WELCOME TO EXTREME MEDIA STUDIES
WELCOME TO THIS ONGOING EXPERIMENT
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is a generative resource and outlet for expanding the fields of art and media.
We orchestrate collaborations among artists, art educators, museum educators, college teachers, teacher educators, and you.
Our projects cross-pollinate education, journalism, art, media, and design.
We use media to produce a new, "hybrid voice" for public discussion and education--one that actualizes the power of art and aesthetic experience as "ways of knowing" the world.
In Fall 2008, students in a University Lecture Course at the New School University used ExtremeMediaStudies.org as a generative resource for studying and responding to extreme media phenomena. Documentary filmmaker Veronica Medina asked a few of them what it was like.
WHAT IT IS
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is:
• an ongoing experiment in using art to expand the field of media studies, and media to expand the uses and meanings of new media for artists and art educators
• a hybrid of museum exhibition, media design and production studio, web-event, aesthetic experience, and field laboratory.
• an experiment in transdisciplinary and trans-institution exchange
• a pedagogical design that "thinks with media"
• a signal of emerging ideas, works, and provocations
• a web exhibition of curated ideas, works, conversations, and provocations exhibited in a way that sifts, bridges, maps, networks, and cross-pollinates to create broader access and new understandings
• a route for reading across diverse perspectives, sites, methods, materials, and practices in order to discover unexpected insights and resources
• a field test for emerging ideas and a springboard for collaborative engagement with the potential they hold
• a new medium that joins theoretical and critical exploration with aesthetic experience.
OUR PROJECTS
(Fall 2008-Summer 2009)
This project consists of two web exhibitions. The first, "Art + Environment," is a creative response to the Nevada Museum of Art's (NMA) Conference of the same name (October 2008). The web exhibition includes smudge studio's live blog archive of the conference, and responses to the conference by those involved in planning and facilitating it. When added together, the various elements of Art + Environment give a diversity of perspectives, insights, and visual experiences of the conference and its meanings.
(Spring 2009)
In Spring 2009, we will produce a second web exhibition: "Artists + Environments." This project orchestrates collaborations among artists, art educators, and museum educators with the purpose of "testing out" ideas generated at the NMA's conference. The results will make up the form and content of the Artists + Environments exhibition.
OUR PROJECTS
Media Scans (Fall 2007-Winter 2008)
The Media Scans project is designed for college students and teachers, and we invite you to creatively appropriate it as a "supplementary" text for courses, projects, and independent studies.
With Media Scans, students and teachers can acquire and practice one of the most fundamental skills humans need today: the ability to navigate and shape massive change as it unfolds. 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 with Kit Laybourne. It was used in a team-taught, undergraduate, interdisciplinary course at The New School, and involved students in a "virtual field trip" and an international collaboration with a Virginia Commonwealth University design class in Doha, Qatar.
Student work resulting from the Media Scan project is featured in the ExtremeMediaStudies.org blog.
WHO IT'S FOR
image courtesy Land Arts of the American West
ExtremeMediaStudies.org is for:
• museum educators
• art educators
• teacher educators preparing teachers to teach art
• college teachers and students in art, media studies, communication arts, design, geography, American Studies, journalism, interdisciplinary studies
We invite you to "adopt" ExtremeMediaStudies.org as you would a supplementary text, and to creatively adapt and integrate its features into your local contexts and practices.
ExtremeMediaStudies.org orchestrates a network of digital tools, media-rich content, and web 2.0-supported collaboration into a transmedia environment that is truly open-ended even as it builds a strong context filled with foundational knowledge.
Our wager is that ExtremeMediaStudies.org can be at the lead of new ways to fuse art, education, media, and design. Contact us to participate in its ongoing experiment in expanding the fields of art + media.
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).