WELCOME TO EXTREME MEDIA STUDIES
WELCOME TO THE MEDIA SCANS PROJECT
Today's media reshape the landscapes of our daily lives right under our feet.
As media artists and teachers, we're convinced that if we can sense and map media patterns
and the forces behind them while they are just now appearing--
we have the chance to shape the extreme media that are shaping us.
This project is a collaboration among first responders to extreme media phenomena.
Here, you can acquire and practice one of the most fundamental skills humans need today:
the ability to navigate and shape massive change as it unfolds.
"Media Scans" investigates diverse extreme media phenomena that are reshaping core human experiences right now. They navigate forces so fluid, so volatile, no one can tell what their impacts will be.
scan #1: NAVIGATING (making your way through a moving landscape)
scan #2: MOBILES (finding voice and being heard).
scan #3: MONITORAL CITIZEN (taking action, finding community, creating meaning).
scan #4: READING BEYOND (making sense of the world in a time of overwhelming complexity and multi-tasking).
scan #5: TRANSMEDIA STORIES (creating new stories and new ways to tell them, sensing and making sense of the world in new ways.
The "Navigating" media scan includes flashpoints. These extend imagination, creativity, and experimental thinking even further--beyond the leading edges of emerging media. They sense and respond to what we don't yet know about emerging media. Flashpoints document the earliest hints of trends, forces, and daily life experiences that might grow into full-blown extreme media phenomena. And they set the stage for learning by making--at the flashpoints.
flashpoint #1: GOING REMOTE
flashpoint #2: WILD IMAGINATION
flashpoint #3: LIMIT CASES
flashpoint #4: HUMAN TRACE
flashpoint #5: CREATIVE CONTAGION (This flashpoint can be found in Expanding Fields, Art + Environment)
HOW TO USE
Start with SCAN #1: NAVIGATING. It introduces you to the the Media Scans Project. "How to use scans" and "How to use flashpoints" give you a complete orientation and overview.
MEDIA SCANS FOCUS ON EXTREME MEDIA PHENOMENA:
media devices, contents, and uses that plunge us
into deep core qualitative change. They alter
how we relate to others and reshape
our senses of who we are.
You know it's extreme if it:• unleashes deep change in the core meanings and experiences of our daily lives. Extreme media tip deep change on a massive, even global scale.
• changes quickly and deploys quickly, combining and recombining in months not years, and spreading widely in a viral way.
• outstrips what we know. Largely "invisible" to academics, mainstream journalists and corporations, it is extreme if it breaks down what we think we know and even who we think we are. It throws "what's human" into crisis by leading us to ask "is it media or is it a human body?" It throws "what's real" into crisis by leading us to question: "is it an image or is it reality"?.
• deeply reshapes our relationships, disconnections, and/or interactions with others and our selves.
• disrupts the status quo, redistributes authority and responsibility and makes us more autonomous and more connected at the same time.
• generates uncertainty about where it's going and awakens (perhaps more democratic) speculation about alternative futures.
Extreme media make us ask ourselves and each other about what lies ahead:
"Do we want this?"
"What does this new thing make possible?"
"What does it make impossible?"
LIVING WITH EXTREME MEDIA
Meet Deb Patterson. An extreme medium has created fundamental, qualitative change in her life. Deb communicates via the Vanguard. She operates it by using a reflective sticker on her forehead. Jamie Kruse interviewed Deb Patterson, with the assistance of Carol Hollowell. Carol works with Deb as a Community Guide at ACAP (Adaptive Community Approach Program) in Waukesha, WI. Deb was recently named Wisconsin's Self-Advocate of the Year in recognition of her work. She is also an artist (her favorite color is purple), actor, extreme sports enthusiast, and media maker. Her new communication device has made her an extreme media enthusiast as well.
WHO IT'S FOR
We designed the Media Scans Project for college students and teachers in communication arts, design, English and new literacies, American Studies, journalism, interdisciplinary studies, anthropology, business, even engineering.
You can use the Media Scans Project as you would a supplemental text. Creatively adapt and integrate its features into your local contexts and practices.
This project orchestrates a network of digital tools, media-rich content, and web 2.0-supported collaboration into:
1) multimedia content;
2) projects that connect to life offline;
3) academic areas of study introduced through popular media;
4) user-generated materials that catalyze collaborative thought and design.
WHY WE ARE DOING THIS
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a project of smudge studio inc., a non-profit art and design studio (and collaborative art practice) between Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse.
As artists, we sense that the question of how to think and learn in the midst of rapid, unfolding change is a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. In the hands of experimental educator/artists, media can become feelers at the limits of what we know and inform inventive response to what we don't yet understand.
As artists, we use our practice to invite radically different ways of knowing and learning through orchestrated co-production of trans-disciplinary projects with our users and co-creators.
When making content for EMS, co-creators, like us, smudge their actions as researchers, artists, students, teachers, media makers, and explorers. We vigorously invite creative appropriation of EMS by museum educators, arts organizations, journalists, artists, and informal learning projects of community organizations.
We wager, that through such innovative forms of collaboration and co-creation, something urgently needed and radically new will result. This is why we think a project like Extreme Media Studies.org is not only possible, but also so incredibly valuable.
We invite you to join us in our ongoing experiment.
Learn more about smudge, the art practice, visit our site here.
(video: smudge's residency at CLUI Wendover's South Base (Clean Livin' 2007).