New Courses for Spring 2011: Topics in New Media and the Avant-Garde

As registration for Spring 2011 academic courses begin, I have been fielding many questions about the two upper level courses I will be instructing in January. See below a more detailed description and preview of both offerings--I look forward to a dynamic and engaging term with both classes! 

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Mondays 4:00-6:50pm, Fir D2422)

ARTH 3100: New Media in Art: History and Theory

This course offers a critical and historical examination of “new media” and the influence of technological, digital, computerized, and networked information and communication technologies in the development of new formats of art making. Looking first to the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth century avant-garde stagings and engagement with new technologies of seeing (through photography and early cinema for example), the course will examine how innovative ideas about representation and free use of materials in the art of cubism, futurism, surrealism and dada set out to re-envision the strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of art represented by painting and sculpture. The course will then explore how artists and art movements of the last fifty years have embraced new media formats to further their visions.

Stan Douglas, Abbott and Cordova, 7 August 1971 (2008)

From conceptual photography to video, collage to assemblage, installation to performance, digital to virtual environments, new media formats have extended notions of what art could materially consist of, but have also affected the anticipation of audiences for that work, having social as well as aesthetic implications. An important aspect of the course will therefore involve thinking about how contemporary new media practices must be understood in a broader historical and social context involving changing ideas about time, duration, and narrative, notions of embodiment, and the turn to a digitally mediated world. Ultimately, our attention will be on the network where new media art is made, exhibited, and reacted to by different parties, and to the ways that portions of the art system have conceived of and explained the workings of such a system and the society it exists within. 

Simon Fraser University (Tuesdays 5:30-8:20pm, Woodwards Room W-4390)

FPA 389: Reassessing the Avant-Garde: History, Theory, and Practice.

The avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (particularly in the area of visual culture, performance, film, dance and music) have been determining forces in shaping collective ideas about artistic practice and culture, social history, and subversive intent.  Originally a French military term meaning the part of an army that goes ahead of the rest, the core meaning and concerns of avant-gardism are framed within a specific cultural and temporal context tied to ideas of progress, social disruption, structuralism and an attack on traditional or mainstream artistic values. As a result, the history and theory of the avant-garde has been critical in shaping Western and Eurocentric ideas about modernity, modernism, and the disputed sacredness of the “art object,” but has faced more difficulty in recent years with the turn to post-structural theory and a more diverse and globally conceived understanding of art and culture.

French anarchist publication edited by Paul Brousse from 1871

In this seminar, we will examine how the current climate of post-structural intervention has attempted to forge more direct links between previously separated realms of art and culture, but also consider how the problem persists that little has been done to dislodge the ironclad structures that constitute the historical narratives of "the avant-garde" writ large—accounts that often pit favoured notions of artistic autonomy, departure from tradition, and radical resistance in opposition to much maligned conceptions of mass culture, vernacular expression, and the alienating effects of new technology. The goal of this seminar will therefore involve: 1) examining and understanding how the history and theory of the avant-garde has been shaped through competing and shifting discourses of nationalism, tradition, modernity, and technology; and 2) consider a range of alternative bodies of theory and artistic practice that present a more broadly defined and interconnected matrix of avant-garde(s) or “neo avant-garde” practice. 

Focus on Research| How to Outline and Prepare an Essay: My Patented "Recipe"

While seemingly formulaic, the ability to outline an essay is critical to your success as a student. After researching and amassing a great deal of material, it becomes vital to organize your thoughts in some meaningful way. In fact, the hallmark of the best essay is one that establishes a thesis statement at the outset and leads the reader through a logical and sequential argument. While not the only method out there, this is the approach that I have used to draft 1000 word essays as an undergraduate, all the way up to entire book-length manuscripts of 300+ pages as a Ph.D. student. I have also shared this "recipe" with many students over the years taking my courses and have had great feedback about its usefulness and adaptation to a variety of assignments. 

The core principal of the formula is incredibly pragmatic-- you are budgeted a specific amount of words that have to be managed and allocated. By applying a little logic, you can take the mystique out of how written work gets completed by making a common sense plan to engage with the finite limits of your assignment-- just do it. In fact, I firmly believe that 75% of your effort should go into an outline or plan for the paper, and only the remaining last 25% spent actually writing. If you do it the other way around, you will likely find yourself both frustrated and wasting precious time. You will find instead that once you have a solid outline or road map of how to proceed, the paralysis and procrastination many students bring to the writing process recedes (it never fully goes away I am afraid) and you can actually begin to enjoy (gasp!) the process of producing solidly constructed written assignments.

Here is my method or “recipe” adapted to a 2000 word assignment (but can be easily used for assignments of virtually any length) :

1. Determine the number of words that you are required to produce for the assignment (i.e. @2000 words for this example)
2. Subtract 200-250 words for an Introduction, and 150 words for a conclusion (this would be more in a paper over 4000 words, but is adequate for a paper of this length). This leaves you with approximately 1600 words for the body of your paper.
3. Keeping in mind your thesis statement and intended argument, figure out how many topic areas you want to discuss. Here you will also consult the instructions given to you for the essay and make sure each area is also covered somewhere in your outline.
4. Once you have figured out how many areas you have, divide your remaining 1600 words into that number (i.e. I have chosen 3 themes that work out to about 530 words).
5. Keeping in mind that most of us write 150-200 word paragraphs, each of your three sections will now have approximately 2-3 paragraphs (you do not have to be completely anal about the numbers, just use as a guideline since you may say slightly more or less in each section).
6. Once you have established the number of paragraphs for each of your three sections, you can now sketch out your preliminary outline.
7. Go back to your research and sources and look carefully at your topic question and begin to think about what you will say in each paragraph to discuss your topic and prove your argument (keep track too of where you will raise and discuss works of art if needed). Take notes about which page numbers from your sources you will cite, and at what point in your essay you will raise them. Write these notes directly onto your outline.You may find that through this process that you will have to revise the outline to accommodate your argument, and this is fine. But keep in mind the limitations for space that you must abide by for each section.
8. Once you are satisfied that you have a good outline, start writing, preferably write one section at a time (one a day over three days in this example). Keep your thesis statement only as your Introduction through this process and importantly, avoid writing the complete Introduction until the end of the process. You will only frustrate yourself and waste time. Chances are that you will only really know what you are arguing in detail once you finish writing (this is really what no one tells you directly).
9. After finishing the essay draft, write the Introduction. Make sure your thesis statement is clearly stated and describe what you will set out in your argument (think of the Introduction as a movie trailer with the “highlights” of your argument). Do not be afraid to use the first person “I” when writing—in fact, I strongly suggest you do for any written assignment where you are asked to critically assess a topic area.
10. Your Conclusion should be a statement that summarizes what your main findings were in the essay. It is similar to the Introduction, only you now can make more specific statements about what you actually found in your research. Here, you can also make comments about what you think is most important about your findings, and why you think the topic area should be of interest to readers. 
11. Read, read, and re-read the essay (both silently and aloud) to make sure your argument and ideas flow from one section to the next. This is where careful editing, planning ahead, and attention to mistakes will pay off in your final mark (who has the time to implement this important step if they are writing the paper the night before it is due?)
12. Finally, create a great title for the project as the icing on the cake! Great titles invite the reader and distinguish your paper from the rest of the pile-- it might just earn you a few extra marks as well.

Weekly Twitter Round Up

What did you do with your extra hour today? I picked up a Gingerbread latte (too soon for Christmas I know, but who can resist? Go low-fat, no whip to save some calories) and headed out for a quick stroll along the ocean to enjoy the colours of fall before heading back to work. It is one week into November and about half way through the semester. Ideas are synthesizing, concepts are coming together, and hopefully deadlines will be met. Stop, pause, and enjoy a few of my favourites from around the Twitterverse from the past week.

PHOTOS: 17 Totally Bizarre Statues Around The World

Is history getting more photogenic?

"Do colleges really need 30,000 applications to find 1,500 great students?"

RT @frieze_magazine: Is it possible to sell out in 2010? Nice piece from the Village Voice from a few weeks back

Banksy vs Bristol Museum YouTube clip

What is dOCUMENTA (13) about?

'I'm interested in how sound can define space' Turner Prize nominee Susan Philipsz talks about her work

Guest Blog | Jenna Kirouac: No Funding? No Actors? No Problem. Canadian Filmmakers Overcome Big Obstacles

Guest Blogger Jenna Kirouac is Avant-Guardian Musings Vancouver Arts Correspondent. To see her previous posts, please click here.

Play With Fire (2009) A local independent film featuring life in small town B.C.

Watching a film where the actors play roles that are reflective of their “real life identities” (whatever that means) and who have no previous experience acting is pretty interesting. It’s hard to tell how much the actors are pretending to be their character, or if they are really just being themselves.

In the independent Canadian film Play With Fire (2009), a story about going nowhere in small town Canada, budget constraints caused the British Columbia born director Soren Johnstone to use people who had no previous acting experience from the communities of Trail and Castlegar. There is an authentic and intimate bond connecting the story’s characters and the people portraying them. And although the delivery of some lines in the film appear a bit forced, I was really impressed by the end result of the non-actor’s acting skills! When I asked the film’s producer Michael Babiarz about the casting decisions, his response was this: “We didn’t have the budget to pay people for their time and effort, it was all voluntary. In the end, it took a hell of a lot longer to get what we wanted but it feels more authentic. Shit is real.”

Indeed it is. My good friend and I walked into Pat’s Pub on East Hastings here in Vancouver during the first local screening of the film. I soon abandoned my initial plan of turning around and walking out the door after catching sight of a bar filled with silent and mesmerized spectators. The graphic language and all too familiar depiction of blue-collar town masculinity drew me in and I was compelled to stay and watch.

Winning a well-deserved award at the ReelHeART Film Festival in Toronto for best cinematography in 2009, the film’s portrayal of the community of Trail, British Columbia looks both breathtaking and heartbreaking with its juxtaposition of majestic mountains and omnipresent smokestacks. The backdrop to the story serves as a constant rhetoric: the vast potential of the wild suppressed by the insulating quality of the small town. The fact that this film was made without any financial aid, grants, or outside funding, and was shot over the course of thirteen months also makes Play With Fire an amazing feat in Canadian filmmaking. The film is currently touring the province, and I would highly recommend checking it out when it comes back to town on December 5th and screens at the Rickshaw Theatre. 

Official "Teaser" Trailer for Play With Fire found on the movie producer's YouTube Channel

Quick Compare| Long Tracking Shots in Film History

Weekend (1967) contains one of  the best  and most conceptual long tracking shots in film history

This week I was lecturing in my film studies class about the use of long tracking shots in the work of many French New Wave filmmakers. A tracking shot is essentially any take where a camera moves alongside as if trailing or pursuing its subject, and the longer the shot is, the more it demands a kind of attention from the audience. Jean-Luc Godard's famous and unrelenting eight minute long tracking shot in Weekend (1967) of a surreal and horrifying traffic jam in the French countryside demonstrates perfectly how the means of filmic representation can impart a specific point of view and attitude of what is being shown. The slow-moving and methodical tracking of the trail of cars to the final accident unfolds with a kind of flatness and inevitability. The notion of not being able to look away at an accident takes on a new charge as the entire scene is brought to a kind of crawl. In Brian Henderson's classic essay on Godard's technique, "Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style," he argues that Godard's use of his signature lateral tracking shot (with no forward camera movement at all and an exactly straight base line parallel to the scene) is "an admittedly synthetic single layered construct, which the viewer must examine critically, accept or reject. The viewer is not drawn into the image, nor does he make choices within in; he stands outside the image and judges it as a whole." In other words, the director is able to establish a kind of critical distance within an accident scene that would usually be presented as emotionally wrenching in other films. As Godard has famously stated, adding to the reading of the scene, "Tracking shots are a question of morality."



Together with the Godard sequence, I have collected three other famous long tracking shots for your viewing pleasure (or displeasure as Godard would have it) and embedded them in chronological order. Each of course is engaged with a different reason for utilizing the long tracking shot and to very different ends. The first is taken from Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958); the second from Mikhail Kalatozov's I am Cuba (1964); and the last is the opening shot from Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights (1997) where the scene is accompanied by Anderson's own discussion of how he conceptualized the camera work (notice how he mentions French filmmaker Francois Truffaut among others in his discussion). I would love to have included the well known Martin Scorsese sequence from Goodfellas (1990), but every last clip is disabled from embedding in YouTube, so you can go to see it directly here. Enjoy and compare!