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This core course is taken in the first semester of the MA program. It develops thinking across the media arts in a comparative perspective that synthesizes the historical and theoretical approaches of art history, cinema studies, performance studies, and computer-based media studies. It establishes bases for understanding the relationships among the visual arts, visual culture, performing arts, and art forms that incorporate reproducible and digital media; these include cinema, video, photography, and computer-based media. In addition to this, the course investigates some of the useful emergent methods for making comparisons among media, across history, and across cultures. While other courses in the MA in Comparative Media Arts focus on the distinctive nature of specific media arts, this course considers what properties cross different forms of media arts. Prerequisite: Enrolment in MA in Comparative Media Arts or permission ofthe instructor.

The research colloquium is a core course is taken in the final semester of the MA program. It develops students' research presentation skills and other aspects of professional development. In it students develop the extended research essay under the supervision of the faculty member leading the colloquium. The course guides students in methods of writing extended prose works, including strategies to move through writer's block. We will devote time to developing public presentation skills for a variety of venues. During the first half of the semester, students submit a draft of their extended essay to their peers and make a formal presentation in the colloquium, which is followed by detailed discussion, the goal of which is to evaluate the framing of the research topic and research problem, timeliness, originality, appropriateness of research methods, depth of research, structure and effectiveness of argument, and style. Students are guided in peer review, developing useful and specific comments that will help their peers in revising the essay for publication. In the colloquium students also learn how to develop their work for publication, including identifying their audience, choosing an appropriate venue for publication, and submitting their work for publication. We discuss issues regarding publication such as permissions for reproducing artworks, contracts, and responding to peer review. Prerequisite: Enrollment in MA in Comparative Media Arts or permission of instructor.

Empire follows Art, and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. - William Blake, annotations to Sir Joshua Reynold's Discourses (ca. 1798-1809) For WJ.T. Mitchell, pictures have lives and loves. Instead of seeing images as inert objects that convey meaning, he urges us to see them as animated beings with desires, needs, appetites, demands, and drives of their own. In the past three decades, literature on visual culture has burgeoned in art history, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy and anthropology, and recently it has taken on a "performative turn." For art history, which is traditionally concerned with the interpretation of art objects, the artists who make them and the interests of patrons, the interdisciplinary field of visual culture has opened up new ways of thinking about images of all kinds. In a culture in which the production and dissemination of images has grown exponentially, it has never been more necessary to pay attention to how images work and what they do. While histories of images tend to locate intentionality in the maker or the patron, this seminar seeks to bring forward the intentions of the image, how, for example, its formal material characteristics, modes and contexts of circulation and use, reproducibility and referentiality, solicit responses: how images seem to take on, in Mitchell's words, "lives of their own." For your paper, you can choose as your main object of study a work of art, a landmark exhibition, or a famous image drawn from popular culture. This image or event will be the subject of student presentations at the end of the term. The topic must be a visual phenomenon about which there is a substantial discourse in print, preferably in both scholarly and popular sources. The final paper will be based on your presentation and should address some of the critical issues and readings discussed in class. Prerequisite: Undergraduate degree or equivalent and permission from instructor.

This course is an elective in the MA program. In it we examine what are understood as the arts of the moving image: these include film, video, and other time based audiovisual media. We will begin by grounding our objects of study, i.e. specific works and practices, in cinema studies and survey emerging approaches in cinema studies, relating these developments to the longer history of the discipline. Investigating cinema intermedially, we will keep in mind the art forms that informed it historically, including theater, public spectacles, photography, painting, music, sound recording. Then the course will examine how the practice, aesthetics, and reception change when cinema moves to television, both move to digital formats, and all these platforms move to handheld and social media. We will investigate medium specificity in the moving-image arts in light of what is termed "media convergence." We will consider what new forms emerge when moving images shift from the institution of cinema to other contexts such as museums and online sites. The course includes two or three weeks topics of interest that arise in the field, such as new national cinemas, new approaches to documentary, cognitive theory and neuroscience, etc. Prerequisite:.

This course will focus on the history and practice of digital art, with an emphasis upon the artistic outcomes of the new methodologies and practices within this field. Digital technology has fundamentally changed the process and products of contemporary creativity in art-making. Although a great deal of contemporary art involves some aspect of digital technology, this course will examine those artists and art-works in which digital technologies play an intrinsic part in the creative process, as well as the realization. A range of processes - from interactive systems through to algorithmic approaches (stochastic, deterministic, chaotic) - will be examined, with particular reference to artistic goals, approaches,and results. Prerequisite: Undergraduate degree or equivalent and permission from instructor.

This course is an elective in the MA program. It traces the interdisciplinary origins of performance studies and brings its concepts and methods to bear on dance, music and sound arts, theatre and performance arts, and media performance while introducing cross-disciplinary ideas from emergent areas such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and gaming, for example. Course assignments will involve case studies as forerunners for further research. Prerequisite: Undergraduate degree or equivalent and permission from instructor.

This course is an elective in the MA program. Students are placed with an arts organization in order to carry out a specific project of finite length. This may be an organization that students identify themselves or that the MA program identifies. The student liaises with the organization with the supervision of a faculty member from the MA program. The practicum takes place at the organization. Organizations include artist run centers, festivals of film, media art, and performance, nonprofit organizations with arts programs, galleries, museums, and arts publications. The student's labor time in the practicum should total approximately 120 hours, to be carried out over the course of a semester. Projects are initiatedby the student in consultation with the supervisor at the organization and the MA program supervisor. Projects can involve research, writing, organizing events, curating exhibitions and programs, public relations, media production, archiving, andrelated activities. The student submits a proposal that indicates the project's purpose, schedule, plans for documenting andreporting, and planned outcome. Final outcomes will vary depending on the placement. The MA program director and the supervisor at the organization approve the project, and they and the student agree on the grading criteria. Prerequisite: Enrollment in MA in Comparative Media Arts or permission of instructor.

This essay is the final project of the MA, and is completed in the fourth semester of the program. The extended essay builds on knowledge students have gained in coursework. It requires them to research in-depth a topic in comparative media arts and develop and polish an original argument, with the goal of producing an essay suitable for publication. Alternatively, students can combine two essays written during their coursework in this MA, one of which must have been instructed by a faculty member in the School for the Contemporary Arts; however, the student is still expected to build upon and develop the topics covered in the coursework. The length should be that of a typical academic journal article in the media arts, about 6000-7000 words. Students may also write a catalogue essay or similar nonacademic publication, supplemented by an academic essay. The object of study may be a single work or a group of works. Methodological, historical, and theoretical approaches should be clearly identified. In researching these, students should identify other scholars who work with similar objects of study and approaches: this is the intellectual company of the extended essay. Students should clarify in what ways their project both belongs to this company and contributes something original. The Research Methods course will have established methods by which to do this. Students research the extended essay independently, but they develop and polish it in the Research Colloquium, FPA 822-4. In the colloquium they write the essay proposal and drafts, give and receive peerreview, prepare to submit the essay for publication,and prepare to make a 20-minute public presentation of it at the culminating research symposium. Students may enroll in the extended essay continuously beginning in the third (summer) semester if they wish, or they may enroll in it in the fourth (fall) semester only. Prerequisite: Enrollment in MA in Comparative Media Arts, FPA 821-4, Research Methods, and two electives.