2025-2026 Catalog

MADD 10002. Discovering Anthropology: Culture, Technology, Mediation. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to some of the major themes and theoretical questions posed in and by anthropology over the last century through the conceptual and experiential matrix of technology and mediation. Our intellectual journey will take us from techniques of magic through technologies of spatiotemporal organization, communication, and exchange. We will explore the formation of the body, social, individual, and mass as expressions of the culture of mediation and the mediation of culture. Readings from the course will cover a broad intellectual terrain that combines seminal anthropological texts with arguments from media theory and the philosophy of technology.

Instructor(s): M. Fisch     Terms Offered: TBD
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 32145, ANTH 20002

MADD 10006. Contemporary Art. 100 Units.

This course will consider the practice and theory of visual art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Among the subjects that will drive our narrative will be the rise of postmodernism, pop art, the aesthetics of the social movements of the 1960s, institutional critique, the relationship between reproductive media and Feminism, the concept of spectacle, conceptual art, the appearance of a global art industry after 1989, the connections between art school and art-making, "relational aesthetics," the fate of art in the age of the Internet, the art of the post-studio moment, and what happens to art when it engages with *everything*.

Instructor(s): M. Jackson     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 15800, ARTV 20006

MADD 10101. Press Start: Foundations in Media Art and Design. 100 Units.

A required course for 2nd or 3rd-year students, Foundations serves as an essential introduction to the Media Arts and Design (MADD) program. It cultivates community, introduces core program values, foregrounds portfolio development, and prepares students for advanced MADD coursework. Through lectures, discussions, and collaborative activities, students will engage with the history, theory, and practice of media arts and design. This course also offers a guided exploration of MADD's specialized "clusters." Students will build a shared vocabulary and practical framework to explore the intersections of media art, design, and culture, preparing them to engage critically and creatively with the field.

Instructor(s): Jon Satrom     Terms Offered: Autumn

MADD 10110. Intro to Porn Studies. 100 Units.

This course is a multi-media introduction to the Western history and study of the mode/label/genre of aesthetic production called pornography and its other appearances as "obscenity," "erotica," "porn," "filth," "art," "adult," "hardcore," "softcore," "trash," and "extremity." We will study how others have approached this form, how they have sought to control it, uplift it, analyze it, destroy it, take it seriously, or learn to live with it. This course is both an introduction to the academic field of "porn studies" and to its equal and opposite: the endless repository of historical and current attempts to get pornography out of the way, to keep it somewhere else out of sight, to destroy it, or to deem it unworthy of study. We begin with a conversation about what the stakes are and have been in studying porn and how we might go about doing it, and then move through history and media technologies beginning with the category of pornography's invention with regards to drawings from Pompeii. The course is meant to introduce students to various forms pornography has taken, various historical moments in its sociocultural existence, and various themes that have continued to trouble or enchant looking at pornography. The goal of this course is not to make an argument for or against porn wholesale, but to give students the ability to take this contentious form and its continued life seriously, intelligently, and ethically. (Theory)

Instructor(s): Gabriel Ojeda-Sague     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 10110, GNSE 23143

MADD 10199. Digital Ethnography. 100 Units.

This methods course prepares students for ethnographic research in an online environment. We will discuss practical steps to put together a research project-from research design to data collection and analysis. We will cover epistemological, ethical, and practical matters in online ethnographic research, and read articles and books showcasing methods for the study of virtual worlds (both game and nongame). This is a hands-on methods course: you will be required to formulate a preliminary research question at the beginning of the course, and you will conduct a few weeks of ethnographic research in a virtual field site of your choosing. Each week you will be asked to complete short ethnographic assignments, and to produce field notes to be exchanged and discussed in class. As a final project, you will have a choice between a research proposal or a short paper based on your observations.

Instructor(s): Cate Fugazzola     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 25199, SOCI 30326, MAPS 35199, SOCI 20558, GLST 25199, ANTH 21415

MADD 10245. Serious Play: Video Games and Global Politics. 100 Units.

This course approaches video games as cultural and political artifacts that can be studied to shed light on global political events and processes. Questions we will explore throughout the course include: How do we understand the relationship between video games and global capitalism? What can video games tell us about large-scale processes such as climate change, migration, war…? How do we understand issues of representation in gaming? What do video games have to do with international relations? We will approach video games from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, analyzing them as a form of entertainment but also as forms of art, as political objects, as reflections of social dynamics, and as channels for social critique and change. The course does not require any previous gaming knowledge nor experience, and it welcomes gamers and non-gamers interested in exploring the relationship between games and global politics.

Instructor(s): Caterina Fugazzola      Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course does not require any previous gaming knowledge nor experience and it welcomes gamers and non-gamers interested in explored the relationship between games and global politics
Equivalent Course(s): GLST 25245

MADD 10325. Setting Sound Standards: Music, Media, and Censorship in South Asia. 100 Units.

This course aims to introduce students to various musical and performance traditions in South Asia and their evolution within regimes of institutional, legal and media censorship. The course aims to understand how media environments and cultures of censorship are in some ways fundamental to shaping performance cultures in South Asia in the twentieth century. How do traditions of musical performance entrenched in the politics of caste, communalism, religion, sexuality and gender interact with regimes of censorship and new media? How do the latter remake and unmake said traditions? Be it the mid-century ban on film music by All India Radio to reflect the aspirations of a newly-emerging nation or the appropriation and urbanization of 'folk' musical practices within the recording studios in Nepal by upper-caste, upper-class male performers- censorship and media infrastructures have been integral to the current ontologies of diverse musical genres in South Asia. Through the analysis of a variety of primary and secondary texts on performance and musical aesthetics, media and music ethnographies, reception and production histories as well as critical listening/viewing exercises, this course seeks to complicate mainstream Euro-American narratives that tend to posit media-modernities as global and uniform. We will seek to understand how South Asian musical cultures and sound practices enter into a creative interplay with musical discourses and media-materialities emerging in the West.

Instructor(s): Ronit Ghosh     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 23322, TAPS 20215, SALC 25325

MADD 10430. Gender, Sexuality, Imagination. 100 Units.

This course explores the relationships between theories of the imagination and those of gender and sexuality, with a particular emphasis on the relevance of this exploration to cinema and media studies.

Instructor(s): K.Keeling     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 30430, CMST 30430, CMST 20430, GNSE 20430

MADD 10440. Desiring Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Media. 100 Units.

Artificial intelligence is a cross-disciplinary field that seeks to imagine and develop machines able to reproduce, automate and exceed the cognitive and sensorial capabilities of biological organisms. This course will trace the conceptual genealogies that inform contemporary AI, and it will interrogate the uses and abuses of AI within social, legal, medical and creative contexts. Course materials will include a diverse array of media and theory including: Soma, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Natural Born Cyborgs, Ex Machina, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Speculative Everything, A Natural History of the Enigma, etc… No prior familiarity with AI or computation is necessary. In lieu of a traditional midterm and final, this course will ask students to develop a series of speculative design projects that imagine new intelligent organisms and their worlds. (Fiction, Theory)

Instructor(s): Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 15440

MADD 10474. Crossing Boundaries: Virtual Reality, Embodiment, and the Reimagining of Social Space. 100 Units.

In this course, we explore the potential for Virtual Reality (VR) experiences to push multiple boundaries: redefining bodies, crossing borders, and reimagining social spaces. In the first weeks of the course, as we think about bodies in the virtual space, we will be asking questions related to embodiment and representation: how does the process of avatar creation reinforce or dismantle assumptions about gender readability and performance? How do immersive experiences induce feelings of gender euphoria and dysphoria? The following weeks we will explore and discuss the way VR experiences can engage with the concept of physical borders-calling their existence into questions in some cases, making them particularly salient in others. We will discuss virtual travel, digital border-crossing, and explore art installations that reflect on migration experiences. The final weeks will build on our previous conversations, and together we will reflect on the fluid meaning of space in a virtual setting and on the creative possibilities that such fluidity entails: What does it mean to reimagine space beyond physical limitations? How do we understand the political salience of taking up space in digitally built social environments? The course combines readings and theoretical conversations with hands-on experiences in VR and explorations of virtual worlds. Previous experience with VR is not required. We will share a limited number of headsets that will be available for use in class.

Instructor(s): Caterina Fugazzola     Terms Offered: Spring. GLST 25474 is seminar with a lab component
Prerequisite(s): This course is a seminar that meets MW, 3:30-4:50 PM and lab that meets M, 5:00-6:00 PM. Students are required to register for and participate in course lab
Note(s): This course is a seminar that meets MW, 3:30-4:50 PM and lab that meets M, 5:00-6:00 PM. Students are required to register for and participate in course lab
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 25474, GLST 25474

MADD 10507. Gender, Race, and Horror. 100 Units.

This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.

Instructor(s): AE Stevenson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25507, GNSE 20132, CMST 35507

MADD 10513. Beyond Hashtags: Social Movements in Digital Society. 100 Units.

In today's global network society, the Internet permeates our lives, whether it be our jobs, politics, or relationships. You're probably reading this course description online, and perhaps next you'll check your email or social media accounts. Social movements, powerful drivers of social change, are no exception. Digital activism has transformed political and social protest over the past two decades, changing how events, protests, and movements are organized and generating alternative ways to build social movements. Students will receive an introduction to sociological perspectives on social movements and the Internet, and consider the influence of networked communication technologies on the mobilization of social movements throughout the globe, with particular emphasis on feminist, queer/trans, human rights, and racial equity movements.

Instructor(s): L. Janson     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20513, GNSE 20513, CRES 20513

MADD 10523. Digital Media & Social Life: Contemporary Methods. 100 Units.

Digital and networked media include forms and social phenomena such as memes, social media, live-streaming platforms, video games, virtual worlds, electronic literature, and online communities. What methods taken from the humanities and social sciences enable the study of these digital media forms and cultures? In order to model a series of methods, this course runs one shared media object (this term, the video game Stardew Valley) through a series of research methods, one per week, taken from the humanities (e.g., close reading, critical theory, response theory, and critical making) and social sciences (e.g., interviews, digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and quantitative analysis) methods. At the end of the course, students will compose a research paper or create a digital project that uses one or more of these methods to analyze a digital or networked media case of their choosing.

Instructor(s): K. Schilt, P. Jagoda     Terms Offered: Winter. Not Offered in 2023/2024
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27808, GNSE 27808, SOCI 20523, ENGL 20523

MADD 10567. Introduction to Computational Sociology. 100 Units.

Advances in machine learning, high performance computing, and big data are opening exciting new ways of doing social science. This course introduces students to the burgeoning field of computational sociology, emphasizing both conceptual understanding and hands-on training. The course does not require any prior experience with coding, computer science, or statistics. The only requirement is that students have fluency in high-school mathematics (pre-calculus) and an interest in acquiring computational skills. Students will learn the basics of R and Python, and will gain practical experience with simulation modeling, computational text analysis, and neural networks. This course will pair a practical training in computational methods with a critical examination of how these technologies are being deployed in the real world and their roles in reproducing systems of power and inequality. This class is recommended for students who want a basic introduction to "data science" and who are seeking the conceptual knowledge necessary to participate in current debates over information technology in contemporary society.

Instructor(s): A. Kozlowski     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): SOCI 20567, HIPS 20567

MADD 10603. What Is Animation? 100 Units.

This course will provide students with an introduction to the objects and theories of animation.

Instructor(s): Cassandra Guan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 35603, CMST 25603

MADD 10605. Queer and Trans Cinema and Media. 100 Units.

In this course we explore the history of queer and transgender cinema and media in an effort to situate new developments in queer and trans cinema and media making. We will consider relevant theories about gender and sexuality and their implications for our categories of film and media analysis.

Instructor(s): Kara Keeling     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 30107, CMST 20605, CMST 30605, GNSE 20107

MADD 10807. Work and Play in the Digital Age: Video Games and Social Media. 100 Units.

Digital media has changed what work looks like across all sectors while simultaneously facilitating more play than ever before. The particularities of mediation are key to the current blurring of work and play: in our play time, video games and social media are feeling more and more like work, as gamification and content creation increasingly become the primary modes of interaction. And work feels more like a game as bosses are replaced by algorithms and all anyone wants to do is 'game the system.' Surveillance ecosystems abound, capturing our data and quantifying our actions, rendering us all working players in a socially mediated video game of life. Making video games for a living or becoming a social media star are jobs that, while fun and highly sought after, are paradigmatic of the contemporary work environment: precarious, aspirational, passion driven, and full of work and play. What happens to us when we're working and playing, at the same time, all the time? How can the frameworks of mass gameplay and ubiquitous sociality help us theorize the contemporary moment?

Instructor(s): Bret Hart     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27807

MADD 10871. Horror, Abjection, and the Monstrous Feminine. 100 Units.

This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds-such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples' minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre's tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine-as both thematic and aesthetic tropes-to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials.

Instructor(s): Hoda El Shakry     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): No prerequisites for undergraduate students Online consent required for graduate students
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 28871, ENGL 38871, ENGL 28871, CMLT 38871, GNSE 20137, GNSE 30137

MADD 10904. Media Wars. 100 Units.

Media practices and discourses evoking war or violence are common today, such as the "weaponization" of social media; "cyber warfare" and attacks; "online battlefields;" "guerilla" media tactics; "The Great Meme War" and "Infowars.com," to name a few. In relationship with terms suggesting that we live in an age of "post-truth" dominated by "fake news" or "fact-challenged" journalism, the media wars of today may seem unique to the twenty-first century. But in fact, the history of the use of media to either combat or spread ideas dates back centuries to the earliest phases of mass media and communication. In this class, we will proceed historically, broadly conceiving of media to include print and visual, cultural, and artistic forms, cinema, television, and the internet. While we will explore how media have historically been used to construct or counter dominant systems of representation, we will also discuss how different media forms function formally, learning to analyze how they construct discourses of truth as texts (documentary; propaganda). This class will also function as a contemporary research laboratory where students will be asked to track, evaluate, and theorize contemporary or historical media that are taking part in a so-called "media war."

Instructor(s): Jennifer Wild     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Please note: Students who have previously completed the course “Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Media Wars” are not eligible to receive credit for this class.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20114, SIGN 26061, CMST 20904, CMST 30904, GNSE 30114

MADD 10906. Contemporary Cinematic Special Effects. 100 Units.

The highest-grossing films of the twenty-first century are, without exception, showcases for special effects. How did special effects become so central to mass-audience movies? What are the consequences of this shift? In this course, we will track the historical and stylistic development of contemporary effects-driven filmmaking, bridging practitioner discourse by effects industry workers with the theories of cinema and media scholars. While our screenings will primarily comprise narrative feature films, we will also explore how special effects draw upon diverse media forms and practices, including experimental cinema, installation art, amusement parks, television advertising, and, above all, digital technologies. Screenings will include Hollywood blockbusters (e.g., The Matrix [1999]), "failed" blockbusters (e.g., Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [2001]), and effects-driven films from other national/regional cinemas (e.g., The Mermaid [China, 2016]).

Instructor(s): Cooper Long     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28906

MADD 10929. Cabal, Cult, and Crisis: Religion and Contemporary Conspiracy Theory. 100 Units.

We live in an age of crisis for liberal democracy, and conspiracy theories are often said to be at the heart of this crisis. While Alex Jones, Infowars, and QAnon have become household names, there is still no consensus on what makes a "conspiracy theory" or how scholars should approach these topics. Are "New World Order"-style conspiracy beliefs irrational or false on their face? Can liberal-democratic regimes which pride themselves on their ability to accommodate diverse religious viewpoints successfully integrate conspiracy believers? In this course, we will approach the subject of conspiracy theory by engaging with theorists in their own words, videos, and images, while sampling a range of academic and public-facing literature on new religious movements, religion and politics, and epistemology. In so doing, we will apply critical lenses of diverse sorts to mixed media, as we collectively develop methodologies for carrying out original research on "low-status" subjects using un-curated archives. No prior acquaintance with conspiracy-oriented materials required.

Instructor(s): Justin Smolin     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28929, ANTH 28929

MADD 10940. Reading Reality TV: How to Research Identity in Contemporary Culture. 100 Units.

This course examines the cultural politics of reality television with a focus on how these wildly successful shows, often perceived as guilty pleasures, have in fact been responsible for mediating important conversations around issues of race, gender, and sexuality. This course is also a survey of reality tv, conceived simultaneously as an artifact and an archive of pop culture and mainstream politics. We will start with the "first" reality tv show An American Family, which aired in 1971, and examine the emergence of reality tv from genres of documentary and cinéma vérité (such as Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, Grey Gardens, and Candid Camera). We will then analyze the advent of so-called unscripted television of the 1990s and early 2000s with special attention to shows like The Real World, Queer Eye, Laguna Beach: The Real O.C., Judge Judy, and The Apprentice. We will also consider more contemporary shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians, RuPaul's Drag Race, The Real Housewives, and 90 Day Fiancé. Student interest will factor into our selection. Above all, students will develop practical skills of research and methodology. In addition viewing shows and reading theorists of identity and media, students will craft individual research projects about specific shows throughout the term, culminating in a symposium. (1830-1940, Theory)

Instructor(s): Brandon Truett     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 19940, ENGL 19940, GNSE 19940

MADD 10950. Filth as Genre. 100 Units.

Is "filth" a genre? This course examines literary texts from antiquity to today that have been dismissed as smut, pulp, and/or trash in either their contemporary moment or reception, and it asks how we might develop as a class a theory of filth. Syllabus materials will range from Catullus's sparrow poems to Richard Crashaw's excremental poetry to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre-labeled a "naughty book"-to contemporary objects such as: the romance novel (incl. the works of Melissa Blue, E.l. James, and Beverly Jenkins); film (John Waters' Trash Trilogy, Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls); and online fanfiction databases. The course also provides an introduction to genre theory: we will explore established literary categories, with attention to intertextuality and periodization, and consider the construction of genre more broadly. (Pre-1650, Theory)

Instructor(s): Beatrice Bradley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 19950, GNSE 19950

MADD 10992. Metapictures. 100 Units.

This course is based on an exhibition that was first staged at the Overseas Contemporary Art Terminal in Beijing in the fall of 2018, and subsequently re-enacted at the Royal Academy in Brussels in the spring of 2020. The exhibition explores "pictures within pictures," images that reflect on the nature of image-making, across a range of media and genres. A virtual version of the exhibition is available on the Prezi platform, and a physical installation, supported by the Smart Museum, will be installed in the Media Arts Data and Design Center (MADD). Visual materials for the course include paintings and drawings, diagrams, models of the visual process, image "atlases," multi-stable images, cinematic and literary representations of images nested within narratives. The readings for the course will include Michel Foucault on Velasquez's Las Meninas, Walter Benjamin on "dialectical images," C. S. Peirce on iconicity, Nelson Goodman on analog and digital codes, and Georges Didi-Huberman on Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Bilderatlas. Students will be encouraged to explore traditional examples of metapictures such as the Duck-Rabbit (canonized by Gombrich and Wittgenstein) or to investigate newly emergent forms of self-reflexive media. Guest lectures will be given by Patrick Jagoda on experimental games and Hillary Chute on comics and graphic narrative; these might be coordinated with the Media Aesthetics ore sequence in the fall term, which focuses on the question of the image.

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): This course is by consent only. Interested students should send a one-page letter describing their interest and preparation of the topic to Prof. Mitchell at wjtm@uchicago.edu.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 29992, CMST 37505, CMST 27505, ARTH 39992, ARTV 30022, ENGL 49992, ARTH 29992, ARTV 20022

MADD 11004. Afrofuturism. 100 Units.

This course focuses on audio-visual cultural productions that have been or might be considered under the rubric of "Afrofuturism," with particular attention to the aesthetic, social, political, and/or cultural contributions and interventions they make.

Instructor(s): Kara Keeling     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 21004

MADD 11005. Problems in the Study of Gender and Sexuality: Media Wars. 100 Units.

In our contemporary moment, we have become accustomed to terms such as 'counter-terrorism' that signal an effort to resist internal and external threats, and those suggesting that we live in an age of 'post-truth' dominated by 'corporate-media,' 'fake news,' and 'fact-challenged' journalism. Taking this platform as our starting place, this class explores how these terms and their use have been gendered; have situated both gender and sexuality as either weapons of resistance or objects of destruction. This class will be historically organized insofar as we will begin our discussion with ways that media - broadly conceived to include cinema, print and visual-cultural forms, television, and the internet - have aimed to 'counter' patriarchal, heteronormative, and hegemonic systems of representation of gender and sexuality.

Instructor(s): J. Wild; L. Janson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 40400, GNSE 31105, CMST 20400, GNSE 11005

MADD 11015. Media, Culture & Society. 100 Units.

This course is a theoretical and ethnographic overview of past, current, and future directions of anthropological research on the mass media. We study issues as diverse as projects of media representation and cultural conservation among indigenous peoples, the relationship of mass media to nationalism across the world, the social life of journalism and news making in an era of new technologies and ownership consolidation, and current debates over the role of mass media.

Instructor(s): D. Boyer     Terms Offered: Summer. Should be hidden from Summer 2018
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 21015

MADD 11314. Fluxus and the Question of Media. 100 Units.

The course investigates the international Fluxus network of the 1960's and 70's from a media perspective. Often identified with the concept of "intermedia" launched in a 1966 text by artist, writer and publisher Dick Higgins, Fluxus artists seemed at pain to distinguish their work from the multimedia or gesamtkunstwerk approaches of the Happening artists, seeking instead to formulate a mode of working between or even beyond media. Underpinned by a desire to pass beyond the work of art itself, this was a complex position that had profound implications for their approaches to technologies and practices such as film, video, computing, sound/music, theatre, poetry and image-making. We will try to map the various facets of this position, with particular emphasis on its relation to another key Fluxus concept: the work as event.

Instructor(s): I. Blom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course does not satisfy the general education in the arts requirement. Students must attend 1st class to confirm enrollment.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21314, CMST 37804, CMST 27804, ARTH 31314

MADD 11315. Introduction to Art, Technology, and Media. 100 Units.

The course gives an introduction to the relationship between art, media, and technology, as articulated in art practice, media theory, and art theory/history. The key focus is the relationship between 20th-century art and so-called "new media" (from photography, film, radio, TV to computers and digital technologies), but older instances of art- and media-historical perspectives will also be discussed. The objective of the course is to give insight into the historical exchanges between art and technological development, as well as critical tools for discussing the concept of the medium and the relationship between art, sensation/perception, visuality, and mediation. The course will also function as an introduction to the fields of media aesthetics and media archaeology.

Instructor(s): I. Blom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course does not satisfy the general education in the arts requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27815, ARTH 31315, ARTH 21315, CMST 37815

MADD 11320. Philippe Parreno's Media Temporalities. 100 Units.

In the 2013 exhibition "Anywhere, Anywhere Out of the World, the French artist Philippe Parreno (b. 1964) turned the monumental space of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris into a living, evolving organism, where music, light, films, images, and performances led visitors through a precisely choreographed journey of discovery, based on the idiosyncratic body of work that he had created since the early 1990s. This course is devoted to an in-depth study of Parreno's work and the highly original form of media thinking that informs it. Rather than focusing on the properties of distinct media or on multimedial forms or presentation, his works explore the new forms of life and social existence that result from the various ways in which 20th- and 21st-century media technologies store, manipulate, and produce time. This is a form of thinking and artistic creation that addresses the realities of formats, programs, and platforms rather than media apparatuses and messages, and that engages everything from architecture and design to social situations, natural worlds, and virtual beings. (The course will be taught in collaboration with Jörn Schafaff).

Instructor(s): I. Blom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This course does not satisfy the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21320, CMST 23412, ARTH 31320, CMST 33412

MADD 12005. Filming the Police. 100 Units.

Filming the police" as a research topic has been taken up in a range of disciplines and subfields from legal and information studies to surveillance and police studies. In film and media studies, the 1991 George Holliday video of the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD played an important and controversial role in the formation of documentary studies as a subfield and in debates about indexicality, the nature of photographic evidence, and realism-issues at the core of the discipline. While this course will survey the topic of the filming of police from multiple perspectives, it aims to construct a specifically disciplinary framework for research on police violence. Topics to include dashboard and body cameras; surveillance, sousveillance, and the regime of visibility; investigative and citizen journalism; records management and archiving; evidence in court proceedings and in the public sphere; police, media, and ideology; the ethics and politics of looking at black suffering; art about police violence; filming the police in an international frame.

Instructor(s): S.Skvirsky     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37005, HMRT 37005, CMST 27005, HMRT 27005

MADD 12043. The Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence. 100 Units.

With the emergence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney, the production of computer-generated content has become accessible to a wide range of users and use cases. Knowledge institutions are particularly challenged to find adequate responses to changing notions of authorship as the mainstreaming of 'artificial' texts, audio-visual artifacts, and code is transforming our paradigms of communication in real-time. This course offers a survey of scholarship from the nascent field of critical AI studies to investigate the impact of AI, machine learning, and big data on knowledge production, representation, and consumption. In addition to theoretical discussions, we will conduct research-creation experiments aimed at documenting and evaluating emerging methods of AI-augmented content creation across text, image, and sound. Prospective students should demonstrate a substantial interest in media art and design and its connections to digital humanities, critical theory, and pedagogy. Experience with artistic and/or engineering practice is a plus. Please submit a 300 word max statement of interest to uhl@uchicago.edu by12/22 in order to be considered for enrollment.

Instructor(s): Andre Uhl     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): HIPS 26043, KNOW 36043, CHSS 36043, KNOW 26043, CMST 36043, MACS 36043, ANTH 36043, CMST 26043, ANTH 26043

MADD 12079. Mass Media in Semiotic Perspective. 100 Units.

Mass media are commonly understood as channels for public information, expression, and debate. Yet, mass media technologies also serve governmental and corporate actors as instruments for shaping public opinion and behavior. In this undergraduate course, we will explore this and related problems from a semiotic perspective, with special attention to the dynamic relations between state, market, culture, and language at work in projects of mass communication. We will study several theories and empirical cases (both historical and contemporary) of mass mediation. Topics will include the role of mass media in nation-state formation and control; the role of mass media in cultural and linguistic assimilation; and group subjectivity and solidarity within media publics.

Instructor(s): Christopher Bloechl
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22079, LING 22079

MADD 12151. Anthropology of Media. 100 Units.

This course follows a historical arc from the advent of analog media in the early 20th century to the rise of contemporary networked digital culture with the aim of introducing students to major themes and theoretical questions at the intersection of media theory and anthropology of media. We will pay particular attention to transformations of the body, social, individual, and warfare in expressions of the culture of mediation and the mediation of culture as we consider technologies of transportation, communication, production, consumption, distribution, and exchange. Readings from the course will cover a broad intellectual terrain that combines seminal anthropological texts with arguments from media theory and the philosophy of technology. We will also be exploring a number of films.

Instructor(s): Michael Fisch     Terms Offered: Autumn. Autumn 2019
Prerequisite(s): This course qualifies as a "Discovering Anthropology" selection for Anthropology majors
Note(s): This course is designed specifically for undergraduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22151

MADD 12208. Posthuman Becoming. 100 Units.

This course introduces recent developments and advanced approaches in critical posthumanist thought. We will explore emerging theories and practices that renegotiate the human condition through critical inquiry into posthuman desires and the complicated relationship between human and non-human 'others,' including animals, plants and micro-organisms, waste and toxins, artificial life, and hyperobjects. By engaging diverse viewpoints that map the stakes of a non-anthropocentric politics of culture, such as new materialism, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism, but also eco-feminism, queer performativity, and Indigenous epistemology, we will explore emerging techniques of mediation, communication, and representation that surrender to the relational identities of a posthuman becoming. A central premise of this exploration are post-disciplinary ways of knowing that make such imaginaries visible: in addition to discussing a substantial body of contemporary scholarship from the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences, the course includes a studio module that introduces a variety of research-creation methodologies for experimentation with curatorial, artistic, and activist practices.

Instructor(s): Andre Uhl     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 30702, ENST 22207, ANTH 32208, KNOW 32208

MADD 12303. Race and Indigeneity in Video Games. 100 Units.

This class will read key texts in critical video game studies to consider how race, diaspora, and Indigeneity shape the code and the machines that structure the games we play. In addition to critical readings by scholars in Indigenous studies, Black feminism, settler colonial studies, and video game studies including Joanne Barker, Christine Sharpe, and Chris Patterson, we may also read creative works by Gabrielle Zevin and Elissa Washuta among others to consider how narratives about society and identity transform in relation to video games. Games and/or franchises to be discussed will include Norco, Umurangi Generation, Assassin's Creed, Undertale, and Spiritfarer among others

Instructor(s): Jodi Byrd     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 23200

MADD 12312. Virtual Theaters. 100 Units.

This course probes the nature and limits of theater by exploring a range of theatrical texts from various centuries whose relation to performance is either partially or fully virtual, including philosophical dialogues, closet dramas, drama on social media, remote online theater on platforms like Zoom, algorithmic and AI theater, mixed reality performance, and transmedia performance. One unit of the course attends to experiments in remote theater since the COVID-19 pandemic. (20th/21st)

Instructor(s): John Muse     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 22312, TAPS 20312, ENGL 32312, TAPS 32312

MADD 12320. Critical Videogame Studies. 100 Units.

Since the 1960s, games have arguably blossomed into the world's most profitable and experimental medium. This course attends specifically to video games, including popular arcade and console games, experimental art games, and educational serious games. Students will analyze both the formal properties and sociopolitical dynamics of video games. Readings by theorists such as Ian Bogost, Roger Caillois, Alenda Chang, Nick Dyer‐Witheford, Mary Flanagan, Jane McGonigal, Soraya Murray, Lisa Nakamura, Amanda Phillips, and Trea Andrea Russworm will help us think about the growing field of video game studies. Students will have opportunities to learn about game analysis and apply these lessons to a collaborative game design project. Students need not be technologically gifted or savvy, but a wide-ranging imagination and interest in digital media or game cultures will make for a more exciting quarter. This is a 2021-22 Signature Course in the College. (Literary/Critical Theory)

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda     Terms Offered: Autumn Summer
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27916, SIGN 26038, ENGL 12320, GNSE 22320

MADD 12350. Black Game Theory. 100 Units.

This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream "AAA" games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda and Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 32350, CDIN 32350, CMST 22350, RDIN 32350, ENGL 22352, ENGL 32352, RDIN 22350

MADD 12351. The Sonic Image. 100 Units.

The Sonic Image offers a unique opportunity to work with three senior researchers exploring the bridge-making and sense delimiting articulations of sound & sight together. We will examine the potency of sound in a world largely understood through its visualization as a world picture. Readings in sound studies, visual studies & media studies explore sound, sounds that evoke pictures, the forensics of sound, sound art, & films including The Conversation, Blow Out & Amour. Each faculty collaborator brings distinct interests to the course. WJT Mitchell's renowned theorization of images naturally extends to his theorizing the possibility of the sonic image. Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan's commitment to the value of earwitnessing asks the listener to extend forensic knowledge to the very core of what it means to be a human being in the world. For the course, Hamdan will develop a workshop comprising a series of practical exercises that experiment with the conditions of testimony or claim making, enabling an exploration of how the law come to its truths and how can we use sonic imagination to trouble & contest established modes of enacting justice. Performance scholar, Hannah B Higgins, examines how musical notation, performance & sound bear on the relationships between sound & vision in recent art practices. An intervention from composer Janice Misurell-Mitchell will add a dimension of musical testimony to our investigation.

Instructor(s): W.J.T. Mitchell, Hannah Higgins, Lawrence Abu Hamdan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Open to all levels with consent of the instructors. All interested students should please email the instructor (wjtm@uchicago.edu) a one-page statement of interest, explaining why they want to take the course and what they will bring to it.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 22351, TAPS 32351, ARTH 22351, ARTV 20351, ENGL 42351, CMLT 22351, ENGL 22351, ARTH 32351, CMLT 42351, ARTV 40351

MADD 12355. Sounding Bodies. 100 Units.

This course will situate sound studies and social aesthetics in the corporeal techniques of expanded listening, particularly when the artistic medium of sound crosses the boundaries of the brain, body, architectural space, and material objects. As auditory culture has moved from the concert hall and music venue into galleries, museums, outdoor public spaces, and digital contexts, cultural practitioners have been prompted to ask how bodies perceive, understand, and evaluate the sounds they encounter. With a rich literature on sound, space, and embodiment, this course will not only survey sonic works in music and the gallery arts but also the ways that technological advancements have changed performance, exhibition, and the perceptual capabilities of bodies.

Instructor(s): Whitney Johnson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 18355

MADD 12360. Introduction to Video Game Music Studies. 100 Units.

This course will offer an overview of current studies in video game music, a relatively new and interdisciplinary academic field. Through reading, listening, and playing, students will explore how and why music is incorporated into video games, as well as the relationship between games and other kinds of musical multimedia. Students will also have the opportunity to compose their own music. No background in music is required. This course counts towards the Media Theory requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Julianne Grasso     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 12422. Hearing Popular Music. 100 Units.

For decades, popular music has been the soundtrack to many Americans' lives. This class explores the structure, function, and impact of a range of vernacular musics from the 20th and 21st centuries. Our approach to popular music will be by turns historical, analytical, and sociological. Students will learn about formal designs of pop songs, from verse-chorus to much more elaborate structures, along with antecedents in the Great American Songbook tradition. Students will learn to analyze the harmonic and melodic conventions in various genres, and also spend significant time with groove analysis and design. Finally, the class will interrogate the sociological relevance of vernacular musics, weaving in discussions of relevant social issues from radio play to popularity, and from subcultural appeal to racial identity. This class is open to anyone who listens carefully and with passion, and who wants to grow their ability to write about music. Experience as a practitioner of any type of music and/or a passing knowledge of music theory will be helpful, but it is not necessary to read notated music for this course.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Iverson     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26090, MUSI 25422

MADD 12500. Video Games and Language. 100 Units.

Video games are written in code. They are inscribed into a computer's memory. Critics, designers, and enthusiasts alike refer to their mechanics as "verbs," like Super Mario's JUMP or Minecraft's BUILD. Sometimes, like other kinds of media objects, video games themselves are referred to as "texts." Starting from these premises, this course will investigate why it makes sense to use this linguistic vocabulary to describe video games. We will consider what theories of language have to teach us about video games, and what video games have to teach us about language itself and the worlds it reveals to us. Readings will include philosophers of language like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, digital media scholars like McKenzie Wark and Bo Ruberg, and literary writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Clarice Lispector. This will be a reading- and writing-heavy course: class meetings will consist of discussion of readings, and assignments will generally take the form of written responses and critical essays. Video games (or recorded video game playthroughs) may be assigned alongside films, video clips, and podcasts at low or no cost to students. This class does not require any special knowledge of video games or gaming culture! An interest in the topic is all that's needed to succeed.

Instructor(s): P. Fiorilli     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 12800. Theories of Media. 100 Units.

This course will explore the concept of media and mediation in very broad terms, looking not only at modern technical media and mass media, but at the very idea of a medium as a means of communication, a set of institutional practices, and a habitat in which images proliferate and take on a "life of their own." The course will deal as much with ancient as with modern media, with writing, sculpture, and painting as well as television and virtual reality. Readings will include classic texts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Cratylus, Aristotle's Poetics, and modern texts such as Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, Regis Debray's Mediology, and Friedrich Kittler's Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. We will explore questions such as the following: What is a medium? What is the relation of technology to media? How do media affect, simulate, and stimulate sensory experiences? What sense can we make of concepts such as the "unmediated" or "immediate"? How do media become intelligible and concrete in the form of "metapictures" or exemplary instances, as when a medium reflects on itself (films about films, paintings about painting)? Is there a system of media? How do we tell one medium from another, and how do they become "mixed" in hybrid, intermedial formations? We will also look at recent films such as The Matrix and Existenz that project fantasies of a world of total mediation and hyperreality. This course includes a weekly screening and discussion section.

Instructor(s): W. J. T. Mitchell     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Any 100-level ARTH or DOVA course, or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 30800, ARTH 35900, ENGL 32800, CMST 27800, ENGL 12800, CMST 37800, ARTH 25900, ARTV 20400

MADD 12830. Indigenous Media and the Politics of Representation. 100 Units.

This undergraduate seminar explores popular representations of Indigenous nations and issues across various modes of media such as film, photography, digital platforms, and museum installations. With a particular focus on media forms produced by Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and curators we will analyze these narratives through frameworks of self-determination, resistance, visual sovereignty, and relational futures. Throughout the course, we will consider Indigenous media production(s) in relation to the broader social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they circulate in North America and beyond. The material covered in this course will acquaint students with an introduction to the contemporary debates surrounding Indigenous media and representation as they intersect with the larger fields of visual anthropology and Indigenous Studies.

Instructor(s): Teresa Montoya
Equivalent Course(s): ANTH 22830, CRES 23830

MADD 12904. Ethics in the Digital Age. 100 Units.

An investigation of the applied ethics of technology in the 21st century. Fundamental debates in applied ethics are paired with recent technological case studies. Topics covered include moral dilemmas, privacy, consent, human enhancement, distributed responsibility, and technological risks. Case studies include self-driving cars, geo-engineering, Internet privacy, genetic enhancement, Twitter, autonomous warfare, nuclear war, and the Matrix. (A) (I)

Instructor(s): D. Moerner     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26071, PARR 21900, PHIL 29904, PHIL 39904

MADD 12910. Virtual Ethnography: Encounters in Mediation. 100 Units.

From everyday social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and WeChat, to more complex real-time immersive social and gaming sites, virtual realms are propagating at a fantastic rate while transforming what it means to live and interact in the physical world. As such virtual world, communities, and spaces increasingly command our attention, time, and money, scholars from various fields have begun to tackle questions concerning the ethics, logics, patterns, and social specificity of the virtual through experimental forms of virtual ethnography. This advanced undergraduate course introduces students to some these recent ethnographies and corresponding theoretical interventions into the nature of collective techno-life within virtual realms. Students will build on this material in order to develop an ethnographic inquiry into a virtual world of their choosing. In so doing, they will work individually and as a class through the processes of pre-field planning, fieldwork, and post-field analysis and writing.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre and Michael Fisch      Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor required; email Professors Fisch and Lamarre a paragraph long description about what you bring and what you hope to get out of this seminar.
Note(s): Enrollment limit: 25
Equivalent Course(s): CDIN 27910, EALC 27910, CMST 27910, ANTH 27910

MADD 12980. Planetary Media. 100 Units.

This course is about how planets are imagined through media as environmental and social systems, with a focus on exchanges between science fictional "world building" practices and scientific ways of knowing. We study the history of science fiction and science borrowing from one another to explain how Earth and other planets work, and how both fields have used media to depict planets. When science fiction creates imaginary worlds, are its tools similar or different to those used by exoplanet astronomers or Mars rover teams? How do these shared planetary imaginaries affect the public's understanding of the climate crisis? Examples will be drawn from both fiction and nonfiction, and both technical and aesthetic media, including climate models, video games, television, pulp magazines, and film. The course culminates with a creative, group planetary world building assignment.

Instructor(s): Katherine Buse     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28910

MADD 13012. Caricature. 100 Units.

Though usually traced to Renaissance experiments with drawing deformed heads, caricature as a mode of parody, humor and invective has various roots, in ancient comedy, ancient modern physiognomy and psychology, the literature and (pseudo)science of social types, and above all in the rise of a public sphere of newspaper readers and broadsheet buyers avid for the ridiculing of public figures, beloved or otherwise. We approach caricature broadly, considering its inverse relation with a neoclassical aesthetics of the ideal body, its theorization around historically significant moments like 1848 and 1939, its relation to technological developments like the newspaper comic and the animated cartoon, and most recently, the viral meme.

Instructor(s): Andrei Pop     Terms Offered: TBD. Will not be offered 21-22 or 22-23
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 35012, SCTH 35012

MADD 13020. Opera Across Media. 100 Units.

Open to all undergraduates. Over the course of the last hundred and twenty years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds-media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be "a grand opera," and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, "Opera across Media" explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst's Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti's Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli's La traviata (1981), De Mille's Carmen (1915), Losey's Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini's E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short "think piece" midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

Instructor(s): Martha Feldman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Open to all undergraduates
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 25020, SIGN 26058, CMST 24617, ITAL 25020, GNSE 25020, TAPS 26516

MADD 13044. Generations, Gender, and Genre in Korean Fiction & TV Drama. 100 Units.

The seminar analyzes the issues of generations, gender, and genres that arise from a selection of popular literary and television dramas from modern and contemporary Korea. The selection for the course is marked by the creative contributions of Korean women as novelists, scriptwriters, directors, among others. It includes prose fiction by renowned authors such as Park Wan-sŏ (1931-2011), Han Kang (1970- ), and Cho Nam-joo (1978- ), as well as television series like Mr. Sunshine (2018; scripted by Kim Eun-sook), The Red Sleeve (2021; dir. by Chŏng Chi-in; adapted the 2017 novel by from Kang Mi-kang), and My Liberation Notes (2022; written by Park Hae-yeong). Through a blend of close textual analysis and historical contextualization, the course aims to uncover the ways in which the gendered and generational identities of these creators might have helped certain configurations of concerns, needs, and aspirations saliently emerge in response to social, cultural, historical, and political currents of their time. [Consent Required; No prior knowledge of the Korean language is necessary]

Instructor(s): K. Choi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20136, EALC 33044, EALC 23044, GNSE 30136

MADD 13133. Queering Visual Culture in Modern India. 100 Units.

This course will examine the process of queering visual cultures in modern India, whereby it interrogates how popular visual cultures (primarily film and advertisements) have upheld normative regimes of gender/sexuality as well as how they have subverted, and 'queered' these regimes. It also asks how expressions of gender and sexuality have been shaped by the contingent and contentious politics of postcolonial India. This course will map three kinds of gender/sexuality visualities in Indian popular culture-ideal woman/femininity, men and masculinities, and queer identity and sexuality. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which films intervene in and shape histories of gendered representation, notably with regard to the figure of the courtesan or 'tawa'if' as mediated through blockbuster films. Similarly, we will look at how specific political and social moments construct particular gendered or sexualized representations. These include: the figure of the "mother" during India's nation-building years (1950s); the trope of the "angry young man" set against the country's emergency-era politics and massive unemployment (1970s); and the sexualized male hero, as expressed by the superstar Shah Rukh Khan in his films and adverts (2000s). For the final part of the course, we will consider queer visualities, and explore how gay and trans characters and identities have been represented in a more contemporary sense.

Instructor(s): Borah, Jenisha     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23133, CMST 21133, SALC 23133

MADD 13238. Documenting State Violence. 100 Units.

Visual media have become central to activism against state violence. Throughout the past century, activists have deployed new technologies to bear witness to atrocity, record evidence, raise awareness, and promote justice. At the same time, media consistently fail to deliver lasting transformations and can even enable violence rather than counteracting it. In this class, we will explore how media practices support, undermine, and complicate efforts against state violence. How have activists employed documentary evidence?What assumptions have they made about communication, truth, difference, and justice? How do media frame what counts as violence? What are the politics of recording,seeing,and showing harm? What are the possibilities and limitations of emerging digital technologies?We will explore these issues across a range of media-such as photography, documentary film, comics, holograms, satellite and drone imagery, virtual reality experiences, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence-and case studies, including the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the U.S. War on Terror, the Syrian civil war, the Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous resurgence in North America, and environmental violence in Guatemala. Students will be encouraged to think critically and creatively through assignments involving media analysis and media production.

Instructor(s): Sasha Crawford-Holland, Graduate Lecturer, Pozen Center for Human Rights     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): The class will have a screening component Mondays, from 3:30-6:30 p.m. in Cobb 307.
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 25238, CMST 25238, HMRT 25238

MADD 13275. Justice: Race, Digital Media, & Human Rights Activism. 100 Units.

How have digital media platforms influenced and motivated recent developments in human rights activism? Can literature, art, and film contribute to political debate and systemic change as much as on-the-ground protest? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore a variety of ways that grassroots activists, writers, artists, and filmmakers have made inventive use of digital media to aid in political struggles for refugee rights, gender equality, environmental justice, police abolition, data protection and privacy, and an economy founded on fair labor practices. We will be especially attuned to how their practices advocate for communities of color and other marginalized groups, who are disproportionately impacted by regimes of surveillance, state violence, and capitalist expansion. In addition to resources and tools created by digital transparency activists, we will examine how cultural practitioners make political interventions and claims with literature, art, media, and other nontraditional forms of engagement. These cultural case studies will include films produced with iPhones and drones that document the global refugee crisis, digital poems concerning discrimination against immigrants, new media art installations that critique algorithm-driven predictive policing, and border-crossing robotic sculptures, among others.

Instructor(s): Maria A. Dikcis, Pozen Center for Human Rights, ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow      Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CRES 33275, HMRT 23275, HMRT 33275, CRES 23275

MADD 13303. Chris Marker. 100 Units.

Chris Marker (1921-2012) is one of the most influential and important filmmakers to emerge in the post-war era in France, yet he remains relatively unknown to a wider audience. Marker's multifaceted work encompasses writing, photography, filmmaking, videography, gallery installation, television, and digital multimedia. He directed over 60 films and is known foremost for his "essay films," a hybrid of documentary and personal reflection, which he invigorated if not invented with films like Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia, 1958) or Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983). His most famous film, La Jetée (1962), his only (science) fiction film made up almost entirely of black-and-white still photographs, was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). In 1990, he created his first multi-media installation, Zapping Zone, and in 1997 he experimented with the format of the CD-Rom to create a multi-layered, multimedia memoir (Immemory). In 2008, he continued his venture into digital spaces with Ouvroir, realized on the platform of Second Life. Marker was a passionate traveler who documented the journeys he took, the people he met, and revolutionary upheavals at home and afar. We will follow Marker's travels through time, space, and media, during which we will also encounter artists with whom he crossed paths, with whom he collaborated, or who were inspired by his work.

Instructor(s): Dominique Bluher     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20032, CMST 26303, FNDL 26102, CMST 36303

MADD 13403. Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media. 100 Units.

Cybernetic Futures in Digital Media" explores the intersection of cyberpunk aesthetics, feminist theory, and digital media. Cyberpunk, characterized by its high-tech, dystopian visions and advanced cybernetics, serves as the course's foundation. We will examine its impact on fine art, moving images, creative writing, and video games. The course will focus on evolving gendered embodiments in cyberpunk, from "masculine" identities centered on military strength to androgynous portrayals exploring emotional depth and resilience. We will analyze these themes and explore how cyberpunk and digital feminisms shape contemporary digital and artistic thought.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdorfer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23403

MADD 13450. Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms and Human Rights. 100 Units.

Algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are a new source of global power, extending into nearly every aspect of life. Recently, The High Commissioner for Human Rights called for states to place moratoriums on AI until it is compliant with human rights. This course will take the first steps towards developing a human rights-based approach for analyzing algorithms and AI. What makes an algorithm discriminatory, and is the algorithm the right place to look? Is algorithmic bias avoidable? Does human review of algorithm sufficient, and in what cases? Do predictive models violate privacy even if they do not use or disclose someone's specific data? When does nudging violate political rights? How does algorithmic decision-making impact democracy? We will closely read Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism on tour through the sociotechnical world of AI, alongside scholarship in law, philosophy, and computer science to breathe a human rights approach to algorithmic life. We will explore analytic toolkits from science and technology studies (STS) and the philosophy of technology to probe the relationship between worldmaking and technology through social, political, and technical lenses. No prior background in artificial intelligence, algorithms, or computer science is needed, although some familiarity with human-rights philosophy or practice may be helpful.

Instructor(s): Austin Clyde, Pozen Center for Human Rights Graduate Lecturer     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 23450, CMSC 10450

MADD 13517. Introduction to Critical Spatial Media: Visualizing Urban, Environmental, and Planetary Change. 100 Units.

This course introduces critical theories and techniques for visualizing interconnected transformations of urban, environmental, and planetary systems amidst the pressures of climate change, urbanization, and global economies of capitalism. Weekly lectures will introduce major themes and theoretical debates, paired with hands-on lab tutorials exploring a selection of methods in conventional and experimental geographic visualization. Thematically, the course will be organized around critical interpretations of the Anthropocene, a concept designating the epoch in which anthropogenic activities are recognized as the dominant force of planetary climatic and ecological change. We will present these interpretations through modules structured around different conceptual paradigms and alternative epochal designations (e.g. the Urbanocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene). Through weekly lab exercises and a final, synthetic project, the course will move from critically analyzing prevalent theoretical frameworks, geospatial data, and associated visualization techniques to creatively visualizing critical alternatives. Students will learn how to construct visual narratives through a variety of spatial media (e.g. maps, diagrams, visual timelines), scales (e.g. bodies, neighborhoods, landscapes, the planetary), and techniques/platforms (e.g. GIS, web mapping, basic programming language tools, and vector/raster visualization programs).

Instructor(s): Alexander Arroyo, Grga Basic     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 23517, ARCH 23517, ENST 23517, ARTV 20665

MADD 14109. Machine Learning at the Archive. 100 Units.

In "An Archival Impulse," Hal Foster describes the archive as "found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private." This is a hybrid seminar / workshop course that brings together making, researching and collecting with the goal of expanding the discourse around archives to address machine learning. Foster's set of tangled binaries provide a foundation on which to build a formal and critical inquiry into the procedural, technological and institutional pressures involved in working with machine learning, particularly as an individual researcher or artist. Topics include: How do the datasets used for machine learning correspond to or differ from traditional physical archives? How does the speculative discourse around the potential for artificial intelligence inform data collection and usage? How has the archive's problematic history of informing and feeding on various "-isms" translated to the digital age and how do we respond to that situation? How can art be used to investigate or interfere with all of the above?

Instructor(s): Cameron Mankin     Terms Offered: Autumn

MADD 14110. Digital Cinema. 100 Units.

Since the 1970s, movies have become increasingly dependent on digital technologies. This course explores a range of issues related to the digitization of cinema's production, distribution, and exhibition, including the cultural contexts and aesthetic practices surrounding these technological shifts as well as their experiential and political dimensions. In particular, we will explore such topics as digital cinematography's relation to cinematic realism, emerging trends in editing practices, the political implications of digital special effects, and the ways that other digital media influence cinematic techniques. Texts discussed include works by Lev Manovich, Stephen Prince, Kristen Whissel, Hito Steyerl, Steven Shaviro, and Vivian Sobchack. Screenings include works by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Agnes Varda, Bong Joon-Ho, Michael Bay, Brad Bird, and Leos Carax.

Note(s): This course does not satisfy the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27110

MADD 14204. Media Ecology: Embodiment & Software. 100 Units.

Media ecology examines how the structure and content of our media environments-online and offline, in words, images, sounds, and textures-affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; or alternatively, media ecology investigates the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter. At stake are issues about agency-human or material-and about determinism-how does society or culture interact with or shape its technologies, or vice versa? This course investigates theories of media ecology by exploring systems of meanings that humans embody (cultural, social, ecological) in conjunction with the emerging field of software studies about the cultural, political, social, and aesthetic impacts of software (e.g., code, interaction, interface). In our actual and virtual environments, how do we understand performing our multiple human embodiments in relation to other bodies (organism or machine) in pursuit of social or political goals?

Instructor(s): M. Browning     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28452, LLSO 27801, HUMA 25202, CMST 25204, HIPS 25203

MADD 14205. Computers, Minds, Intelligence & Data. 100 Units.

How are we co-evolving with our machines? How do we teach ourselves and our computers how to learn? What kinds of human intelligences do we promote in liberal education in comparison with artificial intelligence(s)? Through our distributed cognition with tools of all kinds, as we engage in participatory culture using digital computers and networks, we provide information that generates the basis for big (and small) data. At the crux of our investigation-on the one hand into reading and conversation and on the other hand into algorithms and information theory-are issues about human action and the multifaceted agency of the universal Turing machine-as mobile phone, laptop, internet, robot.

Instructor(s): J. Foley     Terms Offered: Winter. Winter 2021
Equivalent Course(s): HUMA 25205, HIPS 25205

MADD 14207. Mindfulness: Experience and Media. 100 Units.

How do we experience media (of all kinds) with (or without) awareness? Methods of mindfulness offer principles and practices of awareness focusing on mind, body, and embodied mind. Mindfulness (a flexible, moment-to-moment, non-judging awareness) is an individual experience and at the same time, practices of mindfulness can be a mode of public health intervention. Mindfulness involves social epistemologies of how we know (or don't know) collectively, as we interact with immediate sensory experience as well as with mediated communication technologies generating various sorts of virtual realities (from books to VR). In addition to readings and discussions, this course teaches embodied practices of attention and awareness through the curriculum of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

Instructor(s): M. Browning     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HUMA 25207, HIPS 25207, TAPS 20507, HLTH 25207

MADD 14350. Videogame Level Design. 100 Units.

Level design is the process of creating interactive virtual environments and scenarios. Through the deliberate placement of game assets, a level designer can evoke emotions and a sense of flow for the player. Similarly, in architecture, considerations are made into how aesthetics and form impact the experience of built environments. In this course, we will explore the level design of 3D games through an architectural lens and investigate how these conditions incentivize gameplay. With a focus on theories and techniques, we will develop a language to examine and analyze virtual worlds and the purpose behind their design. Course materials include foundational architecture texts, writings on games, talks by practicing designers, and gameplay.

Instructor(s): William Chyr     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 14350

MADD 14355. True Crime and Infamy in Early Modern Japan. 100 Units.

The recent popularization of "true crime" in film, television shows, and podcasts has prompted critical discussions about the ethics of mixing documentary with entertainment and fact with fiction, as well as concerns about whose narratives are given public attention as others are ignored. Using these considerations as a starting point, this course examines some of the mainstays of the genre of "true crime"-scandal, violence, disaster, law, and the supernatural-in fiction and theater in early modern Japan in order to trace the fluctuating relationship between news, fiction, and performance over the course of the Edo period. This course examines the many ways that works of literature and stage were already deeply invested in these tropes of rumor, scandal, sensation, spectacle, and documentary long before the advent of regularly circulating printed newspapers in Meiji Japan, as well as how these existing configurations of sense and sensationalism informed later developments in media and fiction. The goal of this course is for students to gain not only a breadth of knowledge about various literary and theatrical forms in early modern Japan but also a critical awareness of how early modern spectacles of infamy or violence intersected with categories of class, gender, sexuality, and disability to transform some figures into targets of sympathy and others into paragons of villainy or horror. All readings will be available in English.

Instructor(s): M Van Wyk     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): The course is designed for undergraduate students but graduate participation is welcome with advanced consultation.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 24355, EALC 34355

MADD 14400. Living our Bodies with Technology. 100 Units.

We live with and in our bodies, and we cannot experience the world without them. Yet, most of the time, we remain unaware of our bodies and how they are shaped by the technological infrastructures we inhabit. This course explores the complex ways in which technologies-broadly understood-mediate and shape our experience of the body. We will engage with philosophical and anthropological perspectives on the various conditions of the human body and examine how these conditions are influenced by technology and the modern configurations of our lived environments. We will explore questions such as: How do brain scans and real-time ultrasounds shape our experience of our inner selves? Is ADHD a timeless condition, or is it a product of new ways of being and knowing the world? How are organ transplants reshaping our understanding of what makes a person whole? How do artists use virtual reality to tell stories of living with such conditions? How do fitness trackers alter our understanding of well-being? Through critical reflection on different modes of knowing our bodies and communicating lived experiences, we will examine how technologies both reinforce and challenge traditional conceptions of the body, as well as create entirely new ways of living within them. Readings will be drawn from medical anthropology, phenomenology, media theory, and the philosophy of science.

Instructor(s): D. Foerster, E. Mireshghi     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Third or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 27804, BPRO 24400

MADD 14510. Kawaii (cuteness) culture in Japan and the world. 100 Units.

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Instructor(s): Nisha Kommattam     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 24510, GNSE 24511, EALC 24520, CMLT 24510

MADD 14570. Special Topics: Animation Theory. 100 Units.

Due to the ubiquity and pervasiveness of animation in contemporary media ecologies, recent years have seen a surge of interest in animation theory. But animation theory presents a vast and turbulent domain of inquiry, because animation may be narrowly defined as a set of objects or techniques or broadly conceptualized to embrace questions about life and death, about more-than-human animals, artificial life, and animism, for instance. This topics course has two aims. The first aim is to provide an overview of the key problematics of and approaches to animation theory in a global and historical perspective. The second aim is to develop tools for doing animation theory in a more localized manner. To this end, course will highlight theories of character and characterization with an emphasis on how the inherent tension between individual and type in animation affects our understanding race and racism.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Not offered in 2023-24.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 14570, EALC 14570

MADD 14613. God of Manga: Osamu Tezuka's "Phoenix," Buddhism, and Post-WWII Manga and Anime. 100 Units.

How can the Buddhist axiom "All Life is Sacred" describe a universe that contains the atrocities of WWII? Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy and father of modern Japanese animation, wrestled with this problem over decades in his science fiction epic Phoenix (Hi no Tori), celebrated as the philosophical masterpiece of modern manga. Through a close reading of Phoenix and related texts, this course explores the challenges genocide and other atrocities pose to traditional forms of ethics, and how we understand the human species and our role in nature. The course will also examine the flowering of manga after WWII, how manga authors bypassed censorship to help people understand the war and its causes, and the role manga and anime have played in Japan's global contributions to politics, science, medicine, technology, techno-utopianism, environmentalism, ethics, theories of war and peace, global popular culture, and contemporary Buddhism. Readings will be mainly manga, and the final paper will have a creative option including the possibility of creating graphic work.

Instructor(s): A. Palmer
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 24613, FNDL 24613, KNOW 24613, HIST 34613, RLST 28613

MADD 14723. Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos. 100 Units.

The stark black and white of Madonna's "Vogue" and the pinks and sparkles of "Material Girl." The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment's Aespa. Since MTV's advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music's audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.

Instructor(s): Paula Harper     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 20135, MUSI 27423

MADD 14805. Religion in Anime and Japanese Pop Culture. 100 Units.

How does Spirited Away reflect teachings of Japanese Buddhism and Shinto? Or what about Neon Genesis Evangelion? What can pop culture tell us about religion? In this course, we will consider what Japanese religions are (and are not) by looking at their representations in popular cultural forms of past and present. Sources are drawn from a range of popular cultural forms including anime and manga, but also literature, artistic performances, visual arts, and live-action movies. The course covers foundational aspects of Japanese religious life through non-traditional sources like Bleach, The Tale of Genji, and Your Name. At the end of the course, students will be able to speak to the great diversity of religious practices and viewpoints in Japan, not only its centers but also its peripheries and minorities. Meanwhile, we will consider broader questions about the complex connections between religion and popular culture. No prior knowledge of Buddhism, Shinto, or Japanese history is expected.

Instructor(s): Bruce Winkelman     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 28405, EALC 28405, RLST 28405

MADD 14822. Video Game Music and Sound. 100 Units.

From 8-bit audio tracks to orchestral concerts of video game music, from the percussive clicks of keyboards and controllers to menu noises, sound is tightly tied to the experience of playing video games. In this course, we'll explore how game music and sound interact with narrative, the embodiment of play, and musical environments outside of the games themselves. Our engagement with game music and sound will be mostly analytical, but there will be an opportunity for a creative final project for those students who might be interested. No prior music courses are required, although some familiarity with musical terminology and experience playing video games may prove useful.

Instructor(s): Will Myers     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 24822

MADD 14865. Adaptation: Text and Image. 100 Units.

A course concerned with the marriage of image and text that explores films, illuminated manuscripts, comic books/graphic novels, children's picture books and present day (perhaps local) theater productions that deal at their core with the balance and dance between story and picture. Examples of work studied would be Chris Marker's La jetée, Alice in Wonderland and its many adaptations, the comics of Winsor McCay, Seth, Chris Ware, etc, and William Blake's engraved poems and images. The theatrical collaborations between the instructors themselves ("The Cabinet" and "Cape and Squiggle," both produced by Chicago's Redmoon Theatre) will be discussed as well.

Instructor(s): M. Maher, F. Maugeri     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20215, TAPS 28465

MADD 14900. Narratives of Investigation, Games of Investigation. 100 Units.

From Agatha Christie and Marie Rodell to Victor Shklovsky, Roger Caillois, and David Bordwell, popular authors and media critics alike have long posited the mystery story as a "game" or "puzzle," interactive exercises in guessing that are bound by certain rules and expectations of "fair play." Taking the implications of these authors' and critics' metaphors seriously, this class examines the mystery or detective story from the perspective of game design. Case studies will be drawn from literary examples going back to the birth of the detective story in the mid-19th century, through films, analog games and puzzles, and digital games, with an eye toward historical continuities. Course assignments will be a mix of analytical writing and creative projects.

Instructor(s): I. Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course fulfills the requirement for Media History or Media Theory for MAAD majors/minors.

MADD 14916. Yōkai Media. 100 Units.

This course centers on yōkai (monsters or fantastic creatures) and theories of the fantastic in cinema and media. Historically, it spans the range from medieval emaki and Edo chōnin culture through 20th and 21st century manga and anime. Inquiry into yōkai and the fantastic is intended to develop new strategies for putting cinema and media into dialogue with theories of political sovereignty and capitalism in the context of everyday life and its urban myths.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Not offered in 2022-23.
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 24916, CMST 34916, EALC 34916, CMST 24916

MADD 14920. Comparative Media Poetics: Horror. 100 Units.

Cinema, videogames, and VR: all moving-image media, which have at times exerted multi-directional aesthetic influences on each other. This course will investigate the raw materials and basic forms at the disposal of artists working in and across these media, with a special focus on horror as a genre. Along with fundamental questions regarding the social, psychological, and political uses (and abuses) of horror as a genre, this course will also look at how horror works across a variety of media. In what way do the possibilities available to game developers differ from those available to filmmakers, and vice versa? How are space, time, and action presented and segmented differently across moving images (cinema), interactive moving images (games), and fully-immersive virtual environments (VR)? How do techniques ranging from psychological identification to jump scares work in each medium, and what aesthetic effects are open to one that are not open to the other? Course materials will include horror cinema, horror games (video and otherwise), VR experiences, and written horror literature.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMLT 14920, CMST 14920

MADD 14945. Digital Storytelling. 100 Units.

New media have changed the way that we tell and process stories. Over the last few decades, writers and designers have experimented with text, video, audio, design, animation, and interactivity in unprecedented ways, producing new types of narratives about a world transformed by computers and communications networks. These artists have explored the cultural dimensions of information culture, the creative possibilities of digital media technologies, and the parameters of human identity in the network era. This course investigates the ways that new media have changed contemporary society and the cultural narratives that shape it. We will explore narrative theory through a number of digital or digitally-inflected forms, including cyberpunk fictions, text adventure games, interactive dramas, videogames, virtual worlds, transmedia novels, location-based fictions, and alternate reality games. Our critical study will concern issues such as nonlinear narrative, network aesthetics, and videogame mechanics. Throughout the quarter, our analysis of computational fictions will be haunted by gender, class, race, and other ghosts in the machine.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25945, ENGL 25945

MADD 15150. Histories of Technology in China. 100 Units.

According to Bruno Latour, "technology is society made durable." In Francesca Bray's words, "technologies are specific to a society, embodiments of its visions of the world and of its struggles over social order. [T]he most important work that technologies do is to produce people: the makers are shaped by the making, and the users shaped by the using." This course looks at technologies in China since late imperial times and asks how technology both expressed and shaped visions of what Chinese society should be. We start with technologies of the body (how to sit on a kang, how to have healthy babies, how to become a deity, how to do a forensic investigation of a dead body), then move on to agricultural technologies and nutrition, to manufacturing (in sites ranging from the imperial palace to small paper workshops), and to communication technologies such as printing. Next, we look at Chinese worldviews and systems of classification and how they changed, partly due to growing exposure to views from Europe, Japan, and the Islamic world. In the last few weeks, we will look at the vernacular technologies of the Republican era, at Mao-era mass science and mass technology, and some of the contemporary uses of modern communication technology in China. All readings in English.

Instructor(s): J. Eyferth     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 20150, HIST 24207

MADD 15300. The Loop as Form. 100 Units.

This media historical course examines the loop as a narrative and non-narrative form throughout the the 20th and early 21st centuries, with examples drawn from science fiction literature, cinema, animation, electronic music, video art, and video games. Part of the course's focus will be technological, examining the development and impact of walk cycles in cel animation, magnetic tape in analog music and analog video, and go to statements in computer programming. Another part will be sociological, examining the reverberations Einsteinian relativity in physics, Taylorist scientific management in labor, and behaviorism in psychology had within media development, industry practices, and/or the popular imagination. Taken together, the class will be a thorough investigation both into the aesthetic possibilities of the loop, and into the cultural, technological, psychological, and economic reasons it appears as a form in media construction again, and again, and again, and again, and again,

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 15301

MADD 15303. Closure and Infinity in Digital Media. 100 Units.

From hypertext works spanning thousands of nodes to algorithmically-generated animations that unfold slowly over the course of hundreds of years, 21st Century media has leveraged digital technology to approach scales never before conceived. This class examines a broad array of digital artworks and theoretical trends from the past several decades, all circling around issues of endings and infinity. This includes everything from humanistic inquiries into the nature of closure in electronic literature of the 1990s to contemporary dreams of infinite machine-generated content (coinciding with the reciprocal promise of infinite growth via replacing human labor). Course assignments will be a mix of analytical writing and creative projects.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Class includes a mandatory weekly gameplay session in the MADD Center.

MADD 15310. Art and Technology: From the Historical Avant Gardes to the Algorithmic Present. 100 Units.

This seminar tracks the entanglements of visual art and "technology," a term which took on an increasingly expanded set of meanings beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period between World War I and the present, we examine these expanded meanings and ask how the work of art fundamentally shifted with, extended, tested, or acted upon "technology." We consider cases from the art historical avant gardes, the impact of cybernetics and systems thinking on architecture and visual perception, midcentury collectives that sought to institutionalize collaborations between artists and engineers, as well as more subtle exchanges between art and technology brewing since the Cold War. Course readings drawn from art history and the histories of science and technology, as well as site visits to art collections on campus, will inform our investigation. Students will gain historical insights into the relation between visual art and technology; develop analytical tools for critically engaging with the present-day interface of art, science, and engineering; and consider the implications for the futures we imagine.

Instructor(s): T. Shabtay     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 31310, ARTH 21310, KNOW 21310

MADD 15312. Visual Art and Technology: From the Historical Avant Garde to the Algorithmic Present. 100 Units.

This course tracks the entanglements of visual art and "technology," a term which took on an increasingly expanded set of meanings beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period between World War I and the present, we examine these expanded meanings and ask how the work of art fundamentally shifted with, extended, tested, or acted upon "technology." We consider cases from the art historical avant gardes, the impact of cybernetics and systems thinking on architecture and visual perception, midcentury collectives that sought to institutionalize collaborations between artists and engineers, as well as more subtle exchanges between art and technology brewing since the Cold War. We will conclude with a look at present-day practices that integrate visual art, design, and technology. Course readings drawn from art history and the histories of science and technology, as well as site visits to art collections and laboratories on campus, will inform our investigation. Students will gain historical insights into the relation between visual art and technology; develop analytical tools for critically engaging with the present-day interface of art, science, and engineering; and consider the implications for the futures we imagine.

Instructor(s): T. Shabtay     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 33312, KNOW 33312, ARTH 23312, KNOW 23312

MADD 15337. Photography and the Making of Modern Art and Science. 100 Units.

Observation, experimentation, invention, design. How has photography helped to shape these practices, which have been central to the development of both art and science? How might an interdisciplinary approach to the medium of photography invigorate questions of form, abstraction, realism, and subjectivity? This seminar surveys key episodes in the history and theory of photographic media to uncover overlaps, parallels, and moments of exchange across the history of modern art and science. Course readings, presentations, and site visits will offer case studies with which to consider cross-disciplinary connections, from H. Becquerel's visualizations of radioactivity and E. J. Marey's chronophotographs charting bodies in motion, to scientific iconography appearing in the photograms of Man Ray and L. Moholy-Nagy or R. Rauschenberg's use of x-ray imagery. These and many more examples evince how photographic media continually challenges historians of art and of science to reframe the methodological tools they use to evaluate visual and material artifacts. Students will have the opportunity to study and write about photographs in campus collections.

Instructor(s): T. Shabtay     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 20337, ARTH 30337

MADD 15403. History of Creative Computing. 100 Units.

What is "creative computing"? Are artists doing computing creatively or is the computing itself being creative? In this seminar course, students will learn to discuss, analyze, and contextualize artworks covered by the blurry and interdisciplinary "meta-medium" that is creative computing, beginning in the 1960s and working forward to the present moment. Through lectures, hands-on exercises, and discussions of assigned readings, students will gain familiarity with core techniques and concepts that inform contemporary digital art practice and develop their own critical vocabulary and opinions. Course topics include: What (if any) are the medium specific properties of creative computing? How dependent are digital works on screens and other systems of display? How does creative computing allow us to delaminate, interject into, or interfere with the streamlined technological world around us? How do generative machine learning models connect to this conversation and how are artists working with them today?

Instructor(s): Cameron Mankin     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 15416. 1990s Videogame History. 100 Units.

This course will trace developments in the videogame medium and videogame cultures in the final decade of the 20th century, discuss the unique possibilities and difficulties arising from the study of recent history, and put these discussions into practice through research-based assignments. Questions that will guide our study include: what was the relationship between technological innovations and stylistic changes in the videogame medium? How did the entry of new corporate and creative players into the business affect industrial structures and strategies? What do we make of "freedom," "realism," and other concepts that dominated videogame press coverage - and how were they connected to broader cultural discourses? How did understandings of what it meant to play videogames, and the types of experiences that videogames could offer, change over the course of the decade? What was the relationship between developments in the videogame medium and other media - from film and fiction to virtual reality and the Internet? How has this decade been remembered, conceptualized, preserved, and repackaged in subsequent decades?

Instructor(s): Chris Carloy     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37867, MAPH 34516, CMST 27867

MADD 15425. Censorship, Info Control, & Revolutions in Info Technology from the Printing Press to the Internet. 100 Units.

The digital revolution is triggering a wave of new information control efforts and censorship attempts, ranging from monopolistic copyright laws to the "Great Firewall" of China. The print revolution after 1450 was a moment like our own, when the explosive dissemination of a new information technology triggered a wave of information control efforts. Many of today's attempts at information control closely parallel early responses to the printing press, so the premodern case gives us centuries of data showing how diverse attempts to control or censors information variously incentivized, discouraged, curated, silenced, commodified, or nurtured art, thought, and science. This unique course is part of a collaborative research project funded by the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and is co-organized with digital information expert Cory Doctorow. The course will bring pairs of experts working on the print and digital revolutions to campus to discuss parallels between their research with the class. Classes will be open to the public, filmed, and shared on the Internet to create an international public conversation. This is also a Department of History "Making History" course: rather than writing traditional papers, students will create web resources and publications (print and digital) to contribute to the ongoing collaborative research project.

Instructor(s): A. Johns & A. Palmer
Note(s): Making History courses forgo traditional paper assignments for innovative projects that develop new skills with professional applications in the working world. Open to students at all levels, but especially recommended for 3rd- and 4th-yr students. This course fulfills part of the KNOW core seminar requirement. PhD students should register for KNOW 40103 to be eligible to apply for the SIFK dissertation fellowship.
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 40103, HIST 25425, HREL 35425, HIPS 25425, CHSS 35425, KNOW 25425, HIST 35425, BPRO 25425, SIGN 26035

MADD 15502. Mediating Korean History. 100 Units.

This course explores Korea's modern history through a variety of media, such as short stories, comics, magazines, films, and webtoons. Covering events ranging from colonization by Japan, mobilization during the second world war, the Korean War, to dictatorships, development, democratization, and the tensions on the peninsula today, our focus will be on examining selected media produced from the period under discussion paired with retrospective portrayals. By mixing past and present media together, the course tackles both historical events and historical memory, examining how history is created and remembered through different media.

Instructor(s): G. Reynolds
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 14502, EALC 14502

MADD 15507. Margins of the Medium: Text/Image. 100 Units.

In this course, we will study nineteenth- and twentieth-century visual and written texts from primarily French photographic, literary, painterly, and cinematic traditions. These thematically interrogate spatial, cultural, geographic, social, and political margins. By also examining the long-standing and often fraught historical and theoretical relationship between text and image, we will simultaneously investigate the boundaries between divergent media practices (photography, literature, film, painting) in order to question the visual, narrative, and philosophic limits of representation.

Instructor(s): J. Wild     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. For nonmajors, this course meets the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 14507

MADD 15540. Comics at the Crossroads. 100 Units.

Mid-1985 to mid-1986 is the most important year in comics history. This course is an introduction to comics through the prism of this period with snapshots of comics "before" and comics "after"; major texts are Maus, Watchmen, Crisis on Infinite Earths, and The Dark Knight Returns, all of which were released (or released in accessible formats) in '85-'86. We will try to identify the various forces that made this remarkable year possible: changes in the comics business, in American politics and culture, and in the life cycle of the superhero. In the mid-80s the "high" and "low" of comics blended like it never had before. This course is designed for the newbie and afficionado alike, whether you're meeting these four of the greatest comics of all time, or rediscovering them within a new milieu. (Fiction)

Instructor(s): Zoë Smith     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 15540

MADD 15620. Japanese Animation: The Making of a Global Media. 100 Units.

This course offers an introduction to Japanese animation, from its origins in the 1910s to its emergence as global culture in the 1990s. The goal is not only to provide insight into Japanese animation within the context of Japan but also to consider those factors that have transformed it into a global cultural form with a diverse, worldwide fanbase. As such, the course approaches Japanese animation from three distinct perspectives on Japanese animation, which are designed to introduce students to three important methodological approaches to contemporary media - film studies, media studies, and fan studies or cultural studies. As we look at Japanese animation in light of these different conceptual frameworks, we will also consider how its transnational dissemination and 'Asianization' challenge some of our basic assumptions about global culture, which have been shaped primarily through the lens of Americanization.

Instructor(s): Thomas Lamarre     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 35620, EALC 25620, CMST 25620, EALC 35620, SIGN 26070

MADD 15630. Television in an Age of Change. 100 Units.

As streaming options proliferate, we think of television today as a medium in a moment of upheaval; but, since its beginnings, television has always been in flux. This course will provide an introductory overview of television theory and U.S. television history. We will watch and analyze a range of programming and explore ongoing shifts in television's relationship to audiences, technology, and other media forms in an effort to answer-and complicate-the question, "What is television?"

Instructor(s): Ilana Emmett     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28730

MADD 16001. Censorship in East Asia: The Case of Colonial Korea. 100 Units.

Looking into the intricate workings and profound impact of state publication control in the Japanese Empire during the first half of the twentieth century, this seminar examines how censorship influenced literary and other forms of publication within the Korean colony. Students analyze the manipulation of information and representation by engaging with a diverse array of primary sources, including literature, periodicals, police reports, censors' documents, posters, and postcards, among others. Not only do they seek a nuanced understanding of censorship and its impact on cultural production engaging themselves with the original materials from colonial Korea, but also do they gain a broad historical knowledge of modern Korea under Japanese rule and further East Asia under Japan's dominance and hegemony. Throughout the course, focus is placed upon manuscript ("pre-publication") censorship. [Consent Required; Proficiency in Korean or Japanese is not required.]

Instructor(s): K. Choi     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): EALC 43000, EALC 23001, RDIN 23001, CRES 23001

MADD 16312. Reforming Religious Media: Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. 100 Units.

The Protestant Reformation began with a carefully orchestrated media event, when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg. Concurrently, he resorted to the still new medium of print to disseminate more widely his scathing critique of the Catholic Church's use of indulgences to communicate God's grace. This was only the beginning of Luther's sweeping attack on the Church's role as the sole mediator of salvation. No religious medium or communicational practice remained unquestioned, resulting in their comprehensive reform. Soon other reformers joined in, pushing the critique even further by questioning the need and validity of all religious mediation. Approaching the Protestant Reformation as a reform of religious media, this lecture course will give particular attention to the congenial alliance between Martin Luther's religious message and the emerging technology of the printing press, the role of Scripture in legitimating Protestant theologies of communication, controversies around particular religious media, like images or the eucharist, and the role of direct inspiration in radical reformers. This research course will be a combination of lecture and discussion. The course will culminate in an exhibition at the Special Collections Research Center of Regenstein Library, which will first take the form of a virtual web exhibit and then an actual, physical exhibition in the Winter Quarter 2020. All students will contribute to the web exhibition

Instructor(s): Christopher Wild     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26051, HCHR 32312, RLST 22312, RLVC 32312, GRMN 22312

MADD 16600. Chance in Performance. 100 Units.

The course will cover the historical, theoretical and practical issues surrounding the use of chance in artistic production, with an emphasis on how these techniques have been used in live performance. We begin with the historical avant-garde, particularly Dada and Duchamp, continue with mid-century experiments by Cage/Cunningham and Fluxus artists, and finish with contemporary work like "No Dice" of Nature Theatre of Oklahoma and "Algorithmic Noir" by Eve Sussman. By creating performance projects using, or responding to, the techniques studied, students will have an opportunity to develop their own critical and practice-based point of view.

Instructor(s): A. Dorsen     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Attendance at first class meeting is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 22600, TAPS 32600

MADD 16718. Electronic Music: Approaches to Electronic Music. 100 Units.

Hand-built circuits, tape loops, feedback, filters, ring modulators, turntables, live-processing software environments, microphones, and human-machine interface designs. In this course, we will study current and historical approaches to the performative use of hardware and software environments in music, and will follow the practice as it continues to redefine music composition and improvisation in the 21st century. Study will be repertoire-based, drawing from the work of artists ranging from David Tudor to Herbie Hancock to Grandmaster Flash to Kaija Saariaho.

Instructor(s): TBD
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 26718, MUSI 36718

MADD 17010. Gaming History. 100 Units.

How do video games reflect, theorize, and alter history? This lecture course will draw on strategies from history, media, and game studies to understand the place of games in the history of knowledge and our knowledge of history. How have historical simulations, ensconced in media objects, represented scientific, social, and cultural processes? How do games invite players to perform and inhabit historically specific subjectivities? What is the role of digital media in the public understanding of history? By representing alternate and future histories, games articulate theories of historical change, suggesting and popularizing modes of political, economic, and social agency. We will consider how games represent the structure of time, causality, and choice, and how the hardware and software of video games constrain and enable certain representations of history. Through lectures, discussions, group play sessions, written and practice-based assignments, and theoretical readings, we will think about what it means to 'game' history and to historicize games.

Instructor(s): Bolman, Bradley Buse, Katherine Gabel, Isabel     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 27010

MADD 17212. Sonic Cultures of Japan. 100 Units.

This course engages with the various techniques and practices associated with sound in Japanese culture, ranging from the 18th century through the contemporary era. The media covered will include literature, language reform movements, theater, cinema (both silent and sound), recorded music, radio broadcasting, manga, video games and anime. We will also read recent sound-oriented approaches to literary and cultural studies from scholars from both Japan and elsewhere. All readings will be in English.

Instructor(s): Michael Bourdaghs     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): SIGN 26085, EALC 17212

MADD 17304. Photo/Modernism/Esthetic. 100 Units.

The course presents the history of photographic practices in the United States, beginning in the late 19th century and extending into the 1980s, aimed at gaining an audience for photographs within museums of art. The issues under study include the contention over claims about medium specificity, notions of photographic objectivity, a peculiarly photographic esthetics, the division of photography into two categories-art vs. documentary-and the role of tradition and canon formation in the attempted definition of the photographic medium.

Instructor(s): J. Snyder
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 30704, ARTH 37304, ARTH 27304, ARTV 20704

MADD 17717. Opera in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility. 100 Units.

Focusing on a diverse set of productions of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" by Ingmar Bergman, William Kentridge, Martin Kusej, Simon McBurney, and Julie Taymor, we will seek to locate opera in the contemporary medial landscape, exploring some of the theoretical stakes, dramaturgical challenges, and interpretive achievements that characterize opera on film, DVD, and via live-streaming. Readings by W. Benjamin, T. W. Adorno, F. Jameson, M. Dolar, C. Abbate, P. Auslander, et al.

Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 27717, TAPS 28422, TAPS 38422, CMST 28301, CMST 38301, MUSI 34517, MUSI 24517, GRMN 37717

MADD 17817. Sonic the Hedgehog. 100 Units.

In this course, we will use a single franchise - Sonic the Hedgehog - as an access point to study media history, aesthetics, social and cultural practice, and the relationships between games, film, and other artforms. Originally released in 1991 for Sega's Genesis console, the Sonic series has spawned over three decades of games, cartoons, manga, novels, films, music, board games, action figures, fan art, cosplay, and merchandizing. Both the volume and the variety of these texts allow the Sonic corpus to be a focal point for questions with broader stakes for the study of games and media in general. Some of the questions we will be considering in this course include: What has been the relationship between particular videogame characters and franchises and the business practices and strategies of entertainment industries? What form does stardom take in the world of digital games, and is it an appropriate concept to apply to a mascot like Sonic? How have established game franchises responded to major technological and aesthetic shifts in the medium? How might we understand the concept and practice of adaptation as applied to the digital games, and what does it reveal about the medium specificity of and the relationship between games, film, comics, novels, and other forms? What can a game franchise that has taken a wide variety of generic forms (platforming, racing, fighting, and pinball, to name just a few) tell us about how genre works as concept and system in digital games?

Instructor(s): Chris Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MAPH 37817, CMST 27817, CMST 37817

MADD 17880. Videogame Consoles: A Platform Studies Approach. 100 Units.

While videogames' mix of art, play, and advanced technology gives game studies much of its vitality, the technological and computational aspects of the medium can be daunting for many would-be students and designers. And yet no approach to the study of videogames can be exhaustive without some consideration of the material and technological grounds that make games possible. With this in mind, this course will introduce approaches to videogame studies that emphasize the platforms - the hardware, operating systems, etc. - on which games are played, and is intended for students with all levels of familiarity with the technological side of videogames. How do the various components of game platforms, from computer architecture to controllers to the underlying code, affect how games look, sound, and feel, how they are played, who designs them and how, how they are marketed and to whom, and how they are preserved? How do platforms emerge from particular technological, industrial, social, and cultural contexts, and how do they in turn affect the course of game history and culture? Classroom lectures and discussions of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions at the MADD Center, which will provide close, hands-on engagement with game platforms. Possible objects of study include the Atari 2600 (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Sega Game Gear (1990) and Genesis/CD/32X (1988-94), Panasonic 3DO (1993), Nintendo 64 (1996) and Wii (2006), and PlayStation 4/VR (2013-16).

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37880, MAPH 37880, CMST 27880

MADD 17887. The Platformer: History and Theory of a Videogame Genre. 100 Units.

This course will provide an introduction to genre history and theory in videogame studies through a focus on the "platformer." Though not a common name outside of videogame culture, the platformer has introduced or popularized some of the medium's most recognizable figures (Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong) and gameplay mechanics (running, jumping, avoiding enemies, and collecting items). The genre has also been instrumental in and reflective of changes across the videogame medium. This course will cover two decades (roughly 1990 - 2010), emphasizing both historical details and theoretical questions, such as: How have game genres been defined? How do distinct genres emerge and change over time? How do broader trends (technological, formal, industrial, discursive, experiential, etc.) influence individual genres, and what roles do individual genres play in these broader trends? What resources and methodologies exist for studying videogame genres? Throughout the course we'll see the platformer alternate between an emphasis on linear, acrobatic movement across two-dimensional spaces and the free exploration of three-dimensional virtual worlds; between providing mascots for the biggest game companies and becoming a marker of independent, small-team production; and between being hailed as "revolutionary" and epitomizing the retro-nostalgic. Classroom lecture and discussion of readings will be accompanied by weekly gameplay sessions on original hardware at the MADD Center.

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37887, CMST 27887, MAPH 37887

MADD 18000. Photography and Film. 100 Units.

This is a core course that serves as an introduction to the history of art by concentrating on some fundamental issues in the history of photography and film. The course is divided roughly in half between still photography and film. The central theme of the course concerns the way in which photographs and films have been understood and valued during the past 165 years. There have been profound changes in attitudes and beliefs regarding the nature of photographs throughout the history of photography (this is likewise true of film). The current range of views is very different from those held by the various audiences for photographs and films in the last century and the century before. For instance, photographs were originally conceived of as copies of things that can be seen, but the notion of copy was drawn from a long-established set of views about what makes a picture a work of art and copies were said to be incapable of being works of art. This view continues to haunt the writings of some critics and historians of photography and film. The course will concentrate on the work of photographers, theorists of photography and film, and on films by John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Roman Polanski.

Instructor(s): J. Snyder     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This course can be taken for credit towards either the General Education Requirement in the Arts Music Drama core or the MAAD minor, but not both
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 18000

MADD 18205. Feminist Documentary Filmmaking. 100 Units.

This course examines the ways that women-identifying documentary makers have given cinematic form to feminist thought. Drawing from film and media theory and history, we will focus on the formal and narrative techniques that have been employed by filmmakers to reflect on questions pertaining to gender and sexuality, with an emphasis on the specific ways that non-fiction filmmaking expanded feminist theoretical frameworks and research methodologies. Considering topics such as cinematic realism, film spectatorship, viewing pleasure, counter-cinema, and theories of intersectionality and diaspora, we will ask questions such as: What are the stylistic devices that feminist documentary films have mobilized, and for what purposes and ends? What is documentary's relation to the history of fiction film, particularly of Hollywood cinema? How have women documentary makers understood cinema's role in social processes of transformation? What are the possibilities and limitations of collaborative methods, appropriation strategies, and oppositional techniques? We will watch films with a critical eye and engage closely with academic and popular writings to survey the aesthetic, social, and political genealogies operating in the history of feminist documentary production. In this discussion-based course, we will cover a variety of non-fiction film and media forms: film diaries, docu-fictions, home-movies, video essays, auto-ethnographies, ethno-fictions, collage, and found-footage films.

Instructor(s): Cinta Peleja     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 23164, CMST 28205

MADD 18306. Data History: Information Overload from the Enlightenment to Google. 100 Units.

The current era of "Big Data" is often described as a new paradigm in science: increasingly, in fields ranging from molecular genetics to particle physics to internet search analytics, knowledge is produced by processing massive electronic databases with digital algorithms that tell us who we are, what the universe is made of , and why we think and act the way we do. At the same time, the tools, techniques, and social implications of modern data culture have a deep history that stretches back well before the advent of digital computers. Understanding the world by collecting and analyzing large quantities of information has been a goal in the natural and social sciences for centuries, and this history has shaped our current fascination with data in important and surprising ways. This course will examine the long-term history of data in critical historical context. We will examine how data has been collected, managed, and analyzed in the sciences over the past few centuries - the emergence of various technologies and conventions for information processing - as well as why it has been such a central concern in so many disciplines - what was understood to be the goal of reducing the world to data. We will also consider what social and political consequences the history of data reveals, and we will discuss the ethical and epistemological concerns that have emerged as science has become increasingly oriented towards collecting and manipulating large quantities of data.

Equivalent Course(s): HIST 39523, HIPS 28306, CHSS 38306, HIST 29523

MADD 18500. History of International Cinema I: Silent Era. 100 Units.

This course provides a survey of the history of cinema from its emergence in the mid-1890s to the transition to sound in the late 1920s. We will examine the cinema as a set of aesthetic, social, technological, national, cultural, and industrial practices as they were exercised and developed during this 30-year span. Especially important for our examination will be the exchange of film techniques, practices, and cultures in an international context. We will also pursue questions related to the historiography of the cinema, and examine early attempts to theorize and account for the cinema as an artistic and social phenomenon.

Instructor(s): Daniel Morgan     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 is required. Course is required for students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): For students majoring in Cinema and Media Studies, the entire History of International Cinema three-course sequence must be taken.
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 29300, ARTH 38500, CMST 48500, CMLT 32400, ENGL 48700, ARTV 20002, MAPH 33600, CMLT 22400, ARTH 28500, CMST 28500

MADD 18600. History of International Cinema II: Sound Era to 1960. 100 Units.

The center of this course is film style, from the classical scene breakdown to the introduction of deep focus, stylistic experimentation, and technical innovation (sound, wide screen, location shooting). The development of a film culture is also discussed. Texts include Thompson and Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction; and works by Bazin, Belton, Sitney, and Godard. Screenings include films by Hitchcock, Welles, Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni, and Renoir.

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Prior or concurrent registration in CMST 10100 required. Required of students majoring or minoring in Cinema and Media Studies.
Note(s): CMST 28500/48500 strongly recommended
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 29600, ENGL 48900, CMST 28600, ARTH 38600, MAPH 33700, ARTH 28600, ARTV 20003, CMLT 22500, CMST 48600, REES 25005, CMLT 32500, REES 45005

MADD 18700. History of International Cinema, Part III: 1960 to Present. 100 Units.

This course will continue the study of cinema around the world from the 1960s to the 2000s. The continued development of film style and form over this period - one of seismic changes in audio-visual aesthetics - will be one of the primary themes of the course. Additionally, lectures and discussions will wrestle with the rise of global film cultures, technological innovations and their effects on style (such as post-magnetic sound, and visual effects techniques), major international directors and the solidification of auteurism as both a commercial and aesthetic imperative, the increasing internationalization of Hollywood, and post-1970s genre reorientation elevating horror, science-fiction, and other genres to the highest levels of mainstream respectability, critical appraisal, and/or commercial success. Screenings are mandatory and include work by filmmakers including Pedro Almodovar, Michael Bay, Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Denis, Federico Fellini, Hollis Frampton, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Djibril Diop Mambety, Cristian Mungiu, and more, in addition to a selection of music videos.

Instructor(s): Clint Froehlich     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course follows the subject matter taught in CMST 28500/48500 and CMST 28600/48600, but these are not prerequisites.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38700, CMST 28700

MADD 18703. Video Art: The Analog Years. Theory, Technology, Practice. 100 Units.

The course gives a critical introduction to early video and television art - from the proto-televisual impulses in the historical avant-gardes to the increasing proximity between analog and digital technologies in video art in the late 1970's and early 1980's. We will focus on the various technical aspects of analog video, as well as on artistic practice and early writings on the subject. Topics will include the technics and politics of time; video, feedback systems and ecology; the reconfiguration of the artist's studio; guerilla politics and alternative TV; video and autobiography; the relation between video and painting; the musical history of video; the invention of new machines; and video as a "television viewer".

Instructor(s): I. Blom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28703, ARTH 21313, ARTH 31313, CMST 38703

MADD 18740. Global and Transnational Television. 100 Units.

The localized nature of broadcasting has meant that our understanding of television history and programming has often been localized as well. Looking at specific case studies, this course will disrupt that trend by exploring two separate but related topics: (1) the distinct histories of national television industries around the globe and (2) the industrial and cultural factors that allow programming to flow transnationally. Some topics that will be covered include public broadcasting in the UK, the cultural history of Netflix co-productions, and national identity through reality TV remakes. This course will build off of concepts covered in the course Television in an Age of Change.

Instructor(s): Ilana Emmett     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28740

MADD 18801. Chicago Film History. 100 Units.

This course will screen and discuss films made mostly by Chicagoans, concentrating on the period after WWII, until 1980 when Hollywood began using Chicago as a location. By examining various genres, including those not normally interrogated by academics, such as educational and industrial films, we will consider whether there is a Chicago style of filmmaking. Technological advances that enabled both film and video to escape the restrictions of the studio and go hand-held, into city streets and homes, will be discussed. If there is a Chicago style of filmmaking, one must look at the landscape of the city-the design, the politics, the cultures and labor of its people and how they live their lives. The protagonists and villains of Chicago stories are the politicians and community organizers, our locations are the neighborhoods, and the set designers are Mies Van Der Rohe and the Chicago Housing Authority.

Instructor(s): J. Hoffman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 21801, HMRT 35104, ARTV 20750, ARCH 26750, CMST 21801, ARTV 30750, HMRT 25104, CMST 31801

MADD 18814. Theme Park America. 100 Units.

Since the colonial era, Americans have obsessively created recreational themed spaces that manifested historical myths and memories in the built environment. This course considers the evolution, functions, and ethics of the American desire to visit the past as a form of leisure. Starting with early themed spaces such as world's fairs, amusement parks, and cityscapes, we examine how scholars have read cultural phenomena for their radical contemporary significance. We then apply these tools to examine how Disneyland combined, redefined, and heightened its themed space antecedents and to what ends. We will learn how to decode Disneyland's messages about race, gender, capitalism, and the American experience that are embedded within the park's design, architecture, attractions, shows, sounds, and smells. How did such views of the past, present, and future speak to the social, political, and economic needs and wants of Cold War Americans, and why do they continue to resonate today? How should we understand themed spaces as a lens for U.S. history as experienced by contemporary Americans? By interrogating the themed space form, we will explore the nature of historical memory, the responsibilities of public history, and the ethics of constructing a recreational past. In doing so, we will learn how to take the seemingly frivolous matters of history seriously-and the dire stakes for doing so.

Instructor(s): Hofmann, Alex     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 28814, HIST 38814, MAPS 33550, HIST 28814

MADD 20023. Composing for Intermedia. 100 Units.

MUSI 45023: Composing for Intermedia highlights a range of practices in contemporary multimedia/intermedia composition. This course is designed for those who want to expand their creative toolset and covers various topics, including the implementation and synchronization of media such as sound, lighting, video, interactive devices, etc. It should be of interest to composers, performers, visual artists, and choreographers who want to develop a critical approach to integrating multimedia technologies into their practice.

Instructor(s): David Bird     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 45023

MADD 20041. Digital Media I: Game Design with Unity. 100 Units.

This course introduces the principles, practices, and techniques of game design. Students will develop several small games, gaining hands-on experience with the Unity development platform and the C# programming language it uses. The course takes a "ground up" approach: starting with the fundamentals of object- and component-oriented programming, then using those fundamentals to build complex, interactive experiences. While the course focuses on Unity, an introduction to software design patterns and an emphasis on a rapid feedback/iteration cycle will provide tools that translate to other game engines and creative computing projects. Through critique and the close examination of case studies from prior art, students will cultivate their critical eye and articulation, equipping them to discuss, assess, and refine games at various stages of development. Prerequisite: DIGS 20001/30001, "Introduction to Computer Programming Using Python" or an equivalent course in computer programming.

Instructor(s): Cameron Mankin     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): DIGS 20001/30001, “Introduction to Computer Programming with Python” (or an equivalent course in computer programming).
Note(s): Undergraduate MAAD students attempting to join the course should fill out this form to join a shortlist: https://airtable.com/appF7rAlnH3zoRdB4/shrfuB9cVwZC1b5hc. ONLY undergraduates who fill out the form will be considered for the course. Please do NOT send consent requests before filling out the form.
Equivalent Course(s): DIGS 30041, DIGS 20041

MADD 20042. Digital Media II: Extended Reality with Unity. 100 Units.

Part-two of a two-course sequence, this course teaches students how to develop extended reality (XR) environments using the Unity platform. The course emphasizes the creation of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) environments, allowing students to gain hands-on experience. Additionally, students will discuss development with their instructor and peers, assisting them in refining their skills and ideas while creating. By the end of the quarter, students will clearly understand the process of transforming ideas into final products, equipping them with the necessary tools for future XR endeavors.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdorfer     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): DIGS 30041/MAAD 20041, “Digital Media I: Game Design with Unity” (or an equivalent Unity course approved by the instructor).
Note(s): Undergraduate MAAD students attempting to join the course should fill out this form to join a shortlist: https://airtable.com/appF7rAlnH3zoRdB4/shrfuB9cVwZC1b5hc. ONLY undergraduates who fill out the form will be considered for the course. Please do NOT send consent requests before filling out the form.
Equivalent Course(s): DIGS 30042

MADD 20043. Digital Media III: Creating 3D Worlds in Blender. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to digital rendering, modeling, and sculpting using the Blender platform. Prerequisite: DIGS 20001/30001, "Introduction to Computer Programming Using Python" or an equivalent course in computer programming.

Equivalent Course(s): DIGS 20043, DIGS 30043

MADD 20230. From Theater Games to Gaming Theater. 100 Units.

Uniting methodologies and readings from media and performance studies, this interdisciplinary course explores the historical and contemporary proximities between games and theater as interactive media. Each unit of this course interrogates the generic boundary of "games," seeing games as the content of, source of, medium for, and engine behind compelling performances. Our course will make a study of "immersive" and game-like theatrical works that provoke meaningful questions about audience agency, interactivity, and the role of technology in our contemporary understanding of what it means to attend or take part in "play." Students in this course can expect to read theatrical scripts, attend and participate in performances, and perform game exercises in class. Part of taking this class is "being game" - open to participating in the various forms of play we will explore together. Students will watch contemporary works of gaming theater and participate in a hands-on gaming theater workshop, in addition to attending live improv comedy and an escape room. In the midterm assignment students will compose a performance game of their own, designing and testing the piece over three weeks. The final assignment emphasizes the process of producing scholarly writing and asks students to apply performance and game studies approaches to texts from our class.

Instructor(s): A. Gass     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20230

MADD 20302. Bodies at Work: Art & Civic Responsibility. 100 Units.

Contemporary artists are quickly adapting their practices to be more inclusive, diverse, accessible and physically safe. In particular, the rise of intimacy design and anti-racist work in theatre, film and television has opened up a dialogue about how artists do their work responsibly. Through practice and investigation, this class will dive into the responsibility of artists in contemporary artistic processes. We will explore both how the tools and capacities of artists can transform civic practice and, conversely, how artists are grappling with the civic issues of body safety, anti-racism and accessibility in arts practice. We will explore how centering the body can create respectful engagement in the arts. We will look at the work of Enrich Chicago, Nicole Brewer, Sonya Renee Taylor, Not in Our House and Intimacy Directors & Coordinators among others.

Instructor(s): D. Serna     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): RDIN 26302, GNSE 26303, TAPS 26302, CHST 26302

MADD 20310. Introduction to Designing Interaction. 100 Units.

We are surrounded by interactive systems and designs, from the user interfaces for our computers and smartphones to home appliances, doors, and furniture. This class will introduce basic techniques, theories, and practices in designing interactive objects and systems. Specifically, it will introduce students to developing user experience-centric perspectives on critically reflecting on existing (and future) interactive designs. It also provides practices for students to ideate new design solutions and prototype them using design and engineering methods. Centered in interaction design, the class covers broad topics touching human-computer interaction, industrial design, user experience design, and communication design.

Prerequisite(s): CMSC 15200, CMSC 15400, CMSC 14200, CMSC 14300, or CMSC 14400.
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 20310

MADD 20370. Inclusive Technology: Designing for Underserved and Marginalized Populations. 100 Units.

Creating technologies that are inclusive of people in marginalized communities involves more than having technically sophisticated algorithms, systems, and infrastructure. It involves deeply understanding various community needs and using this understanding coupled with our knowledge of how people think and behave to design user-facing interfaces that can enhance and augment human capabilities. When dealing with under-served and marginalized communities, achieving these goals requires us to think through how different constraints such as costs, access to resources, and various cognitive and physical capabilities shape what socio-technical systems can best address a particular issue. This course leverages human-computer interaction and the tools, techniques, and principles that guide research on people to introduce you to the concepts of inclusive technology design. You will learn about different underserved and marginalized communities such as children, the elderly, those needing assistive technology, and users in developing countries, and their particular needs. In addition, you will learn how to be mindful of working with populations that can easily be exploited and how to think creatively of inclusive technology solutions. You will also put your skills into practice in a semester long group project involving the creation of an interactive system for one of the user populations we study.

Prerequisite(s): CMSC 14400 or CMSC 15400 or CMSC 12300 or CMSC 22000 or CMSC 20300 or CMSC 20310
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 30370, CMSC 20370

MADD 20380. Actuated User Interfaces and Technology. 100 Units.

The recent advancement in interactive technologies allows computer scientists, designers, and researchers to prototype and experiment with future user interfaces that can dynamically move and shape-change. This class offers hands-on experience in learning and employing actuated and shape-changing user interface technologies to build interactive user experiences. The class provides a range of basic engineering techniques to allow students to develop their own actuated user interface systems, including 3D mechanical design, digital fabrication (e.g. 3D Printing), electronics (Arduino microcontroller), and actuator control (utilizing different kinds of motors). Through multiple project-based assignments, students practice the acquired techniques to build interactive tangible experiences of their own.

Prerequisite(s): CMSC 20300 or CMSC 20310
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 20380, CMSC 30380

MADD 20403. Conscious Media Practices in the Age of Brain Rot. 100 Units.

A hands-on studio course exploring how to critically consume, dissect, and create media in response to a fractured and fast-paced media landscape. Students will transform weekly headlines into rapid-response digital art projects, interrogating the urgency of contemporary culture through experimental design and creative critique.

Instructor(s): Chris Collins     Terms Offered: Spring

MADD 20404. From Failure to Filter: S#bversions & E/olutions in Glitch Art. 100 Units.

[ERROR_404: Meaning Not Found. REBOOTING CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK 🔀] This course critically examines how the raw, unpredictable elements of Glitch Art-once symbols of digital rebellion-have evolved and assimilated into the mainstream. Charting vectors between avant-garde artistic movements and the commodification of cultural phenomena, we will delve into the lifecycles of radical subgenres, digital aesthetics, and their journeys from fringe to familiarity. Create projects through hands-on experimentation, leveraging artware tools, hacks, kludges, and quirky techniques developed by digital artists. Engage with the concept of 'failure' not just as a technical glitch but as a pivotal point of artistic and sociopolitical discourse. Is a glitch a glitch if it's anticipated and expected? This course provides a space for both creating and critically analyzing digital art, challenging us to navigate and contribute to our ever-shifting and perpetually unstable digital landscape.

Instructor(s): J. Satrom     Terms Offered: Spring

MADD 20420. Painting with Light in Space. 100 Units.

This course explores projected imagery as a medium to paint ephemeral ideas in the real world through installation and theatrical design. Utilizing visual iconography, architectural forms, objects, and cinema, this course will explore the practical and theoretical applications of video on unorthodox objects and spaces. Using software as an instrument, students will investigate the visceral extents of images both historical and generative to create living light. The course will culminate in student presentations that illustrate and illuminate the ideas and techniques presented throughout the course.

Instructor(s): R. Davonté Johnson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 27420, ARTV 20944, ARTV 30944

MADD 20455. Transmedia Theater, Live Experience Design, and Networked Performance: A Maker's Lab. 100 Units.

The recent pandemic has challenged live performance to consider alternatives in the creation of online spaces and the "pivot to digital," has frequently resulted in innovative approaches of adaptation of texts originally designed for the stage, yet as a result, remain rooted in a "broadcast" modality. Live Experience Design benefits from the exploration of pre-COVID forms including netprov, ARGs, online LARPs, interactive theater, and NFT games as well as popular social media forms including Instagram and SnapChat filters. This course invites directors, designers, and writers to innovate under the influence of networked media with an emerging genre at the nexus between theater, film, and video games to create short-form interactive original work through Zoom, Twitch, Twine, and Discord. Through a series of workshop assignments, lectures, and cross-disciplinary guest artist demonstrations, this immersive course will consider how can we use and build upon existing technologies to make impactful theater in a networked setting that not only creates a story that elicits an emotional but narrative that is depended on audience interaction. Projects will draw from game mechanics and work across multiple platforms and will require no prior experience with coding or video production.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28455

MADD 20500. ARTGAMES. 100 Units.

This studio course playfully explores the methods, tools, and poetics of video games as art. Develop interactive new media art, machinima, and experimental 3D environments by using (and misusing) contemporary game engines. Projects will include hypertext adventures, walking simulators, abstract platformers, and metagames. By hacking, modding, and recontextualizing existing game assets, we will challenge the rules, mechanics, and interfaces of video games. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Chris Collins     Terms Offered: Autumn Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 25403

MADD 20502. Sound & Environment. 100 Units.

Huge sections of the Earth's crust resonate across hundreds of miles: seismology, infrasound. Fish larvae differentiate tiny vibrations in ocean water produced by diverse coral ecosystems: hydroacoustics, ultrasound. Humans gather in large numbers to watch each other carefully manipulate air pressure: music, architecture, psychoacoustics. Each of these phenomena can be understood to fit within the field of sound studies, and each among many further examples has an effect upon each other, contributing to a delicately interlinked planetary system of pressure, vibration, and resonance within air, water, land, and body. This system is now in crisis. From the most densely populated cities to the remotest nature preserves and industrial hinterlands, the extraction, processing, transportation, and consumption of natural resources by humans interferes with delicate systems of sounding and listening essential to almost all forms of life on Earth. How can sound studies and audio technology help us navigate this moment? This course takes students through a survey of sound studies and audio technology, from physics, electronics, hearing, and psychoacoustics to the aesthetics, politics, and poetics of musical and non-musical sound production. Students will also learn the basics of acoustic recording, audio processing, and data sonification through hands-on workshops and collaborative projects.

Instructor(s): Carlo Diaz     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CEGU 24502, MUSI 24502, ARCH 25402, ENST 24502, CHST 24502

MADD 20505. Adaptation for the Screen. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the rewards and difficulties of adapting literary material to the big screen. In addition to reading short stories and viewing the films that were made from these stories, all students will be given the same short story to adapt into a 50-60 minute film. Progress on these scripts will be addressed through in-class readings, leading to final meetings with the instructor about your completed first drafts. Screenwriting experience is helpful, but not essential. Class size is limited to 10 students.

Instructor(s): J. Petrakis     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Attendance at first class is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 25505

MADD 20550. Writing the TV Pilot. 100 Units.

The creation of a TV Pilot is a unique, exciting, and demanding task for a writer. In addition to the responsibility of telling a compelling story, writers are also charged with setting up a "world" and establishing characters and plotlines that will sustain the show over multiple episodes and seasons. In this class, we will delve into the processes required to succeed in this challenging endeavor. This includes creation of pitch materials, plot and character development, outlining, creation of a show bible, and ultimately, writing the pilot episode of an original TV series. The classroom will function as part development workshop and part informal TV writer's room. Through weekly reading and writing assignments we will dissect successful entries into the TV space and tap into our artistic inspirations to evolve our show concepts. From there, we would collaborate as a class by actively brainstorming and workshopping our scripts and series. By the end of the quarter, each student will complete a draft of an original pilot script, as well as a short "Series Bible" detailing the broader scope of the show.

Instructor(s): K. O'Brien     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 20550, TAPS 25550

MADD 20570. Technological Selves and Stories. 100 Units.

In traditional artistic mediums, the self is presented as a narrator, a figure on a canvas, a moving image on a screen or a character on stage. Using contemporary digital technology, new selves appear within emerging forms of storytelling. What selves are these? We will take a hands-on approach to answering this question, exploring the nexus between performance, embodiment and digital representation with an eye to storytelling and dramatic narrative. Students will conduct experiments in data-based digital art, multimedia performance (blending theater and film including live-feed techniques), and virtual reality technologies. Students will accordingly be asked to create original artworks using digital technology to tell stories ranging from the personal to the mythological and even more-than-human, exploring a range of perspectives, personas and cutting-edge storytelling techniques.

Instructor(s): S. Bockley     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 22570

MADD 20600. AI + Art: artificial.horse. 100 Units.

Saddle up and ride into the untamed territories of human-AI co-creation. Much like how horses have been our trusty companions in transportation and labor, AI has become a powerful tool for us to navigate the computational era. This course presents a studio environment for performative and avant guarde approaches to experimenting with the newest interfaces and advancements in generative AI, like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, while examining predecessors like chatbots and early forms of automation. Technology is not simply an external tool that we use, it shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Giddy up, as we playfully experiment with the creative, quirky, and unquantifiable human elements in AI-making media art projects as AI, for AI, and with AI. A diversity of artistic and technical backgrounds are welcome.

Instructor(s): Jon Satrom     Terms Offered: Spring

MADD 20601. AI + Video: Glitches, Promises, & Slop. 100 Units.

AI Video sits at a collision point: where polished promises meet unexpected errors and infinite slop. In this studio course, we'll explore the chaotic potentials of AI in video art-its quirks, cultural impact, and untapped possibilities. Using cutting-edge AI tools and techniques like prompt engineering, style transfer, and compositing, we'll create experimental time-based media projects. With a critical lens and playful approach, we'll embrace the weird, challenge the hype, and rethink the ethics and aesthetics of this emergent form. ✨

Instructor(s): Jon Satrom     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 26001

MADD 20602. Animation: Practices & Principles. 100 Units.

Sitting at the intersection of fine arts and filmmaking, animation has held a unique place in visual culture since its inception and has more recently become a ubiquitous presence in our society. Through a combination of workshops, screenings, and discussions, this course will examine the advantages and particularities that come with the art form as well as the diverse range of technologies and techniques that it can include. Students learn both analog and digital animation methods-including cut-out, hand-drawn, and stop motion, among others-to explore their own artistic voice through moving image, culminating with a final project in the medium of their choice. Works screened for discussion will range from the traditional and studio-based to the experimental and alternative. No previous drawing experience required.

Instructor(s): Elizabeth Rogers     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25602, ARTV 20035, CMST 35602

MADD 20605. Advanced Animation. 100 Units.

TBD.

Instructor(s): Lizzy Rogers     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25605

MADD 20610. Line, Trace, Motion: Computation and Experiment in Animation. 100 Units.

Interpreting what we mean by animation broadly, this course will investigate computational moving-image making through the lens of experimental animation. We will take as our point of departure the films of Rettinger, Ruttmann, Fischinger, McLaren, and Breer, but will also draw upon artifacts and 'animated lines' taken from further afield: found footage films and algorithmic editing, dance drawings of Trisha Brown, kinetic sculptures of Bit International, early plotter art, avant-garde music notation, and contemporary techniques of motion and performance capture. This course will develop theoretical lines of inquiry that run in two directions: an excavation of a "pre-history" of contemporary new media and a reinterpretation / re-invigoration of our understanding of early animation. Any film production, hand-animation or computer programming experiences are welcome - but none are perquisites for the course. Students will be expected to complete regular short creative "sketches" of techniques culminating in a final short animated project.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 35610, CMST 25610

MADD 20620. Pivot to Digital: Adapting Performance Practices To Online Spaces. 100 Units.

How are performance-makers adapting their practices to online spaces? Many theater and live art makers are discovering new dimensions of their work as they 'pivot to digital', experimenting broadly with expressive form and audience engagement. In this course we will examine a set of case studies drawn from the current pandemic-inspired movement towards online performance, gamification, live/recorded hybrid models of performance, and socially distanced performance practices. We will look at the translation of theater design techniques such as scenery and sound design to digital platforms, audio-play forms, and at-home experience design, plus ask questions about the democratization of content available much more widely online than in conventional performance spaces. Students will be asked to adapt a theatrical work (play or devised project) to digital form as part of their work in class.

Instructor(s): S. Bockley     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 20620

MADD 20623. Theories and Aesthetics of Remix. 100 Units.

Remix, mashup, bricolage, borrowing, sampling, collage - transformative creative techniques pervade 20th- and 21st-century musical and artistic practice. The spectrum of remixing spans virtuosically across hip hop and DJ culture, through classical and avant-garde composition, to the crudest deep-fried internet memery. Taking a topical approach, this course will use readings, texts, and practices of remix-in many guises-to explore questions of aesthetics, agency, economics, and politics. Topics under consideration include: intertextuality, aesthetics and form, technology and hardware/software affordances, genre and identity, AI, politics, appropriation and copyright, humor and value, memes and shitposts. Assessments will include hands-on creative projects using a spectrum of techniques, media, and software.

Instructor(s): Paula Harper     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 27623

MADD 20624. New Forms in DJing. 100 Units.

This course will briefly explore the history of the media of DJing, then to invent a new form in the lineage through practice. Conventional history including disco, broadcasting, and Youtube, to name a few, and more experimental history including underground hip-hop, musique concrete, and contemporary performance art. The course will begin with student research and presentation on such topics followed by predictions about what may come next or brainstorming ways to deconstruct existing forms, then attempting to enact those ideas.

Instructor(s): Takashi Shallow     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): To be taken in sequence with MUSI 27623: Theories and Aesthetics of Remix
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 27624

MADD 20700. Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production. 100 Units.

Games are one of the most prominent and influential media of our time. This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "alternate reality" or "transmedia" gaming. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of transmedia games. These games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of video games, and the team dynamics of sports. Beyond the subject matter, students will design modules of an Alternate Reality Game in small groups. Students need not have a background in media or technology, but a wide-ranging imagination, interest in new media culture, or arts practice will make for a more exciting quarter.

Instructor(s): Patrick Jagoda, Heidi Coleman     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2025-2026
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing. Instructor consent required. To apply, submit writing through online form: https://forms.gle/QvRCKN6MjBtcteWy5; see course description. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory. Questions: mb31@uchicago.edu
Note(s): Note(s): English majors: this course fulfills the Theory (H) distribution requirement.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 30700, ARTV 20700, BPRO 28700, ENGL 32314, CMST 25954, CMST 35954, TAPS 28466, ENGL 25970

MADD 20703. Computer as Theater. 100 Units.

This course explores the intersection of theater and digital interaction, reimagining interfaces as dynamic sites for performance. Borrowing foundational elements of theater-plot, characters, props, and stage-we will translate well-known narrative structures into media-driven digital performances. Through hands-on projects and critical inquiry, we'll unpack the metaphors embedded in UI/UX design: How do likes, swipes, and notifications choreograph your daily interactions with technology? We will question the role of users, interfaces, and systems. We will remix existing theatrical works, deconstruct traditional narrative arcs, and craft speculative interfaces that challenge conventional modes of interaction. No technical expertise required-just a willingness to experiment, play, and think deeply about how we perform with and through machines.

Instructor(s): M. Faridani     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28220

MADD 20721. Performance Captured. 100 Units.

Technologies that turn human action, appearance and performance into data for storage, transformation and redisplay have a long history inside and outside of moving image arts. This class will look at the opportunities, aesthetics and politics of these approaches running through contemporary special effects, traditional and experimental animation, dance on camera and live performance at a moment when boundaries between these categories have become especially porous.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27021, CMST 67021

MADD 20810. Sound / Image Mapping. 100 Units.

This class will examine the history and production of "hard" sound-image relationships through the lens of computational form. Through studying the range of digital and mechanical tools that have sought to couple the senses - from 19th century color organs and dreams of synesthesia, through music videos and contemporary new media installations, to recent advances in "machine listening" - students will complete a series of critical essays and sketches leading towards a final project using custom software developed in and for the class.

Instructor(s): M. Downie     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 27922, CMST 28010

MADD 20935. Augmented Reality in the Garden. 100 Units.

Focusing on experimental strategies at a crucial moment in an emerging medium, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for Augmented Reality (AR). By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical and sonic experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new tactics and interactive logics for layering technology onto real spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging AR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative works. Uniquely for this quarter we will be using a particularly stimulating and challenging space for our explorations - the Untidy Objects "sculpture" located south of Logan center. This carefully maintained, rewilded space will ultimately provide our canvas, our dataset and our classroom. Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete 4 short "sketches" towards a final AR experience.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27935, CMST 47935

MADD 21006. The Zine as Art Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

The Zine as Art Theory and Practice is a seminar/studio hybrid that combines reading, thinking, and making. Embracing the vibrant history and short turn-around time of the artist magazine or zine, course readings are prompts for you to create your own magazines. Rather than slick glossy commercial pages, your projects will be in the lineage of the hand-drawn, the doodle, the monotype, the playbill, the Xerox, and the collage. Your magazines are a space for you to combine thoughts, images, questions, speculations, manifestos, ambivalences, rants, passions, characters and ideas.

Instructor(s): A. Ginsburg     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200 or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 31006, ARTV 21006

MADD 21011. Experimental Captures. 100 Units.

This production-based class will explore the possibilities and limits of capturing the world with imaging approaches that go beyond the conventional camera. What new and experimental image-based artworks can be created with technologies such as laser scanning, structured light projection, time of flight cameras, photogrammetry, stereography, motion capture, sensor augmented cameras or light field photography? This hands-on course welcomes students with production experience while being designed to keep established tools and commercial practices off-kilter and constantly in question.

Instructor(s): M. Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2022-23.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37011, ARTV 27923, CMST 27011, ARTV 37923

MADD 21110. Imagining Futures: Speculative Design and Social Justice. 100 Units.

This experimental course seeks to disrupt dominant narratives about "the future": a monolithic concept that often comes from technologists and policymakers. Instead, we explore what alternative futures might look like when imagined by and with marginalized communities. Beginning with movements such as Afrofuturism, we will read speculative and science fiction across media, including short stories, critical theory, novels, films, transmedia narratives, and digital games. Rather than merely analyzing or theorizing various futures, this course will prepare students in hands-on methods of "speculative design" and "critical making." Instead of traditional midterm essays and final research papers, the work of the course will consist primarily of blog responses to shared readings, coupled with short-form, theoretically-founded, and collaborative art projects. These projects will imagine alternative futures of climate change, gender, public health, finance, policing, and labor. The work will be challenging, transdisciplinary, and will blur expectations about the relationship between theory and practice at every turn. As such, it is not a course for the craven; it is a course for students who wish to explore the complexities of collaboration and the sociopolitical possibilities of art. (B, H)

Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 38432, ARTV 31110, ENGL 21110, CMST 31110, TAPS 28432, ARTV 21110, CMST 21110, ENGL 31110

MADD 21111. Creative Coding. 100 Units.

This course is an introduction to programming, using exercises in graphic design and digital art to motivate and employ basic tools of computation (such as variables, conditional logic, and procedural abstraction). We will write code in JavaScript and related languages, and we will work with a variety of digital media, including vector graphics, raster images, animations, and web applications.

Note(s): Students who have taken CMSC 11800, STAT 11800, CMSC 12100, CMSC 15100, or CMSC 16100 are not allowed to register for CMSC 11111.
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 11111

MADD 21500. Metamedia. 100 Units.

Computers dynamically simulate the details of any other medium. This course looks past traditional media to engage with the computer as a "metamedium"; an environment with infinite degrees of representation. Relationships between form and content will be explored and exploited through deconstructing, augmenting, and experimenting with the data that makes up digital media. Studio time will be spent digitally improvising with expanded approaches to creating new media art. Topics surveyed will include: algorithms as art, metadata as content, and our digital shadows. In addition to making new media art, we will consider our relationship to contemporary media and the politics of digital agency in our connected world. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): J. Satrom
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 25402

MADD 21900. Climate Change in Media and Design. 100 Units.

If meteorological data and models show us that climate change is real, art and literature explore what it means for our collective human life. This is the premise of many recent films, novels, and artworks that ask how a changing climate will affect human society. In this course, we will examine the aesthetics of climate change across media, in order to understand how narrative, image, and even sound help us witness a planetary disaster that is often imperceptible. Rather than merely analyzing or theorizing various futures, this course will prepare students in hands-on methods of "speculative design" and "critical making." Each Tuesday, we will study how art and literature draw on the specific capacities of written and visual media to represent climate impacts, and how new humanities research is addressing climate change. Each Thursday, we will participate in short artistic exercises that explore futures of each area. These exercises include future object design, bodymapping and story circles, tabletop gameplay, and serious game design. Throughout the quarter, guest speakers from across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences will visit the class to speak about how their disciplines are working to understand and mitigate climate impacts. The most substantial work of the quarter will be an ambitious multimedia or transmedia project about one of the core course topics to be completed in a team.

Instructor(s): P. Jagoda, B. Morgan     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2025-2026
Prerequisite(s): Third- or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 27900, ENGL 27904, BPRO 27900, CMST 27814, CEGU 27900

MADD 22141. Intro to Genres: Drawing on Graphic Novels. 100 Units.

Like film, comics are a language, and there's much to be learned from studying them, even if we have no intention of 'writing' them. Comics tell two or more stories simultaneously, one via image, the other via text, and these parallel stories can not only complement but also contradict one another, creating subtexts and effects that words alone can't. Or can they? Our goal will be to draw, both literally and metaphorically, on the structures and techniques of the form. While it's aimed at the aspiring graphic novelist (or graphic essayist, or poet), it's equally appropriate for those of us who work strictly with words (or images). What comics techniques can any artist emulate, approximate, or otherwise aspire to, and how can these lead us to a deeper understanding of the possibilities of point of view, tone, structure and style? We'll learn the basics of the medium via Ivan Brunetti's book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, as well as Syllabus, by Lynda Barry. Readings include the scholar David Kunzle on the origins of the form, the first avant-garde of George Herriman, Frank King, and Lyonel Feininger, finishing with contemporaries like Chris Ware, Emil Ferris and Alison Bechdel. Assignments include weekly creative and critical assignments, culminating in a final portfolio and paper.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 12141

MADD 22150. Lighting Design & Technology. 100 Units.

This course places equal emphasis on the theory and practice of modern stage lighting. Applying real world observations and research with practical applications students will learn the mechanical properties of lighting equipment; how to create, read, and execute a lighting plot; the functions of lighting in a theatrical context; color and design theory; and how to read a text as a lighting designer. Diverse perspectives in designing with light include rigorous practicum requirements in group projects and exposure to various designers and philosophies.

Instructor(s): G. Bell     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28150, CHST 28150

MADD 22322. Introduction to Game Design. 100 Units.

This course introduces students to the theories and processes underlying game design through the creation of analog projects. We will be designing for forms that include board games, tabletop games, and live-action games. No prior design experience is absolutely required though some background with game studies will enable more innovative work. This course will be project-based and collaborative in nature.

Instructor(s): Ashlyn Sparrow     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Students must have taken “Critical Videogame Studies” or another comparable game studies or design course. To apply, submit writing through the online form at https://forms.gle/k8SVfDqC9hsvHxyHA. Once given consent, attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 22322

MADD 22500. Computational Imaging. 100 Units.

This studio course introduces fundamental tools and concepts used in the production of computer-mediated artwork. Instruction includes a survey of standard digital imaging software and hardware (i.e., Photoshop, scanners, storage, printing, etc.), as well as exposure to more sophisticated methods. We also view and discuss the historical precedents and current practice of media art. Using input and output hardware, students complete conceptually driven projects emphasizing personal direction while gaining core digital knowledge.

Instructor(s): J. Salavon     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200, or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28800, ARTV 22500, ARTV 32500

MADD 22502. Data and Algorithm in Art. 100 Units.

An introduction to the use of data sources and algorithmic methods in visual art, this course explores the aesthetic and theoretical possibilities of computational art-making. Focusing on the diverse and ever expanding global data-feed, we will craft custom software processes to create works investigating the visual transformation of information. Additionally, software programming may be deployed independently, without a connection to source material. While placing an emphasis on creating new work, we will also survey the history of this type of art practice.

Instructor(s): J. Salavon     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200, or 10300
Note(s): No prior experience with programming is necessary.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 22502, ARTV 32502

MADD 22506. Algorithmic Music Online. 100 Units.

In this course, students will learn how to use JavaScript and web-based technologies to create algorithmic musical compositions and experimental web-based instruments. Through the use of the WebAudio API and JavaScript libraries like tone.js, students will learn how to programmatically generate and manipulate sound, creating interactive and generative audio works that can be shared online. Along the way, the class will also survey works by artists working in this field and will feature a visiting artist who will walk students through their own practice. Themes of generative art, randomness and chance, originality and machine creativity, and the cultural implications of influential musical algorithms will also be explored. This class is an intermediate level programming course. A beginner to intermediate level understanding of core programming concepts (ideally in JavaScript) is required. While a background in music can certainly be beneficial, it is not required for success in this course.

Instructor(s): Nick Briz     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 22507

MADD 22700. Devising Fundamentals. 100 Units.

Devised theater is created from a multitude of sources but, importantly, not a preexisting script. Rather the 'script' (whether or not it eventually takes written form) is developed in rehearsal. This studio course engages students in methods of generating and crafting devised material, including but not limited to physical action, moment work, and verbatim text. Additionally we will focus on the generative power of 'problems' as a motor of creation, which draws from core principles of clowning. Through solo and collaborative projects, students will explore how devised theater wrestles with conventionally discrete roles in theater-making (writer, director, performer, dramaturg, and designer). Other considerations will include strategies for making disparate material cohere and more broadly, what constitutes a story. Select readings and case studies of artists working in devised theater will supplement the practice-based focus of the course.

Instructor(s): L. Danzig     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 22700, TAPS 32700

MADD 22800. 3D Modeling and Sculpting for Video Games. 100 Units.

In this class, students will learn how to create high resolution 3D model concepts for the production of video games. High resolution sculpting is an integral part of today's 3D production pipelines. This course aims to focus on this stage of the production pipeline, and its role in creating high quality games. While this class will focus on creating assets for video games, digital sculpting skills can be applied to a variety of other industries, such as architecture, fashion and jewelry, to name a few.

Instructor(s): Tim Nicholson     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 22900. Color Theory and Practice. 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to practical aspects of color mixing and the visual impacts of specific color combinations through a series of studio exercises and projects. Conceptual and theoretical investigations into optics, the science of color, and psychological and symbolic effects will contribute to an overall understanding of color in relation to visual culture and perception.

Instructor(s): S. Wolniak     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200, or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 21900, ARTV 31900

MADD 22911. Augmented Reality Production. 100 Units.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of augmented reality, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production of AR works. Students in this production-based class will examine the techniques and opportunities of this new kind of moving image. During this class we'll study the construction of examples across a gamut from locative media, journalism, and gameplay-based works to museum installations. Students will complete a series of critical essays and sketches towards a final augmented reality project using a custom set of software tools developed in and for the class.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2024-25.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37911, ARTV 37921, CMST 27911, ARTV 27921

MADD 22920. Art and Digital Fabrication. 100 Units.

Digital fabrication practices are transforming the design and manufacture of the world of objects we interact with daily. Naturally, as those tools become more available to the public, artists have co opted and repurposed them to respond and intervene in that world. In this workshop course, students will develop individual creative projects as a means of developing technical familiarity with digital fabrication techniques (particularly laser cutting and 3d printing) and exploring the ways these processes have impacted the material, social, and economic spaces in which we live. The course is primarily intended as an introduction to these techniques, software, and tools, so no prior experience is required.

Instructor(s): Cameron Mankin     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 23020. Live Cinema. 100 Units.

This production-oriented class will examine contemporary approaches to the performed digital moving image. Through studying the range of tools and conceptual frameworks that have sought to fuse live visuals in performance in contexts spanning theater, dance, music, installation and public art, students will complete a series of critical sketches leading towards a final project using custom software developed in and for the class. Film production, music composition, and computer programming experience are welcome (but none are prerequisites for the course). Students will be expected to ultimately use the techniques they learn in a final performance.

Instructor(s): M.Downie     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27020, CMST 37020

MADD 23218. Surveillance Aesthetics: Provocations About Privacy and Security in the Digital Age. 100 Units.

In the modern world, individuals' activities are tracked, surveilled, and computationally modeled to both beneficial and problematic ends. Jointly with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), this course will examine privacy and security issues at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. Through both computer science and studio art, students will design algorithms, implement systems, and create interactive artworks that communicate, provoke, and reframe pervasive issues in modern privacy and security. The course will unpack and re-entangle computational connections and data-driven interactions between people, built space, sensors, structures, devices, and data. Synthesizing technology and aesthetics, we will communicate our findings to the broader public not only through academic avenues, but also via public art and media. The first phase of the course will involve prompts in which students design and program small-scale artworks in various contexts, including (1) data collected from web browsing; (2) mobility data; (3) data collected about consumers by major companies; and (4) raw sensor data. Students will receive detailed feedback on their work from computer scientists, artists, and curators at the Museum of Science & Industry (MSI). The course culminates in the production and presentation of a capstone interactive artwork by teams of computer scientists and artists; successful products may be considered for prototyping at the MSI.

Prerequisite(s): One of CMSC 23200, CMSC 23210, CMSC 25900, CMSC 28400, CMSC 33210, CMSC 33250, or CMSC 33251 recommended, but not required.
Note(s): Students interested in this class should complete this form to request permission to enroll: https://uchicago.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5jPT8gRDXDKQ26a
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 33218, CMSC 23218

MADD 23620. Internet Censorship and Online Speech. 100 Units.

Information dissemination and online discourse on the Internet are subject to the algorithms and filters that operate on Internet infrastructure, from network firewalls to search engines. This course will explore the technologies that are used to control access to online speech and information, and cutting-edge technologies that can empower citizens in the face of these information controls. Students will learn about and experiment with technologies to control online discourse, ranging from firewalls that perform network traffic filtering to algorithms for content personalization and content moderation. We will also explore underlying technical trends, such as the increasing consolidation of Internet infrastructure and protocols, and the implications of consolidation for control over online discourse. Each course meeting will include a technical overview, reading discussion, and a hands-on laboratory activity.

Prerequisite(s): None
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 23260, CMSC 33260, PARR 33260

MADD 23631. Internet Art & Web Design. 100 Units.

We generally accept that computers and the Internet evolved outside of fine art contexts, in fields like science and mathematics. That said, the history of these technologies is a history of creative individuals collaboratively shaping one of the most important narratives of our time, "the Internet is the great masterpiece of human civilization" (Heffernan). In this studio course, we'll learn what the Internet is, how it works, how it got here and how to engage with it as a creative medium. This means we'll be learning how to craft it from code, specifically HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets), but also studying its aesthetics, conventions and practices. We'll be drawing inspiration from various Internet art movements, from the net.art scene of the 1990s, to the digital folk art of GeoCities at the turn of the century, to the Web design and CSS art scenes of today. The goal of this course will be to cultivate our own piece of Internet art/design, informed by the research, discussions, exercises and experiments we'll make along the way.

Instructor(s): Nick Briz     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 23632. Creative Coding Online. 100 Units.

Though the web was originally conceived as an online space for sharing hyperlinked documents, the modern Web browser has evolved into a creative coding playground capable of producing all manner of networked art and algorithmic compositions. In this course we'll learn JavaScript, the Web's defacto programming language. Throughout the quarter we'll experiment with various different Web APIs for creating generative and interactive Internet art including HTML5 video, Canvas (2D/3D animations) and Web Audio. We'll learn how to produce work that responds to various input sources (trackpad/mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, cameras, microphones) and how to fetch and incorporate data from external APIs elsewhere on the Internet.

Instructor(s): Nick Briz     Terms Offered: Spring

MADD 23640. Embodied Data and Gamified Interfaces. 100 Units.

We produce caches of data within our networked lives, from social media interactions to mass surveillance systems, mostly to the benefit of corporate or state entities. The aesthetics of many of these interfaces uses gamification as a guise to data collection, relying on dopamine rushes from "winning" likes, shares, and views to keep us coming back. Through a combination of lectures and workshops, we will explore data and games as artistic mediums and how they interface and exchange with each other. We will look at how the physical body is reduced to data, surveilled and analyzed through our online behavior, mobile devices, computer vision, and machine learning algorithms. Students will learn how to incorporate the aesthetics of this embodied data into 2D and 3D gaming spaces, while considering how the physical body fits into the increasingly digitally connected world. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Jon Chambers     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 23645. Body and the Digital. 100 Units.

As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, strengthen their ability to give critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Throughout this course, students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdofer     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20701, GNSE 23645

MADD 23650. Culture Jamming in the Digital Age. 100 Units.

From the détournement images of the Situationist International to the plundered sampled tracks of sonic outlaws, activist media artists in the later half of the 20th century deployed a medley of piratical practices in their quest to challenge and subvert our mainstream media culture. While the institutional critiques posed by these "culture jammers" remain as salient as ever, the creative techniques themselves no longer have the same effect in the age of social media and surveillance capitalism. As new media theorist Curt Cloninger asked in 2009, "How do you hack/resist a platform that already allows (indeed, invites) you to customize it?" This is the question we will set out to answer in this course. We'll look at works and study the practices of new media artists who have adapted these culture jamming techniques for the present moment. We'll learn how glitch artists exploit bugs in software to databend and datamosh media files. We'll learn how hacktivist use information security tools for creative political ends. We'll explore radical networks that exist outside the mainstream Internet and learn to tactically misuse our apps to circumvent restrictions imposed by popular platforms. At the end of this journey we'll respond to Cloninger's challenge by reframing these techniques as new modes of culture jamming for the digital age. This course can count towards the Media Practice and Design or Media Theory requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Nick Briz     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 23655. Collaborative Artware. 100 Units.

In this course we'll be working together as an open source arts collective. We'll produce an online app which explores the expressive space between software as a tool and software as art. We'll learn the processes (Agile, Scrum, etc) and tools (git, GitHub, etc) that professional creative technologists use when working together to produce "software art" projects. This is an intermediate level coding course with work being predominantly written in JavaScript (server side and client side). While proficiency in JavaScript is not required, it's recommended that students have a background in basic programming concepts (data types, variables, functions, conditions, loops, etc) as this course will build on those to introduce more intermediate level concepts and programming paradigms. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Chris Collins     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 23801. Video. 100 Units.

This is a production course geared towards short experimental works and video within a studio art context.

Instructor(s): S. Wolniak     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200 or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 23801, ARTV 33801

MADD 23804. Experimental Animation: Exploring Manual Techniques. 100 Units.

Individually directed video shorts will be produced in this intensive studio course. Experimental and improvised approaches to animation and motion picture art will focus on analog and material techniques, with basic digital post-production also being introduced. Early and experimental cinema, puppetry and contemporary low-tech animation will be presented as formal and technical examples.

Instructor(s): S. Wolniak     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200, or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 23804, CMST 23804, ARTV 33804

MADD 23805. Minimalist Experiment in Film and Video. 100 Units.

This multilevel studio will investigate minimalist strategies in artists' film and video from the late 1960s to the present day. Emphasis will be placed on works made with limited means and/or with "amateur" formats such as Super-8 and 16mm film, camcorders, Flip cameras, SLR video, and iPhone or iPad. Our aim is to imagine how to produce complex results from economical means. Important texts will be paired with in class discussion of works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Kurt Kren, Jack Goldstein, Larry Gottheim, Bruce Baillie, James Benning, John Baldessari, Morgan Fisher, Stan Douglas, Matthew Buckingham, Sam Taylor-Wood, and others.

Instructor(s): D.N. Rodowick     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28006, ARTV 33815, ARTV 23805, CMST 38006

MADD 23806. Video Workshop. 100 Units.

This production course is geared toward short video works and innovative approaches to digital moving-image art. Video Workshop will function as a continuation and expansion on the foundations of Video I, with emphasis on individually directed projects and experimentation. While some technical instruction and assistance will be offered, a basic understanding of digital cameras and editing software will be beneficial. Projects include several short video sketches and experiments, group exercises, and a larger-scale independent project. Weeks will be divided into screenings/discussion sessions and technical work periods.

Instructor(s): S. Wolniak     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): PQ: ARTV 10300, ARTV 23801, or consent of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 33806, ARTV 23806

MADD 23808. Introduction to 16mm Filmmaking. 100 Units.

The goal of this intensive laboratory course is to give its students a working knowledge of film production using the 16mm gauge. The course will emphasize how students can use 16mm technology towards successful cinematography and image design (for use in both analog and digital postproduction scenarios) and how to develop their ideas towards constructing meaning through moving pictures. Through a series of group exercises, students will put their hands on equipment and solve technical and aesthetic problems, learning to operate and care for the 16mm Bolex film camera; prime lenses; Sekonic light meter; Sachtler tripod; and Arri light kit and accessories. For a final project, students will plan and produce footage for an individual or small group short film. The first half the course will be highly structured, with demonstrations, in-class shoots, and lectures. As the semester continues, class time will open up to more of a workshop format to address the specific concerns and issues that arise in the production of the final projects. This course is made possible by the Charles Roven Fund for Cinema and Media Studies. Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email the instructor with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Students will need written permission to enroll in the course. To bid for entry into the class, please email the instructor with your name, major and year -- and please list any other media production or photography experience. Enrollment priority will be given to graduate and undergraduate CMS students, beginning with seniors, then to DoVA graduates and undergraduates, then to students in other departments.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38921, CMST 28921, ARTV 23808, ARTV 33808

MADD 23809. Experimental Animation: Digital and Camera-less Production. 100 Units.

Through digital and camera-less production techniques such as scanning, signal manipulation, and appropriation, this course will emphasize image construction, digital effects, and post-production for creation of animated art. It can function as a continuation of Experimental Animation: Exploring Manual Techniques or be a stand alone course. Early video effects and image processing, and a wide variety of digital and abstract animation will be presented as formal and technical examples.

Instructor(s): S. Wolniak     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200 or 10300.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 23809, ARTV 33809

MADD 23820. The Mind as Stage: Podcasting. 100 Units.

Audio storytelling insinuates itself into the day-to-day unlike other narrative forms. People listen to podcasts while they do the dishes, drive to work, or walk the dog. In this hands-on course, we will learn to produce a podcast from idea to final sound mix, and explore the unique opportunities that the podcast form affords the storyteller. Students will complete several short audio exercises, and one larger podcast project.

Instructor(s): S. Geis     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Attendance at first class session is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28320, TAPS 38320

MADD 23833. Oral History & Podcasting. 100 Units.

This class explores the potential of the podcast as a form of ethical artistic and social practice. Through the lens of oral history and its associated values - including prioritizing voices that are not often heard, reciprocity, complicating narratives, and the archive- we will explore ways to tell stories of people and communities in sound. Students will develop a grounding in oral history practices and ethics, as well as the skills to produce compelling oral narratives, including audio editing, recording scenes and ambient sound, and using music. During the quarter, students will have several opportunities to practice interviewing and will design their own oral history project. This class is appropriate for students with no audio experience, as well as students who have taken TAPS 28320 The Mind as Stage: Podcasting.

Instructor(s): S. Geis     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 38330, TAPS 28330, CHST 28330

MADD 23860. Screendance: Movement and New Media. 100 Units.

This course will explore the evolving relationship between moving bodies and video technologies. From early filmmakers using dancers as test subjects, to movie musicals and contemporary dance for the camera festivals, mediatization of the body continues to challenge the ephemerality of live dance performance. This course focuses on the growing field of screendance, videodance, or dance-on-camera, working to define this hybrid genre and to understand the collaborative roles of choreographer, director, dancer, cameraman, and video editor. This course is both a practical and scholarly approach to the genre of screendance, each component essential to a full understanding and mastery of the other. Course work will be divided between the studio and the classroom. For the studio component, students will learn basic video editing and filming techniques. For the classroom component, students will be asked to watch screendance and read a cross-section of criticism. Assignments will be both technological and choreographic (making screendance) and scholarly (written reflections and a seminar paper).

Instructor(s): L. Leopold     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at first class is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28360, CMST 28360, TAPS 38360

MADD 23930. Documentary Production I. 100 Units.

Documentary Video Production focuses on the making of independent documentary video. Examples of various modes of documentary production will be screened and discussed. Issues embedded in the genre, such as the ethics, the politics of representation, and the shifting lines between "the real" and "fiction" will be explored. Story development, pre-production strategies, and production techniques will be our focus, in particular-research, relationships, the camera, interviews and sound recording, shooting in available light, working in crews, and post-production editing. Students will work in crews and be expected to purchase a portable hard drive. A five-minute string-out/rough-cut will be screened at the end of the quarter. Students are strongly encouraged to take CMST 23931 Documentary Production II to complete their work. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

Instructor(s): Marco Ferrari     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Prior or concurrent enrollment in CMST 10100 recommended for undergraduate students.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 33930, HMRT 25106, ARTV 23930, CMST 33930, CHST 23930, HMRT 35106, CMST 23930

MADD 23931. Documentary Production II. 100 Units.

Documentary Production II focuses on the shaping and crafting of a non-fiction video. Enrollment will be limited to those students who have taken CMST 23930 Documentary Production I. The class will discuss issues of ethics, power, and representation in this most philosophical and problematic of genres. Students will be expected to write a treatment outline detailing their project and learn about granting agencies and budgeting. Production techniques will concentrate on the language of handheld camera versus tripod, interview methodologies, microphone placement including working with wireless systems and mixers, and lighting for the interview. Post-production will cover editing techniques including color correction and audio sweetening, how to prepare for exhibition, and distribution strategies. Consent of instructor is required to enroll.

Instructor(s): Marco Ferrari     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): CMST 23930, HMRT 25106, or ARTV 23930
Equivalent Course(s): HMRT 35107, ARTV 23931, HMRT 25107, CHST 23931, CMST 23931, ARTV 33931, CMST 33931

MADD 24007. Thinking About and Making Pictures. 100 Units.

With the advent of the digital smart phone, we are all photographers. Just as we all use words, photography, like language, carries meaning that has and gives rise to a myriad of purposes, possibilities, and limitations. The goal of this course is to develop students' investigations and explorations in photography, building on beginning level techniques and ideas to explore technical and conceptual image-making strategies to refine students' visual eloquence. Students will make photographs in response to prompts that interrogate various photographic processes, readings and artists' work (gallery visits, books and image presentations), Critiques and discussions will hone students' critical and evaluative capabilities. Processes will range from silver gelatin black-and-white or color printing, small, medium and/or large format cameras usage, as well as experimenting with alternative light-sensitive materials and digital negatives and printing.

Instructor(s): L. Letinsky     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 24000 or ARTV 24004
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 24007, ARTV 34007

MADD 24270. Children & Architecture. 100 Units.

Many who pursue architecture do so initially out of a childlike fascination with buildings, places, and worlds. Curiosity and limited understanding naturally provide children with an exploratory relationship to the built environments they traverse, and children also often show a heightened sense of wonder--heightened emotions of all kinds--as that relationship plays out. (This can be positive and formative, or scary and traumatic.) And yet, many of the adults who make choices about the worlds we inhabit think mostly of adults, and as adults, in doing so. This architecture studio course investigates the built world through a child's eyes, across different moments in history, including our own. Readings and seminar discussions will range from playgrounds to blocks, preschools to family relations, swimming pools and sandcastles to the very construction of childhood as an idea. We will explore Chicago and meet with builders of all ages, likely culminating in designing (and potentially building) a real playground space. While previous experience with architectural skills is not necessary to excel in this course, childlike curiosity is required. While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 24, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)

Instructor(s): L. Joyner     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): While this class does not require prior experience, all ARCH studio courses require consent. Starting February 24, please visit arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent to request instructor consent for this class or other ARCH studios. (Please do not send consent requests by email.)
Note(s): The course is visiting the City Museum in St. Louis (a multi-story, artist-built playground for children and adults that defies description) for one day in advance of the course.
Equivalent Course(s): ENST 24270, ARTV 20029, ARTH 24270, ARCH 24270, CHST 24270

MADD 24410. Transmedia Puzzle Design & Performance. 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to the burgeoning field of immersive puzzle design. Students will develop, implement and playtest puzzles that are suited for a range of experiences: from the tabletop to the immersive, from online puzzle hunts to broad-scoped alternate reality games (ARG). Students in this course will work directly with master puzzler, Sandor Wiesz, the commissioner of The Mystery League.

Instructor(s): S. Weisz     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24410, TAPS 34410

MADD 24415. Games & Performance. 100 Units.

This experimental course explores the emerging genre of "immersive performance," "alternate reality," and "transmedia" gaming. For all of their novelty, these games build on the narrative strategies of novels, the performative role-playing of theater, the branching techniques of electronic literature, the procedural qualities of videogames, and the team dynamics of sports. Throughout the quarter, we will approach new media theory through the history, aesthetics, and design of immersive games, while working in labs with three Chicago-area companies including The House Theater, Mystery League, and Humans vs. Zombies.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Attendance at first class session is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24415, TAPS 34415, CHST 24415

MADD 24420. Games and Performance: Live Action Role Playing Games. 100 Units.

This course delves into the innovative realms of "immersive performance," "alternate reality," and "transmedia" gaming, culminating in student projects designed for a Spring 2025 immersive event co-hosted by the Fourcast Lab, a transdisciplinary initiative at The University of Chicago, to be staged in The Regenstein Library. As we journey through the history of interactive performances from Tudor-era spectacles to the strategic depth of tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons and the vibrant world of Nordic LARPs, students will acquire key skills in scriptwriting, character development, improvisation, digital platforms, and experience design. We will explore the dynamic theories of Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) and Alternate Reality Games (ARG), investigating how these formats challenge the boundaries between the real and the performative while engaging audiences in rich, narrative-driven experiences. By dissecting the mechanics of these interactive formats, students will gain the ability to craft engaging narratives that invite active participation and build community. Collaborations with library staff will be integral, allowing students to leverage the library's vast resources and spaces for creative expression and experiential learning. The course will also embrace progressive ideas of libraries as dynamic hubs for cultural production and innovation, utilizing the library not only as a venue but as a partner in fostering creative exploration. This partnership will provi

Instructor(s): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24420, TAPS 34420

MADD 24515. Contemporary Political Strategies in Performance. 100 Units.

The emphasis of the course is on strategies-in the words of curator Florian Malzacher, "artistic strategies in politics, and political strategies in art." In moments of political struggle, what can art DO, and what can it not? We will be combining case studies with theoretical background, examining strategies like occupation, participation, parafiction, 'technologies of care,' détournement and the art strike. Students will have the opportunity to put some of these approaches to the test by designing one or more local interventions according to the interests of the group.

Instructor(s): A. Dorsen     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 25515, TAPS 35515, ARTV 30213, ARTV 20213

MADD 24530. Staging the Internet. 100 Units.

The theater has often been used as a means to embody psychic spaces, from Medieval mystery plays and other allegorical works to Richard Foreman's attempt to give theatrical form to consciousness itself. This practice-based lab class will propose to 'stage the internet' - what techniques and strategies can we develop to give tangible shape to the virtual world? Our explorations will be catalyzed by readings on data and interfaces, networks and protocols, procedural/algorithmic art, digital labor, and competing notions of the virtual.

Instructor(s): A. Dorsen     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Course is designed for advanced undergraduates and graduates. Previous course work in Theater and Performance Studies or related fields required.
Note(s): Attendance at first class meeting is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 26530, ARTV 20214, TAPS 46530, ARTV 30214

MADD 24540. Multimedia Fashion Design. 100 Units.

Multimedia Fashion Design sets out to uncover new notions of fashion and style through collaborative, interdisciplinary, and experimental approaches. Historically, garment designers sketch or illustrate their ideas with either theatrical costuming or the runway in mind as an end goal. This course embraces these traditions while also imagining a broader array of historical and contemporary media that involves fashion, like video games, animations, comics, novels, and more. We will spend time exploring the epistemology of fashion before working on our own designs, challenging each other conceptually along the way. Some students may follow the traditional path of sewing their ideas. Others may find themselves creating their work using software. Those who are brand new to art or design are also welcome--we can always sketch our ideas. Multimedia Fashion Design welcomes artists and designers who work in any medium to come together and think about how people and characters express style--the broader the array of mediums, the more dynamic our class will be.

Instructor(s): Takashi Shallow     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 27540

MADD 24550. Evolution of Improvisation in Chicago. 100 Units.

This course traces the history of improvisation for performance, beginning with the "High Priestess" Viola Spolin's work exploring the educational and social benefits of play at Hull House through Paul Sill's development of The Compass Players in Hyde Park to include current companies including Second City, The Neo Futurists, The Annoyance, and IO. The course will include attendance at performances, student presentations, and practice-based workshops.

Instructor(s): H. Coleman     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 24550, TAPS 34550, TAPS 24550

MADD 24618. Sound Practices: Composing with Sound. 100 Units.

Electronic Music I presents an open environment for creativity and expression through composition in the electronic music studio. The course provides students with a background in the fundamentals of sound and acoustics, covers the theory and practice of digital signal processing for audio, and introduces the recording studio as a powerful compositional tool. The course culminates in a concert of original student works presented in multi-channel surround sound. Enrollment gives students access to the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music. No prior knowledge of electronic music is necessary.

Instructor(s): TBD
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 36618, MUSI 26618

MADD 24817. Electronic Music: Introduction to Computer Music Programming. 100 Units.

This course is an introduction to computer-based sound art and live electronic music performance. Our primary tool for this course will be MAX/MSP, a computer music programming language designed for composition and real-time music applications. Through this language we will explore the foundations of computer music, including digital instrument design, sequencing, live processing, sound diffusion, and various approaches to algorithmic music generation.

Instructor(s): David Bird     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 26817, MUSI 36817

MADD 24820. Video Game Music Production and Sound Design. 100 Units.

The advent of video game soundtrack releases and live game music concerts substantiate the importance of music and sound in games, not just as accompaniments but as essential aspects of the gaming experience. This production course surveys the history of sound effects, music, and design in games beginning with the bleeps and bloops of the 1970s and concluding with the ambient, nonlinear soundscape of many contemporary games. Following the timeline media theorist Karen Collins presents in her documentary Beep, this course will explore electronic sound technologies including virtual analog synthesis, frequency modulation, bit reduction, General MIDI, and sample-based production. Each student will compose a game soundtrack demo for their final project. This course welcomes students who are both new to and experienced in sound production; the complexity of each assignment can be adjusted based on experience.

Instructor(s): Takashi Shallow     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 24820

MADD 24910. Short Form Digital Storytelling: Creating a Web Series. 100 Units.

This course examines the short form storytelling of the digital web series. Through lectures, viewings and discussions in weekly meetings students will determine what makes a strong web series and apply the findings to writing and polishing the pilot episode of their own web series. Students will write weekly 4-5 page assignments building toward the creation of a 5-6 episode series.

Instructor(s): P. Wimp     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Attendance at first class session is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28915, TAPS 25910

MADD 24920. Virtual Reality Production. 100 Units.

Focusing on experimental moving-image approaches at a crucial moment in the emerging medium of virtual reality, this class will explore and interrogate each stage of production for VR. By hacking their way around the barriers and conventions of current software and hardware to create new optical experiences, students will design, construct and deploy new ways of capturing the world with cameras and develop new strategies and interactive logics for placing images into virtual spaces. Underpinning these explorations will be a careful discussion, dissection and reconstruction of techniques found in the emerging VR "canon" that spans new modes of journalism and documentary, computer games, and narrative "VR cinema." Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short "sketches" of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): Film production and computer programming experience is welcome but not a prerequisite for the course. Students will be expected to complete short "sketches" of approaches in VR towards a final short VR experience.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27920, ARTV 37920, CMST 37920, ARTV 27920

MADD 24930. Designing Virtual Space While Staying Alive. 100 Units.

How do we experience virtual space in the age of the pandemic? An introductory, studio-oriented class on Unity and Virtual Reality development, this class explores ways of designing virtual space for platforms beyond the head-mounted display. To mine the full potential of the medium, we will adopt a slightly deconstructed approach to learning techniques while adjusting to remote learning needs. Each week's lesson starts with a conceptual prompt around which the technical knowledge revolves. Prompts include: What makes an interesting space? How would one travel through the virtual space? What kind of physicality constitutes your virtual experience? The knowledge and technique acquired in this class can serve as the building blocks for game design, data visualization, VR/AR/XR development. This course counts towards the Media Practice and Design requirement for the MAAD program.

Instructor(s): Li Yao     Terms Offered: Spring

MADD 24931. Re-imagning Health in Immersive Media Environments. 100 Units.

Virtual Reality (VR) as a storytelling medium is often discussed in terms of immersion and presence and how these media specificities tend to instill greater empathy. The common argument suggests that VR allows participants to experience someone else's lived reality as if it were their own. This capacity of VR to increase empathy has been contested by scholars in various fields. In light of this critique, we will examine the potential of VR to tell stories of illness and debility beyond empathy. Using concepts from critical disability studies, phenomenology, narrative medicine, and media theory, we will learn to distinguish the roles that VR narratives offer their participants, ranging from being a witness to becoming the first-person experiencer of non-normative embodiments. Exemplary questions are: what are the limitations of empathy in VR illness narratives? How can illness narratives in VR critically reflect on binaries between healthy/ill? Each week, we will focus on particular health issues as they are taken up by VR artists. We will delve into the ways VR enables experiences of pain in the absence of tissue damage or offer multisensory and nonlinear stories to give a sense of the ups and downs of living with bipolar disorder. The literature provided will help guide us through the exploration of these VR experiences. We will also try out some of these VR experiences ourselves.

Instructor(s): Desiree Foerster     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37931, CMST 27931

MADD 24935. Introduction to Immersive Environments. 100 Units.

Virtual reality is expanding from just being utilized for games into an exploration of extendedrealities. Introduction to Immersive Environments will explore the theory and applications of virtualreality environments. Students will learn how to construct their VR environments using Blender and Unity. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques of their works throughout this course. Students will also explore the genre with readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different developmental processes to create.

Instructor(s): Crystal Beiersdorfer     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 24935

MADD 25010. Anthropology of the Future. 100 Units.

Two major subfields of anthropology - archaeology and ethnography - have traditionally been oriented around the human past and the human present. But what about the future? Conceptions of the future and future-oriented behavior have long been understood to be a critical plane of difference between political economies, religions, and cultural groups, yet they have rarely been an explicit focus of study. When we shift the temporal frame to the future, questions that arise include: do all cultures have theories of the future? how much about human societies are intentional? how does ideology shape future possibilities? what role do imagined futures play in political life? We will consider theories of temporality, past futures (Aztec, Polynesian, Italian), and movements such as millenarianism, messianic religions, Marxism, Dadaism, utopian communities, Afro-futurism, transhumanism, and today's neo-futurist movements that deploy radical technology and speculative design in response to looming climate change. We will also explore the intimate relationship between speculative fiction (e.g., Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut) and anthropology.

Instructor(s): S. Dawdy
Equivalent Course(s): CCCT 20010, ANTH 20010

MADD 25022. Composing for Spatial Audio. 100 Units.

TBA

Instructor(s): David Byrd     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 45022

MADD 25080. Spectacle in Miniature. 100 Units.

This course explores how the grand theatrical event can be 'miniaturized'. Students will investigate forms of spectacle and contemporary puppetry, toy theater, performance installation, and designed environments, along with artists who work in intimate and miniature scale. Students will create works experimenting with how large dramatic stories can be told with detailed and intimate sets, puppets, transforming objects, mechanical contraptions, and text. Sources for narrative will include but not be limited to dream and myth.

Instructor(s): F. Maugeri     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20216, TAPS 27080

MADD 25171. Robots, animals, technologies: Science fiction and the more-than-human. 100 Units.

Science fiction allows encounters with other beings that variously encourage or strain the bonds of kinship, and many of those beings are related to entities with whom we already share a world. From companion animals and modified humans to starfish and androids, estrangement from familiar categories allows us to trouble assumptions about the certainty of species, the superiority of consciousness, and what care looks like in relation with those who may not respond to, recognize, or return care in familiar ways. In this class, we'll look at relations with the more-than-human in the context of urgent and emergent lived experience, in which social, political, and environmental realities require a response that thinks beyond entrenched approaches and takes wild and revolutionary imagination as a reparative possibility. We'll explore these and other questions through science fiction novels, poetry, graphic novels, music, and video (by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Janelle Monae, Grant Morrison, Margaret Rhee, and others). We'll engage with theoretical work on topics including multispecies kinship, race and technology, and non-conscious/non-biological life (by Karen Barad, Beth Coleman, Wendy Chun, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Shannon Mattern, Sophia Roosth, Alan Turing, and others). [Note: this class pairs well with "Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the more-than-human" offered in Spring, and may also be taken as a stand-alone course.]

Instructor(s): William Hutchison     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 40171, ENGL 20171, MAPH 40171

MADD 25201. Art & Machine Intelligence. 100 Units.

Artists have long used autonomous processes to aid in the creation of their work. From 18th century parlor games to contemporary visual culture, creators have applied stochastic methods, automation, and simulation to generate music, text, and imagery. In the last five years, as machine learning has matured into broadly applicable artificial intelligence, artists have turned towards neural networks as a new frontier for creative practice. This studio course will explore the history and uses of autonomous creative tools and focus, more specifically, on leading edge artistic applications of AI. Students will receive exposure to a breadth of methods in this domain and produce multiple projects engaged with these topics. Software development experience is not required, though it may be useful.

Instructor(s): J. Salavon     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): ARTV 10100, 10200 or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 22501, ARTV 32501

MADD 25300. Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction. 100 Units.

An introduction to the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with an emphasis in understanding, designing and programming user-facing software and hardware systems. This class covers the core concepts of HCI: affordances, mental models, selection techniques (pointing, touch, menus, text entry, widgets, etc), conducting user studies (psychophysics, basic statistics, etc), rapid prototyping (3D printing, etc), and the fundamentals of 3D interfaces (optics for VR, AR, etc). We compliment the lectures with weekly programming assignments and two larger projects, in which we build/program/test user-facing interactive systems.

Prerequisite(s): CMSC 14200 or CMSC 15400 or CMSC 22000
Equivalent Course(s): CMSC 20300, CMSC 30300

MADD 25302. A Still Life: Feminists and Objects in Modernity. 100 Units.

Modernity has always been fascinated by the fantasy of objects coming to life. Feminist theory, by contrast, has often been fixated on the reverse: "objectification," or the process of human beings becoming like objects. This course puts into conversation these two different ways of imagining animate object-ness in order to assemble a critical archive on one of modernity's foundational binaries: the "subject-object" dichotomy. We will examine a series of genres that prominently feature objects, including it-narratives, narratives about robotic women, and video games, while consider these texts in relation to prominent feminist writings about objectification. (Theory, Fiction)

Instructor(s): Katherine Nolan     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 18302, ENGL 13002

MADD 25305. Virtual Worlds and Nonhuman Narratives: Cyberspace Fiction. 100 Units.

The joke gets at a disorienting truth: we live in a world where cyberspace increasingly leaks into the "real" physical space of our lives, and the two often become surrealistically conflated. We can be at once in a given geographical location and "online," wafting in and out of presence in both places. We live in a world where major events transpire nowhere but "on the Internet," from hacks to business transactions to relationships. These events have effects and consequences that are felt in our physical world as well. How do we tell - and read - stories that take place at least in part in virtual regions? In this course, we will investigate narrative depictions of experience that transpires in the not-quite-place of cyberspace and similar technologically-sustained virtual arenas. Earlier dream narratives anticipate this world where experience increasingly takes place online; in later narratives of virtual reality, technologically-enabled virtual landscapes confer a dreamlike (il)logic on daily experience. What can we make of the apparent rapprochement between scientific and magical paradigms here? What are the political stakes of a virtual world sometimes portrayed as anestheticizing but also sometimes a space where otherwise unavailable experiences and information can be accessed? We will examine a transatlantic range of influential twentieth-century texts as well as selections from theoretical and critical texts on communicative and information technology.

Instructor(s): Nell Pach     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 23505

MADD 25316. After You: Curating the Art & Algorithm Debate. 100 Units.

This course offers a unique opportunity to witness the process of - and, more importantly, actively contribute to - the conceptualization of a major exhibition of contemporary art, to be organized at the Neubauer Collegium and Smart Museum of Art in the winter and spring of 2021. The exhibition in question is titled After You: Art and Agency in the Age of Algorithms, and was conceived in dialogue with DoVA associate professor and participating artist Jason Salavon. Alluding to the specter of the post-human regime and the various challenges raised by rapid advances in digital technology in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning in particular, After You will bring together the work of a dozen artists working at the intersection of more or less traditional modes of artistic production and their algorithmic antitheses. The primary focus of After You, and therefore also of this class, are the philosophical implications of the increased role of artificial intelligence in the creation and reception of art, in particular with regards to questions of artistic intent, authorship, and originality. We will discuss this phenomenon's short but vibrant history, meet artists, read key texts (Bostrom, Joselit, Steyerl, Zuboff), and view artworks, all the while laying the didactic groundwork for the 2021 exhibit in the process: a hands-on curatorial workshop centered on one of the defining debates of our time.

Instructor(s): Dieter Roelstraete     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 21316, ARTH 31316

MADD 25450. Writing the Feature Film. 100 Units.

This course is designed to help the emerging writer focus their creativity into a viable feature film project and screenplay. This includes structure, format, exposition, characterization, dialogue, voice-over, and other aspects of visual storytelling for the screen. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, assorted readings and writing assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students should expect to deliver four to five pages of written material-including story development materials or screenplay pages-each week.

Instructor(s): K. O'Brien     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25450, TAPS 25450

MADD 25500. Beginning Screenwriting. 100 Units.

This course introduces the basic elements of a literate screenplay, including format, exposition, characterization, dialog, voice-over, adaptation, and the vagaries of the three-act structure. Weekly meetings include a brief lecture period, screenings of scenes from selected films, extended discussion, and assorted readings of class assignments. Because this is primarily a writing class, students write a four- to five-page weekly assignment related to the script topic of the week. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 27102

Instructor(s): P. Wimp     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 15500, CMST 15500

MADD 25531. Framing the I: Autobiography and Film. 100 Units.

Cinema offers almost endless ways of telling one's own story-diaries, confessions, album, travelogues, accounts of a distressing period, letters, searches for one's origins, autobiographies, self-portraits, work notes, autofictions-and filmmakers continually create new hybrid forms that innovate or transgress former "genres." This seminar examines film history's various modes of autobiographical discourse in the context of philosophical and psychoanalytic considerations of the self as well as of experiments in literary and pictorial self-representation.

Instructor(s): D. Bluher     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: CMST 10100 Introduction to Film Analysis or consent of instructor.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25531, CMST 35531

MADD 25590. New Media Since the 19th Century. 100 Units.

How have artists working outside the traditional categories of painting and sculpture introduced new ways of looking at the world? This introductory course will survey the practice, theory, and reception of so-called "new media" art from the late 19th century to the present day. We will examine artists' use of emerging technologies including photography, the portable video camera, the electronic computer, holography, virtual and augmented reality, and Web-based art. We will also discuss time-based art forms such as performance and dance, which made the human body their primary medium. Moving roughly chronologically, we will attend to a set of central themes: temporality and perception, the blurring of artistic and scientific practices, and intersecting questions of gender, race, and class in relation to technology. Through a combination of close looking (the careful study of the visual and material qualities of a work of art) with close reading of primary literature (artists' writings, contemporary art criticism and theory) and secondary literature (scholars' takes on these topics), students will develop the vocabulary and conceptual tools necessary to describe works of art and contextualize them historically.

Instructor(s): Z. Valyi-Nagy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): This class will take place entirely remotely, with the majority of sessions held asynchronously. Students must attend 1st class to confirm enrollment. If a student is not yet enrolled in this course, s/he must fill out the online consent form & attend the first class. This course meets the Gen. Edu. Reqmt. in the dramatic, musical, & visual arts.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 15590

MADD 25604. How to Draw Things on the Computer. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Marc Downie     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25604

MADD 25612. Comics as Medium. 100 Units.

In a climate in which the borders differentiating media continue to collapse into something now referred to as "transmedia," what does it actually mean for us to move between mediums-particularly mediums that raise familiar issues of representation, temporality, and narrative? The objective of this course is to provide the necessary tools to enable critical reflection on the respective values and mutual relationships of comics, art and film. To achieve this, the course is divided into two units. The first weeks will be spent acquiring the technical and historical context that will enable us to begin to recognize the breadth and depth of word/image narrative practices. After developing a core vocabulary for thinking about comics as a medium we will then look at how artists and directors have drawn on that vocabulary in a range of different contexts. Retaining a sense of the specificity of both comics and film as artistic mediums, we will consider topics ranging from cross-cultural translation, ontologies of otherness, and modes of mediated history. Beyond questions of fidelity, we will look at what it means to adapt particular stories at particular moments. How does an X-Men comic from 1982 adapt to meet the historical needs of its film adaptation in 2002? What do we mean when we say a particular adaptation is "good" or that another attempt "failed"? The works this course will consider are meant to challenge our understanding of what the art of comics can be.

Instructor(s): J. Rosenow     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): CMST 10100 or permission of instructor
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 25612

MADD 25630. Videogames and Genre Storytelling. 100 Units.

Historically, the genre categorization of videogames has been based around what the player does. In place of iconography or thematic content, videogame genres are typically defined in terms of actions: shooting, jumping, pointing, clicking. This course takes a sideways approach to videogame genre, examining the ways in which games have taken inspiration from, and put their own unique mark on, genres borrowed from popular literature and cinema. The aesthetic formulas for popular genres such as horror, romance, comedy, science fiction, and the detective story will be examined using examples in literature and cinema, before turning to games and examining the unique challenges and interactivity brings to these genres' typical plot beats and affective techniques. How does the player-avatar relationship complicate point-of-view and identification in the horror genre? What happens to the literary rules of "fair play" in detective stories as they are adapted into actual game form? Can the performative pain of slapstick be successfully adapted into interactive form? How do dating games re-structure the traditional forms of intimacy of the romance novel and cinematic rom com? This course will take advantage of the resources of the Weston Game Lab of the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center, and will be structured around played examples, in addition to examples from popular literature and film.

Instructor(s): Ian Bryce Jones     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27840

MADD 25650. From Open Worlds to Angry Birds: Videogame History 2000-2010. 100 Units.

This course will trace developments in the videogame medium and videogame cultures in the first decade of the new millennium. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following: the rise and influence of the open world/sandbox genre; the spread of online gaming with Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, networked First-Person Shooters, and virtual worlds; changes in the embodied experience of play introduced by rhythm/music games, motion controls, and touch screen interfaces; the proliferation of independent game development and online distribution; the rise of "art games" as a distinct (and debated) category; the reemergence of "retro" styles and repackaging of vintage games; the blurred boundaries of the "magic circle" and everyday life in Alternate Reality and Augmented Reality gaming; the increasing popularity of mobile and casual gaming; and the emergence of Videogame Studies as an academic field. This class will be a mix of history and historiography. We will not only learn about the history of the decade, but also discuss the unique possibilities and difficulties arising from the study of recent history - and put these discussions into practice through research-based assignments.

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27816, CMST 37816, MAPH 45516

MADD 25710. Modern Design and Modern Culture. 100 Units.

This course explores key issues of modernity (industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, consumerism, mass culture, nationalism, technology, etc.) through the study of material culture. Focusing on modern design in Europe and the United States, we will examine major developments in design thinking and practice as both reactive to and generative of broader political, economic, and social concerns. The course is organized around influential exhibitions, from World's Fairs to storefront shows, where design professionals, institutions, and publics came together to reflect on topics of urgency, identify design solutions, and imagine the implications of design on everyday life.

Instructor(s): Maggie Taft     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Students must attend first class to confirm enrollment. If a student is not yet enrolled in this course, s/he must fill out the online consent form and attend the first class. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 15710

MADD 25722. The Musical Interface: Constraint and Creativity. 100 Units.

Music-making involves constraint: the layout of a keyboard or guitar, the poetic systems of an epic storyteller, the practice techniques of a singer who cultivates a certain sound, or even the lines of code that an algorithmic music-maker strings together. New technologies bring new rules, as well as new ways to break the rules: autotuned vocals are no longer derided, and tools like Melodyne are now a standard part of music production. Constraint, then, produces creativity-but how does this look with particular instruments and traditions? How do artists make the most of their tools? In this hands-on class, we will explore the interface through the concepts of affordance, interval systems, algorithms, and generalizable schemas. You won't just analyze art: you will also produce it and discuss your experiences with each type of interface. Our topics will include electronic music constructed on digital audio workstations and through code, the piano keyboard, the harmonica, Korean p'ansori sung storytelling, streaming platforms and recommendation algorithms, and the Italian solfeggio tradition. This class includes a creative final project in the sonic medium of your choice.

Instructor(s): Andrew White     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): MUSI 25722

MADD 25900. Digitizing Human Rights. 100 Units.

In an era in which disruptive technologies have hijacked our consciousness and computer code has woven itself into the fabric of our existence, the lines between the virtual and the physical are increasingly blurred, and the nature of human existence itself increasingly uncertain. Digitizing Human Rights invites you to ponder, question, and even reshape the future of the species. We'll consider digital surveillance, data consent, access to tech, online agency, algorithmic bias and the future of artificial intelligence, among other topics. Drawing on cross-disciplinary perspectives, the course aims to illuminate the often misunderstood aspects of the digital age with the goal of creating an annotated digital document to serve as a blueprint for steering humanity towards a more equitable and just -- and perhaps a more secure -- future. Annotations will draw on a broad array of philosophical traditions and contextualize current issues and debates. We will also problematize the document itself to build into our work a consideration of the digital form through which we are thinking and representing claims about humanity, morality, truth, and justice, for example, that are entailed in the project of "human rights." The class will meet both in small groups and the larger seminar to refine the provisions and annotations, review progress, and shape the document as a whole.

Instructor(s): J. Spruill, N. Briz     Terms Offered: May be offered 2025-26
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third- or fourth-year standing.
Equivalent Course(s): DEMS 25900, HMRT 25900, BPRO 25900

MADD 25990. Always Already New - Printed Books & Electronic Texts. 100 Units.

In this course, students will learn about the fields of book history and new media in various ways-from visiting the University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center to geocaching across Chicago-in an attempt to understand why the book keeps changing shape. The course will guide students in creating their own self-directed final project. (H)

Instructor(s): M. Skinner     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 25990

MADD 26059. Media, Environment, and Risk. 100 Units.

In 1991, Ulrich Beck wrote that "society is made into a laboratory." Following the Chernobyl disaster, Beck articulated how modern technology and its potential side-effects-such as radiation or chemical poisoning-had created the novel epistemological category of environmental risk defined by threats that escape human perception and transcend borders. Institutions monitoring ecological conditions gained responsibility for communicating public health. Political conflicts emerged between formations of expert and lay environmental knowledge. The technological application of modern science, and its associated environmental risks, pushed research beyond the laboratory and into the governmental fabric of social order: nuclear reactors had to be constructed and chemicals distributed to populations before their properties and safety could be understood. This seminar reads the debates on risk in environmental sociology alongside the emergence of risk criticism in media studies to interrogate the probabilistic thinking inherent to the communication of ecological threat. Two common traits characteristic of recent environmental catastrophes ranging from Bhopal, Fukushima Daiishi, Deepwater Horizon, Exxon Valdez, Hurricane Katrina, and the varied crises of global climate change, are that each disaster involves the failure or side-effect of an implemented technological project and that the corresponding risks-whether imperceptible or probable-are necessarily communicated to publics by media

Instructor(s): Thomas Pringle     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 36059, CHSS 36059, SOCI 30329, CMST 42802, HIPS 26059

MADD 26200. Hands-On Multimedia Design. 100 Units.

The Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center at the University of Chicago is a 20,000-square-foot collaborative space for inquiry and experimentation where computer science and the arts intersect. In this course, students will take advantage of the MADD Center's resources as they experiment with the fundamentals of design hands-on, working up to large-scale independent projects that will be featured in a group exhibition. Students will explore the history of design through lectures, readings, and "design walks" at special sites throughout the campus and city at large. The course will accommodate students who are beginners as well as those who have experience studying design. Students may find themselves elaborating on an existing skill set, like drawing or fashion, or engaging with a brand new medium, like building a game. This course encourages students with a broad range of aesthetic backgrounds and skills to collaborate, deliberating what exactly constitutes contemporary design along the way.

Terms Offered: Summer

MADD 26210. Media Art and Design Practice. 100 Units.

This studio-based course explores the practice, conventions, and boundaries of contemporary media art and design. This can encompass areas as diverse as interactive installation, app design, and the Internet meme. Through projects and critical discussion, students engage with the problems and opportunities of digitally driven content creation. Fundamental elements of digital production are introduced, including basic properties of image, video, and the global network. Further topics as varied as--though not limited to--web production, digital fabrication, interfaces, the glitch, and gaming may be considered. Sections will vary based on the instructor's fields of expertise. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts. This course may not double count for general education requirements and the Media Arts and Design minor. However, it is a great way for students to explore a potential interest in these areas.

Instructor(s): N. Briz, C. Beiersdorfer, C. Mankin, T. Shallow, C. Collins     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): MAAD 26210 Media Art and Design Practice is affiliated with HUMA 16000-16100-16200 Media Aesthetics: Image, Text, Sound I-II-III. Students satisfying the general education requirement in the humanities will have priority in enrollment for Media Arts and Design Practice.
Note(s): During the academic year, students must attend the first course session to confirm enrollment. Students aiming to get into the course after registration or during drop/add must use the waitlist to request to enroll. WAITLIST: https://airtable.com/appF7rAlnH3zoRdB4/pagU2swIu7igRSqTB/form
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 16210

MADD 26300. Art and Design in the Age of the Internet. 100 Units.

This course combines the subject matter of an array of courses offering pre-college students a glimpse into the design and art departments at the University of Chicago. In this course, students will experiment with the fundamentals of art and design hands-on, creating independent projects and exhibiting them along the way. Students will explore history through lectures, readings, and "design walks" at special sites throughout the campus and, optionally, the city at large. The course will accommodate students who are beginners as well as those who have experience in these fields. Students may find themselves elaborating on an existing skill set, like drawing or fashion, or engaging with a brand-new medium, like building a game. This course encourages students with a broad range of aesthetic backgrounds and skills to collaborate.

Terms Offered: Summer

MADD 26501. Straight-line sensibilities. A hidden history of 20th Century Art. 100 Units.

The proliferation of straight lines in 20th Century art and architecture is generally associated with rational and universalist procedures and perspectives, and closely associated with the rise of industrial society. This course will look at straight lines in modern art from a very different perspective. We will study a hidden genealogy of straight lines that all seem to evoke the vagaries of sensory realities and capacities and that are aesthetic through and through. These type of straight lines are all, in their various ways, related to the close interaction between bodies and media technologies - one of the major themes in modern art. The question, of course, is how and why straight lines comes to express this relationship. To look at this question, we will study artworks and ideas that extend from the mid 19th-century to 21st century art and that includes a wide range of media and expressions, including architecture, painting, drawing, film, video and computer art.

Instructor(s): I. Bloom     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 26501, CMST 36505, ARTH 36501, CMST 26505

MADD 26531. Race, New Media, and Youth Movements for Justice. 100 Units.

Although racial inequality is an enduring force in American society, new forms of activism--often facilitated by through new media--are changing the terms of political debate around issues of race, gender, power, and justice. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, sites of political struggle have become increasingly decentered and accessible to a broader array of people. And as is often the case, youth from marginalized groups are at the forefront of these struggles, redefining what counts as political and how to conceive of important concepts like equity, community, and dignity. This seminar-style course explores the past and present conditions that give rise to these youth-led movements, drawing from multiple scholarly lenses, including political science, sociology, literature, performance, film, and visual culture. Specifically, the course explores how young activists and cultural workers, who often identify as people of color, women, queer, and/or undocumented, draw on legacies of activism whilst making political claims using media, art, technology, or other nontraditional forms of participation. The course will engage various formats of political and cultural work, considering how intersecting forms of inequity and differing levels of access affect the shape and scope of participation in both institutions and popular culture.

Instructor(s): Jordie Davies & David Knight     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 27531, GNSE 27531, CRES 27531, PLSC 20531

MADD 26900. Communicating Science: For Peers and the Public. 100 Units.

This architectural studio course explores strategies for effectively communicating and presenting science to the public in a campus setting. Students will discover a compelling science story generated by UC scholars and present it as a multimedia exhibit proposal. Student groups also will collaborate on the development of a plan for a campus science exhibition space and science quad involving design charettes led by architects and landscapers. The class emphasizes verbal, visual, and spatial communication methods and incorporates scholarly writing, podcasts, websites, social media communication, design charettes, and 3D model-making. Students will hone their skills to effectively communicate breaking science in an engaging manner in a new campus setting.

Instructor(s): Paul Sereno, Chana Haouzi, Jeremy Manier     Terms Offered: Not offered in 2025-2026
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing. This course does not require prior experience, and all are welcome. If you would like to join the class, please complete this consent form at arthistory.uchicago.edu/archconsent so we can learn more about you.
Equivalent Course(s): SCPD 26900, ARCH 26900, BPRO 26900, CHST 26900, ARTH 26809

MADD 27022. Surveillance Media. 100 Units.

Surveillance media are ubiquitous: in your pocket, on the street, at school, underground, and in the air. They work incessantly and quietly, often without our knowledge but always with the goal of producing knowledge about us. But they don't do so equally. Wedded to concepts of security, risk, and crisis, surveillance is itself a technology of power. While some of us benefit from surveillance in certain contexts, many others are disproportionally targeted based on differences of race, gender, sexuality, class, religious affiliation, ability, citizenship, and more. This course will explore how surveillance media distribute power in the United States and across its global connections. Throughout, we will understand surveillance media not only as the specific technologies used for surveillance, but also how these technologies differentially mediate our bodies, behaviors, communities, and political relationships. Beginning with various theoretical frameworks of surveillance, this course will track surveillance media across various sites and systems. These include borders, policing, drones, algorithms, and labor. In each, we will examine both contemporary and historical materials in order to consider how our dominant ideas and values about surveillance media are rooted in the ideologies and violences of capitalism, colonialism, and empire. We conclude by exploring modalities of resistance in art and grassroots organizing that imagine more just futures.

Instructor(s): Gary Kafer     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27022

MADD 27410. Scenography: Static and Kinetic Forms. 100 Units.

This course is an exploration of various forms and processes of designing sets and projections for theatrical performance. We pay particular attention to a cohesive reading of a text, contextual and historical exploration, and visual and thematic research, as well as the documentation needed to complete a show including storyboards, models, drafting, and paint elevations. Conversations with guest artists will illuminate personal and cultural aesthetics of an individual artist and assigned readings will expose students to major trends in modern stage design.

Instructor(s): Alyssa Mohn     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20208, TAPS 27410

MADD 27430. Sound & Light in Motion. 100 Units.

This course will explore ways in which the ephemeral elements of sound, light, and projected image can function in traditional and non-traditional spaces. Assigned readings and conversations with guest artists will expand students' relationships with cinema and performance. We will examine layered approaches to storytelling structures including applications in installations, shadow-play, live video mixing, and dance. Using a variety of tools we will apply concepts that cover the augmentation of the aural and visual dimension to create performative work. Final projects will culminate in an evening of work presented in a site-specific format.

Instructor(s): R. Davonté Johnson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 27430

MADD 27522. Experimental Futures: Re-figurations of Human/Environment Relationships. 100 Units.

The naming of the current era after the human-Anthropocene-is widely criticized. Scholars such as Donna Haraway bemoan the emphasis on the human being and its control over earthly matters at a moment when non-human entanglements with the world are simultaneously overlooked. Other thinkers point out that the planetary changes of the Anthropocene have occurred mainly due to capitalism and industrialization. In the course of these debates, the role of the human and the understanding of the human as part of the Earth's ecosystem is discussed again and again. Especially in the arts and design, new figurations of the human and a future outside anthropocentrism are being developed. This course follows fundamental questions around the emergence of this discourse: Which tropes, materials, and concepts do we collectively use to imagine our future? Who gets to participate in these imaginaries and who is thereby excluded? What role do the arts and design play in this process? In this class, students will gain understanding of an emerging area of interdisciplinary research that reframes the category of the "human" in face of contemporary environmental challenges such as climate change and resource scarcity. Students will become familiar with concepts and theories associated with post-humanism, new materialisms, and environmental humanities and use them to reflect on examples from architecture, design, and the arts.

Instructor(s): Desiree Foerster     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37522, CMST 27522, ARCH 27522

MADD 27558. No Future: Visual Media and Contemporary Life. 100 Units.

No Future seeks to establish the grounds by which we might examine contemporary theories of the future--and perhaps its negation--through visual media and the production of art in the age of the algorithm. We will use this course as a means to consider new modes of subjectivity that arise as effect and response to mutating forms of control in society-and how we might refuse such mechanisms. Speeding through (art) history with detours at groups like the Futurists-with their violent reimagination of the human as a productive machine-and the Situationists-who vowed never to produce again, we will examine the fluxes and flows of subjectivity through the historical movement from Fordist production to the immaterial labor that powers the economies of today and tomorrow. We will discuss issues of work and non-work, image production and the labor of the artist, subjectivity and identity, the ends of cinema and History, and the state of the spectacle today. But what is left of the future? Is it already over?

Instructor(s): Andrew Pettinelli     Terms Offered: Winter
Note(s): This class will present theory that might be new to us; yet, it should remain our goal to work together to think through these texts and visual texts collectively, utilizing the classroom as a space for collaboration and experimentation.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27558

MADD 27703. Visualizing Knowledge: Studies in the Humanities and Sciences. 100 Units.

Visualization is a tool deployed across various fields of knowledge production. Diverse forms of imaging practices not only are wielded to support data and to illustrate claims, but also to disseminate information. Positioned at the nexus of art and science, this course explores the representational strategies deployed in various intellectual domains. We ask: how was/is knowledge visualized and what conventions determine(d) such standards of validity and utility? Far from being limited to one geographical or temporal context, we consider a range of visualization practices from early modernity to the present moment, especially as this concerns astronomy, geography, cartography, and medical diagnostics, as well as more recent areas of inquiry, visual pedagogy and the digital humanities.

Instructor(s): S. Cooperstein     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Students must attend 1st class to confirm enrollment. If a student is not yet enrolled in this course, s/he must fill out the online consent form & attend the first class. This course meets the Gen. Edu. Reqmt. in the dramatic, musical, & visual arts. In order for this to count towards the Arts, Music and Drama Core it must be taken at the 100 level
Equivalent Course(s): KNOW 17703, ARTH 17703

MADD 27900. Image, Text, Archive. 100 Units.

This course examines hybrid image-texts of the last 150 years to investigate what happens to narrative and genre when visual images become integral parts of textual composition, and what kinds of claims such texts make about memory, veracity, or objectivity. We will examine the early history of photography and image reproduction, learn to formally read images, and interrogate the relationship of photography to documentary. Our readings will include Louis Aragon's Paris Peasant (1925), André Breton's Nadja (1928), James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory (1966), Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001), and Anne Carson's Nox (2009); critical readings will include texts by Roland Barthes, Margaret Iverson, Timothy Dow Adams, and Linda Hutcheon. (1830-1940, Theory)

Instructor(s): Rachel Kyne      Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 19700

MADD 27908. American Graphic Art and Commercial Culture: 1850-1960. 100 Units.

This class focuses on widely distributed printed images, most of them with commercial, aesthetic, and/or political significance, along with the graphic design traditions and typography associated with them. While concentrating on American imagery, the context would be international, reflecting the condition of popular graphic arts in this country. Among other things it would treat book illustration, posters, advertising art, magazines and newspapers, cartooning, postcards, children's literature, commercial paper, and trade catalogs. Necessarily, given this wide scope, it will be episodic in character, but it will also attempt to relate this visual explosion to larger artistic movements, major events, technological changes, and political trends. It would also explore, from time to time, the roles played by collecting, exhibition, and academic commentary in legitimating the subject, as well as the power of ethnic and racial stereotyping and the multiplication of trade and printing journals. The aim, in short, is to examine the flowering of a visual print culture that had its roots in the Gutenberg Revolution of the 15th century. There will be both class discussion and lecturing. This is art in context, emphasizing breadth and the introduction of figures, institutions, and movements nurtured by an expansive production and distribution network. The course will be hosted by the Special Collections Research Center at Regenstein Library.

Instructor(s): N. Harris     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.
Equivalent Course(s): AMER 17908, ARTH 17908

MADD 27915. Introduction to Videogame Studies: Art, Play, and Society. 100 Units.

This course is intended as an introduction to the study of videogames in the humanities. Topics include videogame form (visual style, spatial design, sound, and genre); videogames as a narrative medium; embodiment and hapticity in videogame play; issues of identity/identification, performance, and access related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, ability, and class; and rhetorical, educational, and political uses of videogames. Just as the videogame medium has drawn from older forms of art and play, so the emerging field of videogame studies has grown out of and in conversation with surrounding disciplines. With this in mind, readings and topics of discussion will be drawn both from videogame studies proper and from other fields in the humanities - including, but not limited to, English, art history, and cinema and media studies. Undergraduates should be prepared for an MA-level reading load but will write final papers of the standard length for upper-level undergraduate courses (8-10 pages versus 12-15 for MA students). MA students interested in pursuing a particular research topic in-depth will be given supplemental readings. This course will also be designed to take advantage of the University of Chicago's videogame collection, and will require game play both individually and as part of group play sessions.

Instructor(s): Christopher Carloy     Terms Offered: Spring
Note(s): Email for instructor consent
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 37915, CMST 27915, ENGL 34515, ENGL 24515, MAPH 34515

MADD 28003. Issues in Film Sound. 100 Units.

Taking advantage of recent developments in the field of sound studies, this course examines issues in film sound (technology, sense experience, histories of listening, sonic space, soundscape construction, the materiality of sound formats, etc.) that speak to broader concerns in the humanities, especially sound-related arts. While we will focus on a film or films every week, from blockbusters like Gravity to avant-garde and experimental films, the readings and issues will touch on everything from noise pollution, architecture, musical performance and recording, and mp3 files. Students interested in installation and environmental arts, sound in literary studies, music, and other sound-focused fields are welcome.

Instructor(s): James Lastra     Terms Offered: Autumn
Note(s): Not offered in 2022-23.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 38003, CMST 28003

MADD 28008. Sound and Scandal: How Media Make Believe. 100 Units.

Why has lip syncing caused so many scandals and successes across media, from Milli Vanilli to drag? Primarily focusing on American film, TV, music videos, and animation, this course investigates how sound synchronization creates alternate identities and realities. We may think we know lip sync and voice synthesis when we see and hear them, but close reading unveils deeper issues of technological construction and gendered performances. For example, Singin' in the Rain dramatizes film's transition to sound as technicians struggled to match the "right" voice to the "right" body: a beautiful woman with an ugly voice lip syncs to the lovely voice of a woman who Hollywood deems unsuitable to appear onscreen. From The Jazz Singer to today's alarmingly authentic deepfakes and vocaloids, we will diagnose how vocal appropriation and synthesis conjure states of credibility and belief. We will ask how lip sync authenticates talking animals and faux rockers. Questions of star power and authorship confronting performances of gender and sexuality. No matter the motive, vocal manipulation can never be taken at face value, especially in an age when contortions between sounds and their sources can be passed off as truth.

Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 28008, MUSI 28008, TAPS 20208

MADD 28250. Performance as Event. 100 Units.

What makes a performance unforgettable? How do fleeting acts-onstage, online, or in the streets-spark curiosity, provoke debate, or ripple through memes and memories? In this course, we'll immerse ourselves in the bold, hybrid world of performance as a tool for upending expectations and crafting the unexpected. With hands-on projects, critical reflection, and collaborative exploration, we will investigate performance in its many forms, from physical spaces where people move, connect, and gather, to digital platforms where swipes, clicks, and streams define interaction. Together, we'll uncover how performers outwit algorithms, engineer surprise, and amplify their work in resourceful and unpredictable ways. Visiting artists from theater, media art, and tactical performance will join the course throughout the quarter, bringing unique practices and perspectives into the mix.

Instructor(s): D. de Mayo, J. Satrom     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 28250, ARTV 20703, SIGN 28250

MADD 28300. Disability and Design. 100 Units.

Disability is often an afterthought, an unexpected tragedy to be mitigated, accommodated, or overcome. In cultural, political, and educational spheres, disabilities are non-normative, marginal, even invisible. This runs counter to many of our lived experiences of difference where, in fact, disabilities of all kinds are the "new normal." In this interdisciplinary course, we center both the category and experience of disability. Moreover, we consider the stakes of explicitly designing for different kinds of bodies and minds. Rather than approaching disability as a problem to be accommodated, we consider the affordances that disability offers for design. This course begins by situating us in the growing discipline of Disability Studies and the activist (and intersectional) Disability Justice movement. We then move to four two-week units in specific areas where disability meets design: architecture, infrastructure, and public space; education and the classroom; economics, employment, and public policy; and aesthetics. Traversing from architecture to art, and from education to economic policy, this course asks how we can design for access.

Instructor(s): M. Friedner, J. Iverson     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): Third or fourth-year standing
Equivalent Course(s): BPRO 28300, CHDV 28301, MUSI 25719, CHDV 38301, HLTH 28301, MUSI 35719

MADD 28815. American Spectacle. 100 Units.

Spectacles have shocked, awed, delighted, and horrified Americans for centuries-seemingly all at once. This class reexamines American history through the lens of spectacle in its many guises: the scientific, violent, technological, and political. We explore how these various iterations have not only coexisted over time but also intersected, reinforced, and-at times-complicated each other. We will ask how these overlapping spectacles shaped and continue to shape the United States by underwriting and innovating race, class, gender, and statecraft. Is spectacle foundational to the United States? How does it bridge individual lived experience and sociopolitical and economic abstractions? Running from the early modern Atlantic World to the present, we conclude by asking whether the digital age has made spectacle ubiquitous, and at what cost.

Instructor(s): Hofmann, Alex     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): HIST 28815, MAPS 21450, MAPS 31450, HIST 38815

MADD 28989. Virtual Realities and Religious Realities. 100 Units.

Virtual reality is at the cutting edge of modern technology and stands to impact many aspect of contemporary life. At the same time, religious and philosophical sources have been thinking the concept of virtuality for centuries. Responding to popular efforts to ask how religion should respond to advances in technology and mass media, we will ask how religious thought has laid the groundwork for and even anticipated these advances, and therefore how it can be used as a resource to address contemporary ethical and political challenges. This class will take us from ancient Jerusalem to cyberspace in order to interrogate the various contexts and guises in which the problem of virtual reality has appeared. Doing so will ask us to think about memory and the archive, temporality and history, faith and truth, immanence and transcendence, robots and even ghosts.

Instructor(s): Matthew Peterson     Terms Offered: Spring
Equivalent Course(s): RLST 28989

MADD 29400. Media Arts and Design Capstone Colloquium. 100 Units.

In this capstone colloquium, students will prepare a portfolio of digital media artworks and/or historical and theoretical writing that reflect their interests.

Instructor(s): J. Satrom     Terms Offered: Autumn Winter
Prerequisite(s): Consent of instructor.
Note(s): This course is required for students completing a minor in Media Arts and Design and must be completed no later than Winter Quarter of the fourth year. The course will meet weekly throughout the quarter.

MADD 29401. Capstone I: Methodologies. 100 Units.

The Methodologies course is a cornerstone of the Media Arts and Design program, specifically designed to equip students with essential skills and strategies for creative project development. This foundational course marks the beginning of their capstone project, exploring the intricacies of ideation, effective research, goal setting, design, and project scoping. Students will receive ongoing feedback and guidance from the professor and their peers as they continually refine their projects, an approach that mirrors real-world iterative design practices. Throughout the course, students learn to adapt and adjust their approaches, tackle challenges, and embrace diverse methods, fostering an environment of nimble experimentation. This prepares them for successful project execution and portfolio development, setting the stage for the subsequent Capstone II: Production course.

Instructor(s): Nick Briz     Terms Offered: Autumn

MADD 29402. Capstone II: Production. 100 Units.

TBD

Instructor(s): Jon Satrom     Terms Offered: Winter

MADD 29700. MADD Reading and Research. 100 Units.

This course is primarily intended for students who are in Media Arts and Design and who can best meet program requirements by studying under a faculty member's individual supervision. The subject matter, course of study, and requirements are arranged with the instructor prior to registration.

Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): Consent of faculty adviser and MADD Program Director
Note(s): Students are required to submit the College Reading and Research Form. This course may be counted toward distribution requirements for the minor.