MARCH 2009 CITY UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG What are the ‘Digital Arts and Humanities’? Dr. Mary Flanagan Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities Professor, Film and Media Studies Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH USA

[giantJoystick] 2006

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth

Tiltfactor at Dartmouth College (Film+Media)

the digital humanities are fostered by hybrid practices…

Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning What can be measured and how? *Why?*

What is the role of digital arts and humanities in the contemporary university curriculum?

Disciplines: Film studies Cultural studies Sociology IT/Technology Computer science Game Studies Art and Media Studies Anthropology Engineering (simulation) English and Literature Creative Writing Education Design Business Healthcare Urban Planning Military

Digital Arts and Humanities What is this? Fundamentally a theory-practice site of inquiry. New Media/Digital Humanities (scholarship) - the exploration of aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, and social changes associated with the evolution and adoption of emerging media forms New Media/Computation Media (practice) – interactive, dynamic creative works using emerging technologies or influenced by computer culture: interactive art and installation, games, sculpture, and interactive design, and more

Major Research Areas

1) Computing in Traditional Areas (e.g. History, Literature)

Camille Utterback’s embodied interfaces for exploring text

2) Archives+Resources, Visualisation, Mapping

Mark Lombardi’s Power Maps

Krebs’ hijackers map

Josh On and Future Farmers, They RuleThey Rule

[search] - internet search artwork

3) Games+Game Studies

games: the 21st century medium not just due to economics… Media theorists / academics around the world are evaluating computer games in peer-reviewed journals, such as: Journal of Game Development and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, ACM’s Special Interest Groups in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and the annualGame Developers Conference Publishers of game related work: MIT Press, Addison-Wesley, Morgan-Kaufman, Premier Press + Charles River Publishing

games provide a framework, or as Guattari might say, machines or "devices for producing subjectivity" (Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm 1995)

these relational systems embody the contemporary ideas expressed by Bourriaud and Guattari; they engage theories in multiple fields, engage players in alternative thinking, and incorporate artistic positions

3) Future Cinema: Documentary Games, ‘Media Fabric

installation

‘Documentary games explore: immigration, political strife, poverty terrorism, news events, internment camps, war in Iraq GMO crops, &tc. Documentary games:

Heidi Boisvert - Hunter College

ayiti GLOBAL KIDS PARTNERSHIP

Ayiti GLOBAL KIDS PARTNERSHIP

Profit Seed: Flanagan and Nicholas Pappas from Hunter College; Dr. Chris Egert, Ben Dapkiewicz, Brian Mayzak, Greg Kohl from RIT

Madrid Gonzalo Frasca

documentary games Escape from Woomera, an Australian Immigrant Camp

Peacemaker

JFK Reloaded An “Edutainment first person shooter” (2004)

the mechanic is the message

‘media fabric’ – a semi- intelligent organism where lines of communication, chains of causality, and streams of consciousness converge to form a rich tapestry of creative story potentials (Interactive Cinema, now Media Fabrics Group, MIT Media Lab 2007-present)

Projects include ‘mindful cameras’ for documentary filmmakers, fluid rich-media blogs with integrated cameras and phones, improvisational relationships to media, + ‘emonic environments,’ real time media narrative spaces. (Interactive Cinema, now Media Fabrics Group, MIT Media Lab 2007-present)

Toni doveToni dove Toni Dove – Interactive Film

Iphone movies, machinima, eddo sternIphone movies, machinima, eddo stern Distributed Cinema

4) Software Studies

“… ask in the context of computing what can (and must) be known of our artefacts, how we know what we know about them, and how new knowledge is made” (Willard McCarthy, 2002)

Casey Reas, code drawings

5) Performance

'[…] the image can no longer be restricted to the level of surface appearance, but must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied existence. This is what I propose to call the digital image.' (Mark Hansen: New Philosophy for New Media, 2004, p. 10)

Projecting tags, public seating in privately owned spaces Graffiti Research Lab

Anne Marie Schleiner’s O.U.T.

Massively Multiplayer Soba (2008)

Massively Multiplayer Soba (2008), by Tiltfactor Lab

the function of representation is played out in behavioral patterns (Bourriaud 68)

Digital Arts and Humanities How can they effectively reflect the inherent multi- disciplinary nature of contemporary thinking?

“In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a 'subject' (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists of creating a new object, which belongs to no one.” --Roland Barthes, Camera Ludica: Reflections on Photography

Computer Science Information Technology Software Dev. & Mgmt. Humanities & Liberal Arts Art & Design Science & Mathematics There! A broad picture of how a number of disciplines could potentially be involved in the work of interactive media and games education Source: RIT

So, what are the necessary skills in this admixture? Computer Science Information Technology Software Dev. & Mgmt. Humanities & Liberal Arts Art & Design Science & Mathematics There!

Outcomes Based Teaching and Learning What can be measured and how? Why? What are the core skills required?

“ The main point to realise is that all knowledge presents itself within a conceptual framework adapted to account for previous experience, and that any such frame may prove too narrow to comprehend new experiences.” --Niels Bohr, 1958

Questions for SCM: -Where does innovation come from? -Where are new core literacies taught? (Programming, Information Aesthetics, Systems Thinking) -How do educators plan for future media forms? (Novel interfaces, 3D interactive cinema, design and conceptual work)

more Questions : -How to manage breadth and depth issues in the Curriculum, especially in area of interdisciplinary work? -How to teach team work and still foster individual voices given the complexity of these new forms of work? -Where will new career paths be forged in the curriculum? E.g. narrative Environments for science, virtual architecture, Biomed, complex systems. Media artists as translators?

-What spaces best foster interdisciplinary work? -What types of portfolios work with interdisciplinarity?

…those investigations which delve into the devices and methods for producing meaning and subjectivity, or as Guattari might say, machines of materiality, expression, desire, and politics (Chaosmosis, 34)

Career Opportunities: game designer, web producer narrative design / writer animator, art director, concept artist digital ethnographer experience designer content strategist, culture jammer advertising, culture and media writer/journalist professional artist digital journalist, professional blogger photo editor, graphic designer, photographer web producer, content manager, videographer writer, researcher MA+PhD: Curatorial studies, social science, cognitive science, Human Computer Interaction, AI, Critical Theory

Career Opportunities supported with more links with science systems designer programmer, lead programmer 2D/3D/Graphics programmer AI programmer. network engineer, system administrator webmaster, play tester, quality assurance technician audio engineer, sound producer/programmer usability expert, HCI guru, interface design data visualization, large scale systems designers interaction architect, information architect

At Hunter: Computational Media Courses media 161 Intro to digital media (all the digital creation tools) medp 278 web production I (basic html / css) medp 299 digital design and usability (new) medp 331 web production II (flash programming) medp 278 interactive media production (processing class) media 280 understanding new media (history and theory) media 363 concepts in gaming (game design course) medp 399 game programming I (flash programming class, new) medp 341 web programming (php class) ABOUT TO SHIFT TO A ONE YEAR “MEDIA IN A DIGITAL AGE” YEAR LONG COURSE