In the Winter of 2003 I began updating the curriculum for my interactive media and information design courses. Like most of us who teach new media design and theory, I had many different ways to approach the material, but had no “standard” to fall back on since this area of pedagogy and research is so new and continues to evolve as we work. Like many of us, I have tried most of the popular approaches to teaching online development and writing in the past ten years. When the web first became popular, I taught my new media courses (then called hypertext courses) through the lens of classical rhetoric, focusing on Plato’s conception of the dialectical exchange. As online design also started to become a vital tool of corporate promotion and training, I refocused my courses through the lenses of project management, industrial user-centered design and usability testing.
As online new media technology improved and allowed for the creation of web-based material that functioned like stand-alone software, I refocused my courses around the structure of narrative and how it uses theatrical forms of interaction in the presentation of complex online help and instructional systems. Never quite comfortable with any of these course designs nor with the overall reception of my course material, I have continually reedited my curriculum and project designs. I keep changing course approaches to adapt to changes in the field, and to keep pace with students’ foreknowledge of the technologies we use in the classroom.
What I have essentially been looking for all this time is a poetic conceit, a solid story line, a narrative and theoretical blueprint that I can use to build a pedagogical home for a wide range of theoretical approaches, cultural and technological histories, and student-driven technology development work. Lev Manovich’s recent important work on new media, The Language of New Media, and its focus on new media development as a form of interactive, multicultural cinema, recently provided me with the inspiration for a way to tie all my interests and pedagogical approaches together into a single curriculum.
Manovich's focus on the integration of film history and technique into new media theory provided me with a way to present my course material in an interactive manner that draws students directly into the central concerns of our field. Because I believe praxis is essential in engaging students by asking them to actually create a new technology or a new process from the inside (instead of learning to only critique the completed work of someone else), I decided to take Manovich’s ideas a good deal further by asking my students to invent a new form of cinema. For the last year and a half I have asked students to bring film and new media technology development to the next level as we work to create a next generation theater, a holodeck of sorts, that now has students thinking of themselves as next generation film makers and as new media information designers.
The project students have been working on is called the Lumiere Ghosting Project, and the new media, immersive theater they are designing is called the CompuObscura. The poetic conceit that draws the entire work together is the human fascination with the unseen which has often been presented in theater, poetry, prose, photography, and film through the image of the ghost. In many ways, for a year and a half now, our students and faculty have been working on a sophisticated but deceptively simple haunted house.
This essay or hypertext cluster is actually three separate essays combined into one interconnected hypertext presentation. The purpose of this hypertext creation is to introduce readers to the histories (personal and social) that support this ongoing pedagogy project, give readers an overview of how the technologies that we are inventing will eventually come together into a single production, and then briefly explain how all this work has been integrated into a series of new media courses.
Because so much of our project work revolves around visual interaction, the first group of students who worked on this project decided that we should use the human eye as our “icon” throughout our work (a semiotic conceit that plays well, of course, with the cinematic fascination with the eye) and also the letter “I” which we use for:
• Inspiration (Personal and Social History)
• Innovation (Technology Development)
• Illumination (Pedagogy and Curriculum Design).
I have followed my student’s advice in deciding how to structure the visual and prose divisions for this hypertext work. As with any piece of hypertext, you may read these pages in any order. I encourage you to explore, but I have also interconnected this web cluster with a number of text and image links to provide you with various directed paths through the material.
Because the Lumiere Ghosting Project is still very much a work in progress, and because Kairos is such an active nexus point in our community, we are eager to hear your responses to this article, to our work thus far, and to our plans for future collaborations with students and colleagues across the country. Please do take advantage of the mailto links scattered throughout these pages to let me know what you think as you read.
Like many new media instructors, I have had to look outside my academic “department” (English) in search of colleagues and students to collaborate with in this interdisciplinary pedagogy and technology development project. Therefore, while this article is my individual and quite personal statement about what we have created together, this project is truly a group collaboration that depends on the contributions of many thinkers, designers, and instructors.