9 – Interdisciplinary

Week 9 – New Media collectives and interdisciplinary teams opening cross-currents

Work Plan

This week we will examine high impact multi-disciplinary and multi-media projects. Organizations like Games for Change and Media Storm are bringing together participatory teams of skilled practitioners in a variety of fields to produce work that functions within the frame of the mainstream journalism and social change institutions. On another track, Stillwater is the place/repository for a variety of  new media projects and research initiated by artists and professors Jon Ippolito and Joline Blaise at the University of Maine. They are artists, writers and archivists working at the interdisciplinary frontier of new media — including digital curation, preservation of new media/ephemeral artifacts found online, and the taxonomies of “network art.”

Term Project:  Week 8 Benchmarks

  • Third week iteration of group projects’ public engagement phase underway — campaign continues through Week 10
  • Can you report on any surprising issues that have come up in this phase of the outreach?  What has been predictable?  What has been a challenge?

 Reading Assignment

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, Joshua Green (2013).  Spreadable Media. pp 229 – 305.

Online Assignment: website immersion + viewing

Games for Change
http://www.gamesforchange.org/
Co-Presidents: Asi Burak and Michelle Byrd

Media Storm
http://mediastorm.com/
Executive Producer: Brian Storm (and a team of many more!)

Stillwater:  A project of the New Media Program at University of Maine at Orono
http://still-water.net/
Program directors:  Jon Ippolito and Joline Blaise

REMINDER:

Report/Reflection Paper Due: Monday, December 9. No exceptions or exemptions because I have a deadline to hand in my grades as well.

Online Discussion:

I invite you to return to some of your own questions that you raised early on about challenges that the field faces and that you will be engaged with as you make creative and practical choices in your careers using the tools and evolving strategies of multimedia creation.

Early on there were some questions about…

  • gaming and interactivity as a way to re-engage youth.
  • archiving and preservation of this fragile media online.
  • classic journalistic storytelling and truth-finding by professionals, and how does the fan/participant/user fit into emerging digital contexts while maintaining craft and integrity?
  • Interdisciplinarity: truth or consequences?

Can elements we see in this final program of web-based projects point us in new directions?  How do they connect to the ideas and forms we have been investigating this quarter?

Public post + comment is due before Friday, 5pm.

Private Post-Essay:

Same summarizing and reviewing format you used in Week 8.  Now that you’ve wrapped up with “Spreadable Media” and the concepts that the authors use, how useful are they for you and your work?  What would you like to challenge them now to consider?

This private 500 word min. post-essay is due to me by Sunday, midnight.

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