Peekhaus

From Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
Director, BS in Information Science & Technology Program
Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

w: www.michaelzimmer.org

The Center for Information Policy Research (CIPR) in the School of Information Studies announces the following research presentation:

Canada's Biotechnology Strategy: Struggles on the Knowledge Commons

Featuring: Wilhelm Peekhaus, PhD (2010-2011 CIPR postdoc)

November 18th, 2010
Time: 12:15 -1:30
Location: Bolton Hall, Room 521

This talk reports on research that interrogated the various forms of social struggles that have emerged in defiance of the progressive enclosure of agricultural biotechnology within the social factory. An emphasis on the information and knowledge issues embodied in these conflicts, aside from potentially being indicative of the scope of the social factory, holds the promise of cementing an important bridge between Library and Information Studies (LIS), with its concern over information flows and the information cycle, and political economic and public policy disciplines. I contend that the multiple information issues that inhere in biotechnology, ranging from intellectual property concerns in respect of genetic information to the contested nature of regulatory and public biotech discourses, render LIS a wholly apposite discipline within which to situate a critical analysis of this technoscience that goes beyond the current LIS engagement with bioinformatics.

Additional details at: http://www4.uwm.edu/sois/news/events/cipr_peekhaus_111810.cfm

New Media Positions at Georgia State University

From Brad Litchenstein, aka @bradleyLbar
New Media Positions at Georgia State University

New Media and Documentary Investigation
Interactive Media Design
Digital Humanities
Digital Music Technology

http://www.cas.gsu.edu/secondcentury_newmedia.html#interact

Media Studies Colloquium Friday Nov 12, 1pm Merrill 347

From Elana Levine

Associate Professor

Director of Graduate Studies, Media Studies M.A.

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

Just a reminder that we will gather for a Media Studies graduate program colloquium on Friday, Nov. 12 from 1 - 2:15 PM in Merrill 347. Presenting will be:

Weiai Xu, "Exotic Disease or Local Disease? Framing Analysis of H1N1 Swine Flu coverage on Chinese Media"

Dugan Nichols, "The Connected Dots of Waco and Oklahoma City: Media Frames of Timothy McVeigh"

Derek Granitz, "Government Health Care that Never Was: Print News Media Framing of the Public Option During the 2009 Health Care Reform Debate"

All are welcome.

Library trials of useful databases

From Elana Levine

Associate Professor

Director of Graduate Studies, Media Studies M.A.

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Thought you might be interested to know that the UWM Libraries have subscribed to trial versions of a few useful databases for people doing media-related work, namely the Film and Performance Arts databases through Proquest and the Film and Television Literature Index with Full Text. You can access both http://guides.library.uwm.edu/trials. There is a space to enter feedback, which I imagine might encourage the library to subscribe permanently. So please check them out, and write some comments. Would be great to have these resources available to us. I know that I will be encouraging my students to use them, as well, while they still have access.

Elana