Archive for January, 2012
Five Reasons Why I’m teaching on TV?
1. It remains an incredibly powerful mode of communication accessed by millions, despite tendencies by some of the more erudite cognoscenti to dismiss it as too low brow.
2. Convergence/Distribution: Not only is it easier than ever before to access TV programs for teaching and learning purposes, the opportunity to study TV allows us a key point of focus for understanding the rapid transformation of culture / cultural production: convergence.
3. Good Material: the production values of new television programming rivals those of large budget films. Often the quality of the scripts and acting are better than what you get with block-buster films. The Wire, the Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sherlock—these are arguably the new novels of the digital age.
4. Hollywood North: Televisual culture is of particular interest here because Vancouver was a hub of North American TV and Film production, and it remains an important node in the network. As a result, TV is one of the few places Vancouverites might see ourselves reflected on the world stage—albeit unnamed or tagged with Oregon plates. (Until we get better and more arts galleries, concert halls, hip bars etc, TV will remain way up there as a form of entertainment in this sleepy provisional outpost.)
5. It’s addictive.
What’s On? Teaching and Learning New TV
This semester at Emily Carr I am teaching two courses “on TV”—one figuratively, one literally.
what's left from xmas CC, Some rights reserved by atrox_atrox
Social Sciences 300: The New Art of Association
With M. Simon Levin, I’m co-teaching SOCS 300: Network/Connect/Collaborate: The New Art of Association. This course is distributed across sites at Emily Carr and North Island College, and it links students from the external BFA with students at the main campus through High Definition audio-video feeds.
For this pilot course, Simon and I will move back and forth between Comox and Vancouver, working with the students to take the new gear through its paces while we interrogate the televisual platform conceptually and practically.
We’re taking our classes on TV, to see how it works to rethink distance education in an era of distributed learning.
Art History 333: Adventures in New TV
Harry Killas and I are co-teaching AHIS 333: Up on the Wire and Down on Madmen: Adventures in New TV. This is an Interdisciplinary Forums Course based around a collaboration between Emily Carr’s studio faculty and academic faculty, and much of the critical material is provided by guest lecturers, invited critics and makers who will share their expertise/interests in new directions in TV: Zoe Druick, Tom Scholte, Ron Burnett, Peg Campbell, David Paperny, Donald MacPherson, Lisa Coultard have all agreed to participate.
This course hinges on the question of what TV means here and now: in a west coast “Art School” in an age “convergence.” Our course proposal offers a provocation: “If you are not watching TV, what are you looking at?”