Leigh Davis

Apr 042013
 

LDavis_vLeigh Davis is an artist and educator.  Her work investigates the relationships between people and the physical spaces in which they live, work, and perform.  Leigh’s subjects span a broad range—from the men of a dying religious order, to women living in a YWCA residence hall, to a variety of performers (tap dancer, Michael Jackson impersonator, a cappella choir, conductor) —and the projects she creates derive from the relationships she develops with those subjects over time.  Gathering visual and aural material around a person or place is how her projects usually begin, but the final products are site-specific installations or situations created from a variety of media, and are deeply informed by their subject matter and the sites in which they are presented.  Davis teaches at Parsons within the School of Design Studies, and the International Center of Photography.  She also teaches high school students in collaboration with The Center for Urban Pedagogy.

You can see some of her work at: http://leighdavisprojects.com/site/

 Posted by at 10:07 am People Comments Off on Leigh Davis

Course Fall 2013 – Archives Libraries and Databases

Apr 042013
 

Instructor: Shannon Mattern
Fall 2013 Graduate Seminar (advanced undergrads welcome)
CRN 6731
Tuesdays 4 – 5:50pm
2012 Course Website

*While this course is not explicitly about sound, students can tailor their projects to focus on audio archives, music libraries, or other sound-related topics.

“There has been more information produced in the last 30 years than during the previous 5000.” We have all heard some variation on this maxim. As U.S. publishers add 250,000 printed books and close to 300,000 print-on-demand books to our libraries each year; as we find ourselves wading through over 200 million websites; as we continue to add new media – from Tweets to Apps to geo-tagged maps – to our everyday media repertoires, we continually search for new ways to navigate this ever more treacherous sea of information. Throughout human history we have relied on various institutions and politico-intellectual architectures to organize, index, preserve, make sense of, and facilitate or control access to our stores of knowledge, our assemblages of media, our collections of information. This seminar looks at the past, present, and future of the library, the archive, and the database, and considers what logics, priorities, politics, audiences, contents, aesthetics, physical forms, etc., ally and differentiate these forms of data storage and filtering. We will examine what roles the library, archive, and the database play in democracy, in education, in everyday life, and in art. **This class is the first in a two-part series; in Spring 2014, we’ll be consulting with archivists, librarians, and designers to develop a  digital archive for The New School. Students are strongly encourage to enroll in both the Fall and Spring courses.

ArchivesLibrariesImage
Image via — Wikimedia Commons

 Posted by at 9:27 am Courses Comments Off on Course Fall 2013 – Archives Libraries and Databases

Course Fall 2013 – Urban Media Archeology

Apr 042013
 

Instructor: Shannon Mattern
Fall 2013 Graduate Studio (advanced undergrads welcome)
CRN 4168
Wednesdays 7 – 9:45pm
2012 Course Website

*While this course is not explicitly about sound, students can tailor their projects to focus on sonic media in urban environments — radio, loudspeakers, musical performance, etc.

Today’s city is layered with screens of all shapes and sizes and stitched together with a web of wireless networks, but woven into these modern media spaces are other, older urban media networks and infrastructures – many of which have laid the foundation for our newer media. This project-based course is dedicated to excavating and mapping – both theoretically and practically – the layers of mediation that have shaped urban forms and informed urban experiences through several key epochs in communication history, from the oral culture of ancient Athens to the television age. Each student, alone or in pairs, will conduct an urban media excavation – exploring, for example, how pneumatic tubes facilitated the delivery of mail in late-19th century New York, how the rise of the film industry shaped early 20th-century Los Angeles, or how television cables served as the nervous system of new mid-20th-century suburbs. Rather than presenting this work as atomized individual projects, however, everyone will plot their sites and networks, and post relevant archival media, to a collaboratively designed interactive media map. Part of the class will be devoted to designing the platform by analyzing which presentation format is best suited for effectively displaying these layers of urban mediation and exploring the synergies between individual students’ projects. The class will lay historical and theoretical groundwork for examining media and the urban environment, and also introduce students to the fields of media archaeology and the digital humanities.  While students will participate in the creation of interactive media maps, this hybrid course will have a strong theory component.

Image via — Creative Commons license
UrbanMediaArchaeologyImage

 Posted by at 7:52 am Courses Comments Off on Course Fall 2013 – Urban Media Archeology