Jenkins Collaboratory: Teaching
A list of current and recent course offerings
ISIS 210S. How They Got Game (Fall 2011). History and cultural impact of interactive simulations and video games. Evolution of computer and video game design from its beginnings to the present: storytelling, strategy, simulation, sports, 3D first-person games. Cultural, business, and technical perspectives. Insights into design, production, marketing, and socio-cultural impacts of interactive entertainment and communication. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
MFAEDA 302. Genealogies of the Experimental (Fall 2011). The course explores the construction of selected avant-garde, underground, alternative, counter culture and experimental practices in the theoretical context of artist manifestos and writings, as well as in the related secondary and tertiary literature from the humanities and social sciences to sciences, with special attention to critical literature in art history and cultural and visual studies. Students will examine such artistic production in the context of modernist and poststructuralist theories and methodologies from formalism to postmodernism, postcolonial theory, and current twenty-first century approaches. Students will articulate a personal and/or group relationship to the current potentials of the "experimental" through multiple practice-based assignments. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 250S. Critical Studies in New Media (Spring 2011) addresses key issues in the philosophy of new media. Central themes include the materiality of media; media configurations and their co-evolution with human being; computational media and recent discussions of posthumanism; the merger of nano-bio-info-technology and the ubiquity of code; media convergence and the political uses of new media. Examines new media technologies from a transdisciplinary perspective. Builds upon existing expertise in film, literature, and media studies to analyze what is "new" about new media and how they compare with, transform, and remediate earlier media practices. Proposes the development of a critical analytical framework for approaching new media and relating them to other areas of academic discourse. Promotes a hands-on active engagement with the technologies as a means for analysis and critique of new media innovations in contemporary academic research. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 263S. Post-Digital Architectures—Living Machines (Fall 2010) explores the impact of advanced technology on conceptions of architectural design, new urban environments, and the cultural imaginary of the body since the mid-1990s. Beginning with theories of postmodernism in architecture we address the impact of virtuality (immersive digital environments, mixed, and augmented reality) on recent architectural theory and practice in the rise of digital architecture. Exploration of time-based new media, game environments, and virtual worlds technologies in the rise of digital architecture from the late 1990s-2000s is set in dialog with theoretical readings from Deleuze and Guattari, Liz Grosz, Brian Massumi, Neil Denari, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn, John Rajchman, Gordon Pask, Gilbert Simondon, and others. Our trajectory takes us next to an exploration of programs for post-digital architecture that draw upon emerging fields of synthetic biology, and artificial life including the integration of nanotechnologies, biomimetic technologies, smart materials, and protocells into the design of self-organizing bottom-up designs for living architecture and reflexive environments. Our discussion of post-digital architecture engages the work of Simondon, Spillers, Armstrong, and others. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 250S. Critical Studies in New Media (Fall 2009) addresses key issues in the philosophy of new media. Central themes include the materiality of media; media configurations and the co-evolution of human being; computational media and recent discussions of posthumanism; the merger of nano-bio-info-technology and the ubiquity of code; media convergence and the political uses of new media. Examines new media technologies from a transdisciplinary perspective. Builds upon existing expertise in film, literature, and media studies to analyze what is "new" about new media and how they compare with, transform, and remediate earlier media practices. Proposes the development of a critical analytical framework for approaching new media and relating them to other areas of academic discourse. Promotes a hands-on, active engagement with the technologies as a means for analysis and critique of new media innovations in contemporary academic research. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 270. BodyWorks (Spring 2008): Medicine, Technology, and the Body in Early 21st Century America. CCI, EI, STS. Influence of new medical technologies (organ transplantation, VR surgery, genetic engineering, nano-medicine, medical imaging, DNA computing, neuro-silicon interfaces) on the American imagination from WWII to the current decade. Examines the thesis that these dramatic new ways of configuring bodies have participated in a complete reshaping of the notion of the body in the cultural imaginary and a transformation of our experience of actual human bodies. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 92FCS.01. How They Got Game (Fall 2007) explores the history and cultural impact of interactive simulations and video games. Evolution of computer and video game design from its beginnings to the present: storytelling, strategy, simulation, sports, 3D first-person games. Cultural, business, and technical perspectives. Insights into design, production, marketing, and socio-cultural impacts of interactive entertainment and communication. (Instructors: Lenoir, Herron)
ISIS 250. Critical Studies in New Media (Fall 2007) examines recent new media technologiess—such as videogames, VR, computer graphics animation, and digital art installations—via an engaging, transdisciplinary approach. The Course will build upon existing work in literature, film, and technology studies by McLuhan, Foucault, Peirce, Derrida, Kittler, Deleuze, Bergson, Baudrillard, and others to question what exactly is "new" about new media. (Instructor: Lenoir)