Proposal #50
Proposal Title:
Digital Arts and Technologies Research Lab & BA in Digital Arts and Technologies
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: Unknown
Units affected: College of Creative Arts
Impacted Degrees/Courses:
Potentially all degrees in the College of Creative Arts, but certainly Cinema.
Brief Description of Proposal:
A proposal for a new program to be called the Digital Arts & Technologies Research Laboratory (hereafter: DAT Lab), which will administer classes and a Bachelor of Arts in Digital Arts & Technologies degree program within the College of Creative Arts.
By Julian Hoxter & R. L. Rutsky
Introduction
The Digital Arts & Technologies Research Laboratory will provide an innovative, rigorous, and multidisciplinary approach to education and research in digital arts. Here we define ‘digital arts’ to include, but not be delimited by: digital critical studies; digital cinema; contemporary art media; graphic and illustration design; multimedia production; web design; game design and gaming; sound recording; digital music production; digital photography; digital performance; many instances of creative writing and computer animation.
Bringing the project-based, modular, and team-oriented model of the scientific research laboratory to an arts context, the DAT Lab will offer students the opportunity to participate in practical, digital arts research, experimentation, and creation, led by faculty researchers. Research and experimentation in digital arts are, in other words, the foundation of the pedagogical approach of the DAT Lab.
Through classroom, group, and individual work, students will gain the professional skills, creative experience, and intellectual and critical fluency needed to thrive in the rapidly changing digital environment of the 21st century.
Overall Structure
The DAT Lab should be seen, like most scientific and technological research laboratories, as an administrative structure that houses and coordinates a program composed of discrete, but interrelated, areas of research and education. This administrative structure must be defined in somewhat broad and open-ended terms, in order to provide the flexibility necessary, first, to adapt to the rapid changes in technologies and culture that affect digital arts, but also to allow for potential cooperation and partnerships with other research fields and businesses in the future.
Similarly, the educational program of the DAT Lab must provide a structure that allows a degree of modularity in its classes and research projects (particularly at an advanced level), so as to be able to respond rapidly to new research possibilities (and rapid obsolescence) in the digital arts.
Because, however, the DAT Lab will endeavor to educate students who may have little experience in digital arts and technologies (and indeed, following the traditional mission of San Francisco State University, often students from underprivileged backgrounds), all students will share a gateway experience in order to prepare them for more advanced research and coursework and to build a sense of teamwork and esprit de corps.
Beyond this gateway experience, students will choose from among several areas of research specialization. These areas would initially be limited in number, but the possibility of further research areas should, in our view, remain open to future developments. Here we do not wish to impose definitions onto our colleagues in other departments in the College, but provisional groupings along the lines of Digital Media, Digital Visual Arts and Digital Performance / Performing Arts might be worthy of discussion.
For the purposes of this current document, we propose, as one of the initial areas of research, a program in Digital Media, outline details of which are provided below. Without being prescriptive, we would further suggest that the example of Digital Media would provide a structural model for other areas of research, the details of which should be determined in consultation with appropriate departments and faculty.
We also strongly suggest that care must be taken to avoid these areas of research specialization becoming entirely separated. One of the great promises of digital technologies -- and digital arts -- is in fact the undoing of traditional boundaries, including disciplinary boundaries. Thus, we would argue that students in every area of research should share coursework and experiences with other areas. In particular, shared areas should include work in writing and digital critical studies. We would also suggest that strong consideration be given to constructing a means for courses (or workshops) and research projects/modules that are explicitly designed to allow students in these different areas to work together.
Finally, while DAT Lab obviously differs from most degree programs within the CSU in a number of ways, we want to draw special attention to a particularly important difference. While most degree programs are, for obvious reasons, concerned with moving students through coursework to completion of degree in as short a time as possible, the DAT Lab, as a self-supporting program, need not be concerned with “throughput” in the same ways. While students will often want to move as rapidly as possible through the program for financial reasons, time to degree need not be limited to four semesters of coursework, as in most degree programs.
Moreover, four semesters is often simply not enough to achieve appropriate skills levels and project completion in some fields. Here, we would like to raise the possibility, at least, of a program divided into trimesters, which would have the advantage, among others, of making use of facilities year round.
Digital Media
The Digital Media area offers an alternative to most undergraduate degree programs. Its approach considers each year’s student intake as a cohort and offers them a core program of classes in their Junior and Senior years around which students will be free to choose from a wide range of elective options from many of the departments in the College of Creative Arts. In this way the structure is similar to MA and MFA programs, only at an undergraduate level and on a larger scale.
The focus of this area of research will, however, be the shared core classes through which the cohort will pass as a body.
Approximately 75% of a Digital Media student’s classes will be core and 25% elective.
A cohort system is designed better to facilitate student skilling in an area that is weighted more heavily towards practical, media production classes and assessments. It also minimizes the perennial problem of student access to highly popular advanced production classes such as we encounter in the cinema department. We anticipate that this will be an attractive proposition for many of our potential students in and of itself.
The cohort system streamlines the skilling process and facilitates and encourages team building, creative leadership and collaborative working practices and the development of similar important transferable skills through a project-centered curriculum.
In another change to the usual way of doing things, the focus of the core program of Digital Media will be on group work and group projects. Students will, however, also have the opportunity to pursue individual projects alongside their group work in their final year, benefitting from the teams and creative relationships they have formed in their core groups.
The Core Program
The core program of Digital Media will be built around four key subject strands:
- Interactive production: digital distribution and exhibition; web based production and website design; experimental and multimedia.
- Digital cinema: documentary and fiction - the next generation of SFSU’s internationally famous cinema program.
- Digital critical studies: histories, contexts and debates framed within an innovative teaching style utilizing digital technology and interactive learning methods.
- Writing: from blogging to screenwriting by way of academic and discursive writing.
Junior Year: Fall Semester
Students will take a sequence of introductory classes which interweave elements from the four subject strands and prepare them for their Junior Project Semester. These classes will combine elements of media production and digital critical studies and may be delivered by interdisciplinary faculty teams rather than individual subject specialists.
In their first semester, the critical and production focus will be on the structure of media texts. In this way, for example, students will be taught digital editing and cinematic language before they are taught cinematographic and directing skills. By the time they undertake their first shoots they will understand the need for good coverage.
By the end of the fall semester, students will have formed production teams and have undertaken preparatory exercises for their Junior Projects which will be undertaken in spring.
Junior Year: Spring Semester
Students will focus on their Junior Projects this semester. A dedicated class will be offered, under the auspices of a faculty coordinator, providing access to facilities and equipment as well as offering additional training and project development as appropriate.
Junior Projects will be group undertakings and the faculty will attempt to accommodate as wide a range of student ambitions and activities as possible within the digital media frame. Where appropriate and available, the Digital Arts & Technologies Research Laboratory may offer groups the chance to undertake projects in collaboration with community based organizations and professional bodies and institutions outside the university.
Students will also have the opportunity to take their first elective classes in spring. These electives may either compliment the work the students are doing in the core program directly or lead them into other fruitful areas of study within the College of Creative Arts.
Senior Year
Senior year involves parallel, year long group and individual project tracks supported by advanced classes and more elective options.
These projects will act as foci for groups of specialist classes that further develop students’ technical, critical and creative proficiencies while helping them work towards completion of their Senior Projects.
It is anticipated that group projects in senior year will likely focus on digital production (broadly defined), whereas students’ individual projects might also include variants and combinations of academic and creative writing and more personal, avant garde and experimental digital works.
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
