Approval

The course was established 2006-03-14. This document is the reconstruction of a syllabus approved 2006-03-14 by Utbildningsnämnden vid Konst, kultur och kommunikation. The syllabus is valid from 2006-03-14.

The reconstruction has a new layout although the text is unchanged. Some notions migth have been substituted by recent equivalences.

Purpose

Through mixed theory and practice, the course explores new tools for the creation of experimental, personal and locally based stories on the Internet. The participants will continuously produce audiovisual content for a net based videoblog. Parallel to this, there will be a discussion concerning narrative form in digital media, in relation to media history and to spatial representation in design- and planning processes. The course looks at how new media expands traditional forms of storytelling and also at how these developments have been preceded by artistic and filmic experiments. The course is useful to filmmakers and artists (aspiring as well as established) who wish to explore experimental modes of storytelling, journalists who want to learn new publication tools or to independent “micro-journalists" and other activists within alternative media production.

Entry requirements

General eligibility + the equivalent of English course B in Swedish secondary school.
Information on application and eligibility is available at www.mah.se/education/non-exchange

Learning outcomes

The overall goal is to build an integrated practical and theoretical understanding of the possibilities for personal and experimental storytelling in today’s digital mediascape. On a technical level, students will after having completed the course be able to work further on their own with the publication of videomaterial on the Internet in a videoblog format. On a conceptual level, the students should be able to relate their production to relevant sociocultural contexts in the global/local nexus.

Assessments

In order to pass the course, a student should at the end of the semester be able to show that he/she has continually produced content for the course home page (the video blog) and that he/she has been active an active participant in the common seminars.

Course content

During the course, the participants continually produce their own content for a netbased video platform. In order to produce this content, different types of utilities for digital sound and image production will be used:

• DV-Cameras (digital video)
• Digital stillcameras (stills + video sequences)
• Mobilephones (mobile documentary, mobile stories)
• Minidisc recorders (sound based stories)

In order to manipulate the recorded material, participants will be introduced to the basics of digitisation, video editing, compression and net publication. The main focus of tutoring will however not be on the film craft as such but on the creation of networked stories – that is films that explicitly relate to the connectivity and communicability of digital media.

Malmö högskolas perspektiv
The course focuses on alternative forms of storytelling and thus traces the often marginalised history of video art and experimental filmmaking that reaches back to feministic filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Gunvor Nelson, Martha Rosler, Dara Birnbaum and many others. The course also explicitly deals with the local as a place for storytelling and investigates which kind of stories are emphasized in our increasingly globalized media everyday.

Learning activities

The practical elements will be taught in an intensive workshop form where relevant examples are examined in connection to small video tasks where the participants are asked to produce their own short clips for the videoblog. In between the workshops, the participants read a number of key text that deal with the development of networked stories, on one hand from a sociocultural perspective and on the other from a film studies perspective.

Grading system

Fail (U) or Pass (G).

Reading list

Gye, Lisa, Anna Munster,
Distributed Aesthetics Fibreculture Publications, 2006.
Ingrid Richardson. (ed)

Lovink, Geert.
Dark Fiber - Tracking Critical Internet Culture. MIT Press 2003.

Manovich, Lev
The Language of New Media. MIT Press 2001.

Miles, Adrian
“Cinematic paradigms for hypertext."
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 17-226.

Murray, Janet
Hamlet on the Holodeck – The future of Narrative in
Cyberspace. MIT Press 1997.

Renov, Michael.
The Documentary Subject. Minnesota 2004.


Walker, Jill.
"Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks". Paper, AoIR 5.0, September 2004.

"Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself". DAC 2005 Proceedings. 184-190.

Youngblood, Gene.
Expanded Cinema. Dutton NY 1970.

Zapp, Andrea; Druckrey Timothy,
New Screen Media , Cinema, Art Narrative, BFI 2003. Sean Cubitt (Red.).

Course evaluation

A written as well as a spoken evaluation will be take place at the end of the course.