Multimedia Composition Courses

In these classes, we will be examining different ways in which digital media has contributed to new modes of thinking about topics of social and cultural importance. Through assigned texts and selected videos, podcasts, and other examples of popular digital media we will be meditating on what creativity and communication means in the 21st century. In addition to working with the assigned course texts, students will have the opportunity to develop projects that utilize digital media in order to generate their own ideas around the question, what does it mean to be connected in the digital age?

This course satisfies one SAS Core Requirement
Area of Inquiry: Arts and Humanities; Critical and Creative Expression [AHr]

*Honors College students and SAS Honors students enroll in Section H1 or H2

Sight, Sound, & Stories
In this course, students will be introduced to the fundamental principles and practices of creative writing as they relate to audio and visual multimedia composition, critique, design, creation, and distribution. Simply put, multimedia means the integration of multiple forms of media (alphabetic text, visuals, video, audio, etc.) into one artifact or deliverable, and describes much of what we encounter and consume every single day. Since multimedia is, by nature, interactive, we will cover the rhetorical nature of interactivity, and the relationship of the audience, or users, to both the “texts” we will be engaging with and the “texts” we will create, ultimately to understand the ways information and messaging are employed and experienced, with storytelling always in the forefront of how we think of these, keeping our increasingly fragmented audiences in mind at all times.

Food, Culture & Politics in the Digital Age 
Multimedia appeals to various senses, but not all of them at once. How can students use digital platforms to create something that comes close to experiencing the real thing of food? Additionally, how can social media disseminate information about the food world, specifically agriculture and the politics that surround it? How can these media bring awareness to the forefront and encourage social action? In this course, students will consider these questions as they engage with all varieties of food literature (novels, restaurant reviews, political essays, how-to videos, food blogs) and how their own identities are created through food. As a result of our discussions, students will create a podcast, a video essay, and other related assignments.

 Documenting YOUR World
Sometimes, it feels like The News has everything covered: politics, entertainment, climate change, business. But there’s something only you can report on: The story of your everyday life. How your immediate world keeps changing. Is there a new graffiti artist in town? Is something fresh happening in the local music scene? Has your circle of friends changed its view on an issue? Is a new fashion trend emerging on campus? Through blog posts, a podcast, and a video project, we’ll keep track of micro-stories like these, analyzing and exploring them in different ways.

Making it New: Rewriting and Remixing
In this class, we will read essays about and study examples of how artists and writers use found materials and take inspiration from works of pop culture, literature and myth to explore their own emotions and ideas. To start, students will create poems and works of flash fiction that reinvent other writers’ narratives and borrow from existing languages and tropes. Later, students will translate these written pieces into audio works and short videos that use sounds and images from the public domain. As a final project, students will design a personal website that showcases their creative work.

Turn on your Radio and Hide!
The age of the iPod is over, but a genre of narrative audio that took its name — “podcasting” — is thriving. The course focuses on the rise of the modern fictional podcast from its roots in Golden Age radio drama. Students will listen/respond to several vintage radio dramas and modern podcasts, prepare a handful of sonic adaptations (from visual or textual sources), then write/produce two original podcasts (i.e. a "sound story" and an "ear movie"), as well as one video (in which the visual information doesn't compromise the work's integrity as audio narrative). The course also includes visits with a variety of podcast professionals (and at least one live performance of a classic radio drama). The great strength of audio storytelling, is the mind's innate willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how bizarre. So come on, folks, let's get crazy!]

Digital Identity: Public and Private
The Internet is a place that can foster incredible connectivity, act as a means for sharing ideas, resources, and stories, and provide access to people, places, and things that we would never have access to otherwise. It is also a place where anonymity allows online users to troll other people, spread wild conspiracies and misinformation, where isolation and disconnection are felt to be all-encompassing. This class looks at the various was that the connectivity and possibilities brought about by the Internet can help us to see how people understand themselves and the world around them. Of particular interest, we will be exploring to what degree creative and critical thought can make in a world of social media platforms, constantly updating news cycles, and digital mash ups of music, movies, and images whenever we look at a laptop, smartphone, or other wireless device.

DIY r/Reality
This course approaches multimedia as provocation—where language, sound, and image are set in deliberate misalignment. Students undertake a series of speculative media experiments that test how meaning emerges from contradiction, culminating in an audio project and short film. Along the way, the class engages with writers, sound artists, filmmakers, and cultural trouble-makers whose work teaches through dissonance rather than clarity. Composition becomes a method for constructing reality—playful, rigorous, and sometimes unsettling—that pushes against what counts as truth. Rather than affirming reality, 209 treats multimedia itself as a means of constructing it.

Memoirist Mixed Tapes
This introductory workshop explores writing as a multi-media entity, offers exciting ground for experimentation and is, in a Dadaist sense, a portrait of the writer. You will explore hybrid, multi-media texts by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writer-performers and installation artists. Writing produced in the workshop will be collaged or remixed into multi-media projects such as sound-text pieces, video poems and podcast episodes. Practice will include audio and video assemblage, experimenting with found language, cross-genre collaboration, playing with possibilities of music-text-video interaction, and critical engagement.

Writing as Your Outlet
Have you ever felt the need to vent or process your feelings, but you don't know how to start? Sometimes it's hard to find the time to write down your thoughts to articulate what you want to say. This class will allow you to use writing as your outlet. You will have the freedom to choose the topics that are important and interesting to you - whether it's fiction or nonfiction pieces or a bit of both! You will get to create your personal digital portfolio and share your own stories with a small group of classmates. Join this class if you are ready to use writing as your outlet and finding your voice!

Millennials and Multimedia
Through blog posts, video essays, podcasts, and other multimedia projects, you will explore the ways you define yourselves within and against the millennial generation that is being actively discussed in the blogosphere. According to a 2014 White House report, one quarter of millennials—Americans born between 1980 and 2000—“believe that their relationship to technology is what makes their generation unique.” In this course, you will use multimedia composition—that is, writing and creating using digital technologies—in order to analyze, define, and ultimately contribute to millennial culture. You will theorize how millennials differ from Gen Xers, Baby Boomers, and from other generational groups, considering questions not only of technology but also of race, gender, class, employment, education, health, family, community, and attitude.

At Home: What Does it Mean?
What is home? Is it a place of belonging, of safety, of refuge? Must it be something that we call ours, that we identify with? Or can home be a dwelling in bewilderment? What happens when we don’t feel at home, when we don’t belong? In this class, we will develop work that documents the shapes and contours of our intimate dwellings and the stories of those who inhabit them. Through videos, podcasts, and graphic illustrations, students will develop narratives around questions of home and estrangement, investigating how each specific digital media employed can serve as a unique lens to view both feeling at home and feeling estranged. Students of all backgrounds and disciplines welcome!

Video Games, Board Games, and YOU
Writing stories allows us to express ourselves and bring others into the worlds we create. Games contain stories, characters,  and dramas as well. With a simple format of instructions we can invite others to participate as passive and active participants with the people and missions we put in front of them. Video Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Monopoly and Settlers of Catan are popular examples. So are chain letters, bake-offs, viral dance trends, and re-edits of all kinds of music and movies. What periods of time or environments would you like to use for your world-building? What activities would you like others to become involved in? In this course we create storylines and goals for the characters and the players in an online game. The technical aspects will not be difficult. If you can use Instagram, you will be alright. With photos, videos and music you can populate your ideas with fashion, objects, languages, musical themes and prizes.

* Honors College students and SAS Honors students enroll in Section H1 or H2

*H1 (Honors) - Curiosity and Expression
How are our perceptions of art, communications, and information changing as a result of widespread access to digital technologies and various digital media platforms? This course provides students the opportunity to explore the conceptual challenges that have emerged from the ever-expanding digital world that we inhabit through blog postings, group exercises, and individual digital media projects that provide hands-on experience of what it is like to compose and share works that are both thought-provoking and entertaining. Taught at Honors level.

*H2 (Honors) - Sonic Ecologies
“Dawn itself is the most neglected masterpiece of the modern world…When you listen carefully to the soundscape, it becomes quite miraculous.”
-R. Murray Schafer

Despite the emphasis on visual culture in social technologies, we are immersed in sounds that continue to shape and shift perceptions of our environment. How might listening, rather than seeing, our surroundings shift these perceptions? This creative writing workshop will attempt to respond to this question throughout the semester by reading foundational texts in the growing field of Sound Studies that destabilize ocularcentrism, exploring various environments and architecture through sound walks, and through regular journaling and recording of these experiences. Students will work towards recording and editing a Soundscape, creating an Acousmatic Sound Collage, developing and editing a Sound and Space Audio Poem, and completing a Final Sound Essay Project that uses sound and narration to engage with issues and key terms discussed in the weekly readings.  

Period numbers/times for all campuses: