This interdisciplinary course aims to critically address a range of concepts and media practices that have a long tradition in the arts but which are now changing in the context of digital technologies and new media art.   These changes are crucial to our understanding of both creative artistic practice and broader systems of communication in contemporary society.  The course focuses particularly on new media’s cinematic heritage and its use of remediation in form and content, as well as its manipulation of memory as emotion and as database, its integration of live and virtual modes of performance through computer-generated simulation and immersion technologies. In addition, the course also aims to explore the current lively debates on narrative structures in new media arts.  A screening or on-line activity each week will provide a grounded example for exploring these exciting ideas and practices.

On satisfying the requirements for this course students will have a in-depth knowledge of both analytic approaches to the analysis of texts and creative practice in new media and knowledge of such texts and the academic literature in the field. These skills will be based on the application of Critical Theory to such texts and practices.  On completion of this course, students will be equipped with the knowledge of how to research and analyse media texts and practice in the area of new media studies as well as the ability to develop their own research questions on topics of their own choosing.

20 minute tutorial presentation  and 1000 word paper (30%), 1500 word essay (30%), 4,000 word essay (40%)

2 hour lecture/seminars and 1 hour tutorial per week      

Paul, Christiane, Digital Art, London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2001.    

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.