Exciting Spring courses by metaLAB friends

There are lots of very exciting courses be offerred around campus by friends with many overlapping concerns. In particular, these two studios in VES should be great:

VES 45: “The New Photographers” by visiting artist Sue Johnson

The Web and mobile technologies have opened up countless options for photographers to create and publish work, but they also demand new strategies in conceptualizing and producing projects. Students will create original content for web and mobile platforms utilizing crowd-sourcing, interactivity, nonlinear narratives, and place-based storytelling. Students will learn the basics of HTML and multimedia production during class workshops. Projects will take into account current practices while looking to the future of the medium.

VES 139: “Artist Research Group: Investigative Practices” by Amie Siegel and Katarina Burin

This studio course considers how artists make use of documentation, research inquiries and archive materials in their work. Taking Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center–history, controversy, use–as a topic, we will further consider building as projection of self, architecture as reflection of time, the document as “fact” versus fiction. Students work in diverse mediums, focusing on how research documentation relates to video and installation practices, and drawing: mark-making to generate knowledge, presentation and visual diagram.

In the Law School, meanwhile, a compelling choice at the intersection of film and the law:

“Law and Film: Speaking Truth to Power or Using Truth to Speak With Power?: Human Rights, Documentary Film, and New Media”, by Rebecca Cohen and Andrew Woods

In this reading group we will investigate whether familiar questions about storytelling in the documentary film context are useful for understanding and evaluating the use of new media to tell stories in the human rights context, especially as the definitions of “new media”, “documentary film”, “journalism”, “amateur”, and “professional” are blurred. Do the same questions about authenticity, objectivity, and purpose that arise in the documentary film context also arise in the new-media-for-social movements context?