ABOUT EXTREME MEDIA STUDIES
Extreme Media Studies (ExtremeMediaStudies.org) is a project of smudge studio inc. a non-profit media arts studio.
We are supported in part by funding from:
Parsons Design & Social Science Fund at The New School, which "aims to stimulate innovative faculty initiatives that explore potential interactive relationships between social sciences and design theory and practice."
The Faculty Development Fund at The New School, (Office of the Provost).
In kind donations gratefully received from:
We welcome donations to support adminstrative, design, and overall running costs so we can keep EMS free to all users.
ELIZABETH ELLSWORTH
One day my mother came home and said she was on the media committee for my elementary school's parent-teacher association. I asked her "what is media?" Soon after, I got a toy printing press with rubber letters that I could slide onto a drum. When I turned the drum it inked up the letters and pressed them onto small sheets of paper. I printed a newspaper for the street I lived on and delivered it to the neighbors' mailboxes. In college and then graduate school, I studied journalism and mass communication, and then film theory and criticism (The University of Wisconsin-Madison). I got interested in nonfiction forms because of how they contributed to efforts for social change. I did a Ph.D. on how, for many marginalized audiences, film viewing provides a pretext and a means for talking about the politics of identity and strategies for social change. As an Assistant Professor, I taught educational and documentary media and video production. I co-produced several educational videos. Challenged by my students' diverse backgrounds, I developed a keen interest in teaching about and across social and cultural difference. I started to write and do research about pedagogy as a way of creating social change--and I was especially excited about how mediated learning environments shaped our experiences of our "learning selves." I wrote a book about this called Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (Routledge, 2004). An extreme media phenomenon changed my life: I arrived in New York City at the turn of the century to serve as Vice President for Research and Development in a dot com during the boom. Its project was to create a peer health education portal on the internet for and with college students. I stayed in New York and joined the faculty at The New School. It was a return to my first love: media studies.
Team-teaching an integrated media theory and design course with Kit Laybourne advanced our program's commitment to integrating media theory and practice. We started ExtremeMediaStudies.org when we realized it would give us the chance to teach in ways we were both passionate about.
Three years ago I formed a non-profit media arts studio with my collaborator, Jamie Kruse (smudgestudio.org). We're making media-based art and getting it published and exhibited. We're interested in how media can address us and the world not as already known or complete--but as in-the-making.
ExtremeMediaStudies.org brings each of these life-strands of mine together into a rich and complex weave-one that promises to make life extreme and extremely interesting for the foreseeable future.
Link to Full CV
JAMIE KRUSE
Growing up in Illinois, my bedroom walls were plastered with the designs of Tibor Kalman. There was something about the provocative ads from United Colors of Benetton that struck a deep cord in me. While attending design school in Southern Illinois I discovered my first Adbusters magazine and it became clear that there really could be more to design than selling products. Driven to find like-minded others, after getting my BFA in Visual Communication, I moved to British Columbia, Canada. For two years I freelanced for a variety of education and health-related non-profits on Vancouver Island (including AIDS Vancouver Island and the Victoria Women's Sexual Assault Centre). In 2002 I moved to New York and got my M.A. in Media Studies at the New School (2004). This is where I met Kit and Elizabeth and learned even more about bridging the gap between theory and media practices.
In 2004 Elizabeth and I started to collaborate and released our first education project, earthshapes.org. We also co-founded smudge studio inc., a non-profit design studio. This also led to the start of our collaborative art practice smudge, which I like to think of being grounded in responding to the change that makes the world. Since 2004 we have facilitated several site-specific collaborations, primarily in New York and Massachusetts. In the spring of 2007 we staged a 28-day ecological performance piece throughout the American Southwest participating in site-responsive residencies that included: The Center for Land Use Interpretation and Sundance. Samples of our work and publications can be found online.
In May 2006 I left my full-time job and returned to freelancing. Since then I have been fortunate enough continue my work with art, education and health-related organizations in New York City (Brooklyn Arts Council, dumbo arts center, the New York Department of Education, The Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, Mediapedia.net and the Gender Offenders). Samples of my web design work can be found at orangevector.com.
Elizabeth, Kit and I started collaborating on Extreme Media Studies in 2007. I bring a strong interest in art and design to the project. I sense that Extreme Media Studies holds great potential for meeting the contemporary moment and all the complexities that this moment contains. For me the site is a testing ground, a place to become wildly imaginative and inventive, in collaboration with others- while navigating massive change.
KIT LAYBOURNE
People who work in media tend to have multiple careers.
Mine turns out to have contained five.
Teaching - 10 years: I started working with "disadvantaged" kids while in college and grad school, and then joined a team working in the Philadelphia Public Schools. That led first to working on a Ford Foundation Grant to develop an integrated media studies curriculum for elementary schools and then to teaching in a MA program for teachers that took root at The New School. I taught media design classes and animation, resulting in THE ANIMATION BOOK-now a standard text for the field.
Indie Production - 16 years: I leveraged my proposal writing skills to join a talented filmmaker, Mickey Lemle, in doing a series for Public Television titled Media Probes. I then partnered with animator Eli Noyes to set up a TriBeCa-based company. We pursued production and design activity in television commercials, broadcast graphics, and long-form programming for broadcast and Cable Television. I Executive Produced multi-season series for Nickelodeon (Eureka's Castle) and MTV (Liquid Television).
Career Shakeout- 5 years: I joined Kathy Minton and Maria Perez as Creative Director for another Nickelodeon series, Gullah, Gullah Island. I also taught the thesis animation course at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. On my 50th birthday, I started my first corporate gig as a Senior VP for Creative Production at Tele-TV, a joint venture of three Baby Bells. When it crashed I did a deep revision for my book about animation and discovered the world of digital production.
Creative Executive in Cable & Interactive - 5 years: I became a member of the team that developed Oxygen Media, a cable TV network for women. There, I served as an executive producer, a director and the head of units working in Animation, DV Production and Interactive Narratives.
Teaching - 2004 forward: I returned to The New School as a Core Faculty Member and Associate Professor. I now teach "Foundations of Media Design," "The Producer's Craft", and "Producing & Directing The Short". In the Fall of 2005 I began team teaching an experimental course with Elizabeth Ellsworth. We combined and extended two of the program's required courses: Foundations of Media Theory and Foundations of Media Design. ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a result of our unfolding collaboration. At my teaching site, MediaChops, there is a longer bio with sample frame grabs of various productions plus some reflection about skills learned and insights gained. You might want to snoop around this site. It has lots of video pieces, useful information on producing, and work-in-process for my forthcoming book, Mediapedia, which provides a highly illustrated lexicon about the aesthetics of media design.
Link to Full CV
A NOTE TO TEACHERS
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a hybrid online/offline experience. It sends students into the world to map, navigate, and make something of the phenomena they study online. We built this site for undergraduates and first-year graduates in: English, Mass Communications, Communication Arts, Media Studies, Media and Society, Film & Television Studies, Journalism, Cultural Studies, Digital Design, Business, Social Sciences, and Interdisciplinary Studies.
You can use ExtremeMediaStudies.org as a platform for an entire semester-long class. The initial introductory week ("Navigating") can be followed by exploration of the scans and flashpoints. Each edge presents two to three weeks each of readings, experiences, and projects. These can be followed by a three-week long final project and a final culminating week.
Or, scans can be followed by creative projects based on the flashpoints'explorations of what we don't yet know about emerging media phenomena.
But this site can serve equally well as a source of supplementary case studies, themes, or topics for already established curricula. It could be used to explore multiple literacies in a college English class, for example. It can also be used as a means to create independent studies and honors credit projects for individual students.
After the introductory sections ("Welcome" and "Navigating"), the site is presented non-linearly and non-hierarchically. You may adapt it to your students and schedule and scale it to your needs.
All of this means that ExtremeMediaStudies.org is far from "teacher proof"-and we mean it to stay that way. We seek to ignite your passions for learning as a teacher. We present a learning environment that you can co-create with us and with your students.
We continually update the website. While extreme media scans and flashpoints are the core of the site's learning experiences, we augment them in our BLOG with special learning events that we announce as they launch. These will include:
-field trips (in the form of short videos that take students to the sites of extreme media phenomena);
-critiques of breaking media events and phenomena;
-interactive blog spaces for students' works-in-progress, student-student collaborations, student-student critiques and re-mixes. The blog is a place for students to break out and to teach us, exceed us and create media concepts and designs together.
COLLABORATORS
Kevin T. Allen is an award winning filmmaker and sound artist living in Brooklyn. He has created sound-installation work for the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Third Coast International Audio Festival, and Proteus Gowanus. He is also an independent producer for APM's Weekend America. His most recent travels have led him to explore the soundscapes of Sri Lanka, India, Vietnam, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and a piano bar in Greenwich Village. His most recent film, KIEU, won first-prize at the Black Maria Film Festival and was featured on Michigan Public Broadcasting. He is currently working on a yearlong audio-visual project called American Transit.
Jeff Ertz is a composer, sound artist, journalist and media producer. He received his BA in English from La Salle University (Philadelphia, 2003) and is currently pursuing his MA in Media Studies from The New School (New York). He presented his latest music compositions and a seminar on collaborative music composition practices at Electro-Music 2007, an international conference and music festival held annually at the Cheltenham Art Center outside of Philadelphia. Samples of his work can be found online at jeffertz.com.
CREDITS
This image is a screenshot from a copyrighted film, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by the studio which produced the film, and possibly also by any actors appearing in the screenshot. It is believed that the use of a limited number of web-resolution screenshots
• for identification and critical commentary on the film and its contents
• on extrememediastudies.org, hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit smudge studio inc.
qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. Any other uses of this image, here or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement.
Extreme Media Studies is proud to collaborate with Creative Common photographers.
We thank and attribute three of our main scan images to the following artists:
