This interdisciplinary course is a compulsory core unit in the BA (New Media Arts) and further develops areas of study introduced in Media Cultures 1 (NEWM1001). The topics covered in this course include the major ways in which digital media are currently used: in everyday life as part of our current social and political networking practices (mobile phones, face book, you tube), in entertainment and in artistic practice - both live and virtual (performance artists), in cinema and in animation. Each week a screening or on-line activity will provide examples of how we represent ourselves in the world using new media: for example through our fascination with cyborgs and animation, through the new kinds of storytelling that now are possible using digital media, and through our use of the so-called virtual spaces of the web for communicating with each other. In looking at all these topics we use past and present critical theory to ask these questions: ‘how is new media linked with older media?,’ ‘what has changed with our use of digital media - what can we do now that we could not before?’ and even ‘what might come next?’.

By the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Explain the ways in which a range of ‘traditional’ concepts and media practices are changing in the context of digital technologies and new media art.
2. Critique the ways in which these changes influence our understanding of both creative artistic practice and broader systems of communication in contemporary society.
3. Assess the ways in which new media’s cinematic heritage, and its use of remediation in form and content, manipulate memory as emotion and as database.
4. Evaluate the ways in which computer-generated simulation an immersion technologies integrate live and virtual modes of performance.
5. Research, select, combine and integrate materials on narrative structures in the new media arts and present them in a coherent fashion in a team environment.

• Paul, Christiane, Digital Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.
• Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2001.
• Extra readings and reading lists will be posted on the course’s on-line teaching site during the course.
• Nightingale, Virginia and Dwyer, Tin (Ed.'s) New Media Worlds. Challenges for convergence, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press. 2007

Online Journals: New Media and Society, Media Culture and Society, Games Studies, Transformative Works and Culture, Convergence: the international journal of research into media studies, Animation: an interdisciplinary Journal

Reader:  Nightingale, Virginia and Dwyer, Tim (Eds) (2007). New Media Worlds. Challenges for Convergence, Sth Melbourne: Oxford University Press.