ABOUT EXTREME MEDIA STUDIES
Extreme Media Studies (ExtremeMediaStudies.org) is a project of smudge studio inc.,
a non-profit media arts studio.
The MediaScans Project was 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).
The Art + Environment Project received in kind donations from:
We welcome donations to support costs of design and production and keep ExtremeMediaStudies.org 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 Elizabeth and Kit 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. We also co-founded smudge studio inc., a non-profit design and media 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 to continue to 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 online at orangevector.com.
Elizabeth, Kit Laybourne 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.
ADVISORY BOARD
Kit Laybourne: M.A., University of California, Los Angeles. One of the founders of the Media Studies program at the New School in the 1970s; he returned in 2002. He was for many years an independent producer in partnerships with Eli Noyes, Kathleen Minton, and Mickey Lemle, and he was a co-founder and executive producer of Oxygen Media, LLC, a cable TV network targeting women, where he ran projects in animation, interactive programming, and DV-based documentaries. He is author of The Animation Book (Crown, 1979; revised 1998) and creator of a rich-media web site, Mediapedia.net. He lectures widely, and his professional productions have received many awards.
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.
Based in both New York and Seattle, Caryn Cline is an artist and educator who has been active in media education circles for many years. Before moving to New York, she taught media education courses and workshops in Seattle, Olympia, and around the Puget Sound. Her essay film “Recipe” played in festivals in the U.S. and Canada, including Women in the Directors Chair in Chicago. Her masters thesis explores the vital relationship between media art making and media education. Her current media art projects, which tack between experimental and documentary forms, involve site-specific plant materials and direct animation techniques on film.
Markie has made a living from the eponymously named Hancock Productions creating documentary-style videos for clients since 1993. (see www.hancockproductions.com) She has also produced her own projects which have ranged from “15/8” (a documentary short featuring Andrew Hill’s famous composition, “15/8”), “Talkin’ Trash” (a 5-minute poetry video featuring the work and voice-over of poet Elena Georgiou), “Exclusions & Awakenings” (a 57-minute documentary celebrating the life and work of philosopher Maxine Greene) and most recently, “Born Again” (a 70-min. personal documentary about leaving the grips of an evangelical Christian family to be able to make a self and make films! See www.bornagainthemovie.com or www.snagfilms.com) She is currently working on “Triptych: Betrayal, Need, Loss” which is about relationships to mothers and self.
Valerie Triggs has a strong background in K-12 education and curriculum. She is a Canadian educator who has worked as a teacher as well as a curriculum consultant for school districts in Saskatchewan and Manitoba from 1993 - 2006. She is presently completing her PhD in Education at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her current work involves exploring the ways in which arts based educational research events extend classically scientific modes of research.
Colin Robertson is Curator of Education at the Nevada Museum of Art. After completing his graduate work in the University of Nevada, Reno Literature and Environment program, he taught environmental literature and composition at UNR. He has written about the environmental sensibilities of writers, architects, and artists, including the Japanese American artist Chiura Obata. His essay on British artist Chris Drury’s exhibition Mushrooms | Clouds is forthcoming from the Center for American Places in 2009. In addition to designing the museum’s educational and interpretive programs, Robertson co-coordinates its Art + Environment initiative to bring community, artists, and scholars together to explore the intersections of art and environment. He came to the Nevada Museum of Art in 2005.
Kelly Hrenko has been a k-12 arts educator in Illinois, Washington and most recently, Minnesota. While in Minnesota, Kelly has been involved as an arts educator and curriculum specialist for both visual arts and theatre organizations in the twin cities. Currently, she works at the University of Minnesota teaching for the Department of Curriculum and Instruction’s teacher licensure program, and also serves as research staff on a federal arts integration grant. Kelly’s PhD research and classroom work focuses on arts infusion through new medias, visual literacies, and culture-based pedagogies.
Perri Chinalai studied Photography and Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design and Media Studies at the New School University. Her recent projects include a video documentary about her Thai aunt/nanny who has
Alzheimer¹s Disease and photography/video work that explores immigrant experiences in the U.S. Perri currently works as Outreach Coordinator for the Memory the Loss Initiative at StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit oral
history project. She is often incredibly touched by the stories she hears at work, as a hospice volunteer and on the streets of New York City. She also loves to run, update her blog with fun pictures of her family and can make a mean chocolate wasabi cupcake.
Pritika Nilaratna is currently a BFA student at Parsons The New School for
Design in the Design and Technology department, New York, NY. She is an
international student from India, who came to the United States in Fall
07 to pursue design studies at The New School. She has previously done a
year of foundation studies at the National Institute of Fashion
Technology, New Delhi and is currently working as an Art Production
Intern at Large Animal Games, a game design company that is involved in
producing casual games operating on numerous platforms including social
networks, mobiles and PCs. She is interested in exploring non-narrative
time-based media forms and interactive media forms.
Caroline Payson, Director of Education at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum
A NOTE TO EDUCATORS
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.
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a hybrid online/offline experience. Its projects send participants into the world to map, navigate, and make something of phenomena they both study online and experience in their daily lives.
You can use ExtremeMediaStudies.org as a platform for an entire semester-long class. For example, the Media Scans Project includes an initial introductory week ("Navigating"), which can be followed by explorations of four scans and four flashpoints. Each scan presents two to three weeks 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.
After the introductory sections ("Welcome" and "Navigating"), Media Scans are presented non-linearly and non-hierarchically. You may adapt them to your students and schedule and scale them to your needs.
ExtremeMediaStudies.org can serve equally well as a source of supplementary case studies, themes, or topics for already established curricula. It can 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.
We augment the site's projects with a BLOG that facilitates special learning events that we announce as they launch. These 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.
Extreme Media Studies is proud to collaborate with Creative Common photographers.
We thank and attribute three of our media scan images to the following artists:
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.