Hybrid Media Design

Level: Undergraduate, Graduate

Division: The New School for Public Engagement

School: School of Media Studies

Department: Media Studies

Course Number: NMDS 5200

Course Format: Lecture

Location: NYC campus

Permission Required: No

Description:
This course considers "hybrid media" and "media practice" from a very particular perspective, examining how and why individuals and groups are inventing hybrid media practices in response to the emergence of new social realities. We consider how current scales, speeds, and complexities of social change are encouraging and rewarding hybrid media practices. For our purposes, "hybrid media practices" refers to approaches to media production and use that cut across research, design, art, communication, science, participatory citizenship, speculation and action. We track what practicing media producers actually make of"hybridity." We question what hybrid media practices make thinkable and possible for media forms, styles, modes of address, and uses. We focus on hybrid media practices involved in knowledge production, documentary, information dissemination, and interpretation of contemporary conditions of daily life. The readings and conceptual framework of the course draw from theories of "hybridity," "assemblage," and "translation" and we use that framework to inform field- and case studies of media producers who actively invent and employ hybridized media practices. Students contribute weekly reading responses, conduct a field- or case study, and produce a final project in the form of a prototype or "test site" that tries out a hybrid media practice in order to identify its potentials as well as its limitations.

Restrictions:

Level

Open to Graduate students.