Portfolio

Overview
In working with expressive digital forms, my primary goals are to combine scholarly rigor with imagination, the intellectual with the lived and the felt. The projects described below question the practices of the player/user; these roles include digital game player, mobile phone user, academic, installation visitor, and student. Developed from these projects, I have come to recognize the deeply enmeshed relationship between theoretical intention and a system’s design. Although ideology always permeates both, the level of self-reflexivity varies.

In my work, I am most interested in pushing on what seems to elude representation in, and yet is built into, a system of feeling. As I continue with my studies, I plan to pursue the question of how registers of science fiction, fantasy, and imagination be used to destabilize the ontological underpinnings that form systems of categorization and organization. This pursuit is animated by many theoretical trajectories, specifically studies of racial formation, and its intersections with gender, sexuality, technology, and labor; historiographies of digital media; along with studies of affect and pathology. As I move forward in the program, I aim to expand my own conceptions of systems by creating one that self-reflexively engages with its own mechanics and workings, defined on many levels—technological, philosophical, affective, and historical.

This portfolio details the projects that have influenced my development as an iMAP student. Being a member of the first cohort of the program, I have tried to take seriously the responsibility to experiment with the program’s possible shapes. As the program grows, a willingness to experiment and explore new forms and practices on the part of its students remains paramount to its success and lasting relevance. In representing the program, I consider it just as important to bring disciplinary openness, flexibility, and intellectual rigor to conference organizing and the classroom, as it is to other professional venues. It’s for these reasons that I list conference organizing, research groups, and teaching experience, alongside projects.

---

I. Collaborative Projects

In the field of Digital Media Arts and Practice, collaboration is pivotal. The issue of collaboration permeates the many genres and aspects of digital media, ranging from everyday interactions of sharing within personal networks to institutional collaborations that make programs like iMAP possible. As I’ve moved from a model of solitary effort prevalent in the humanities towards these practices of collective work, I’ve learned a lot about the benefits and struggles of “working together.” The projects described below were products of collaboration – and would have been impossible without its processes. Along with discovering the benefits of collaborative work, these projects also show my development in thinking through interactive design. In designing Cuerpo y Luz, we (Andrea Rodriguez and myself) aimed for an immersive experience – and found the most poignant moments of immersion to be the interactions in which the players felt the system to be most responsive to their movements. How can we, as designers, achieve a balance between arguments that explore serious issues regarding gender, beauty, identity and performance and compelling interactivity? For Meet the Middletons, the players’ creative contributions are central to the play experience; as players construct a story, ideology is also implicated and forged.

---

Meet the Middletons

Meet the Middletons (aka The Middletons Break Loose) is an interactive, multiplayer storytelling game. During the game, players collectively build a story. At her turn, each individual player selects a small movie clip and word, the word is accompanied by a soundtrack; with these audio-visual assets, the player contributes her own unique unit of the story, while reciting contributions from the other players that preceded their own part of the story. For this prototype, the experimental tale focused on an American family attending the New York’s World Fair in 1939. The game was a collaborative final project created by Lauren Fenton, Susana Ruiz, and myself – it was designed for Tracy Fullerton’s Design for Interactive Media course (CTIN 541). The game explores group play, narrative and interactive storytelling. Read More

 

---

Cuerpo y Luz (body + light)

Cuerpo y Luz is a cinematic / immersive/ interactive dance installation that incorporates high-definition video production, music composition, choreography and interactivity to explore ruptures in femininity, movement, identity and performance. Cuerpo y Luz was a collaborative project between Interactive Media (IMD) alumna, Andrea Rodriguez, created in Mike Patterson’s Experimental Animation course (CTIN 495). The piece used the exhibition space of the 14-screened Zemeckis Media Lab to provide players with a different kind of audio-visual experience. Questioning the comfortable consumption of female bodies in visual technologies, the piece incited uneasiness in its viewers/ users, coupling experimental, enigmatic dance movements with imagery of performed elegance and grace. Our ultimate goal was to have our audience members, young and old, experience new movement through the vividly personal, yet public, space of the interactive installation. The questions that animate Cuerpo y Luz, along with the learned importance of strong collaborative relationships, continue to deeply influence and shape my current research. Read More

 

---

II. Conference/ Event Organizing

My first foray into event organizing was part of a research assignment. I worked with a group of SCA faculty, collaboratively designing, planning, and coordinating TransFormations — a series of workshops, screenings, speakers, and performances organized into four sets of weekend-long events. I took lessons learned from that experience to co-found the first Critical Studies Graduate Student Conference in 2007 with ZdC. I returned to conference organizing in 2009 with Translating Media, unlike Deaths of Cinema, this was a collaboration between Critical Studies and iMAP students. As I move forward, I aim to rethink the very tools and protocols of the conference. What other possibilities are there for the academic event, panel, and conference? Many of these conferences and events sought to bring voices of the humanities, the arts, and the sciences into dialogue. Though the traditional conference still produces extremely relevant conversations,  how can we experiment with the very terms of their practices of discourse? With the development of BarCamp and “unconferences,” more models are popping up for iMAP students to consider.

 

---

Translating Media

Translating Media brought together SCA PhD students from iMAP and Critical Studies in order to organize a conference that addressed the mix of theory and practice increasingly prevalent in the work of the School of Cinematic Arts’ graduate students. It addressed the themes of expression in different visual and digital media, while also raising issues of translation, language, and global media. I was primarily responsible for organizing and scheduling the screening and discussion of Julia Meltzer and David Thorne’s media work and documentary in progress.

Conference Description The organizers chose “Translating Media” as the title of this conference in order to foreground translation as a contemporary and ongoing process. However, we also believe the title speaks to the crucial importance we feel, especially as graduate students and as potential intellectual and creative vanguards, in understanding our own methodological, institutional, and ethical positionality at this critical junction, however small or wide our current and future reader- and viewerships. Conference Website

---

TransFormations

TransFormations consisted of four different sets of workshops, panels, and screenings. As event coordinator, I worked with the organizing committee of faculty — SCA faculty members Perry Hoberman, Steve Anderson, Anne Balsamo, Anne Friedberg, Richard Weinberg and Michael Naimark; Alice Gambrell (English); Douglas Thomas (communication); and Holly Willis (fine arts). The four set of events were: Remixing the Archive, The Perception of Perception, Fiction Science, Distributed Realities. In organizing TransFormations, I scheduled visits with art galleries around the city; arranged travel, lodging, and honoraria for conference presenters and guests; organized outdoor screenings; worked closely with venues and vendors in the USC area; and contributed to programming decisions.

Series Description In today’s data-saturated and digitally mediated world, questions of how we perceive and know the world around us have taken on a new urgency. Our ideas and experience are formed by our perception of the world. How have these perceptions been shaped through past and newly-emerging media technologies?

---

Deaths of Cinema

As the 2007 Academic Chair for ZdC (Critical Studies graduate student group), I was a key organizer for the Deaths of Cinema conference. I was responsible primarily for organizing the screening and discussion of Janie Geiser’s work. After the conference, I also co-wrote an Introduction to the special issue of Spectator edited from the conference’s papers. Download Intro

Conference Description Deaths of Cinema engages cinematic death in a more polyvalent sense—as an overlapping and intersecting series of historical, methodological, and disciplinary concerns developing around issues of medium specificity, political economy, industry and consumer practices, and formal and textual analysis. Conference Website

---

III. Research + Research Groups
Just as the other categories in this portfolio emphasize collaboration, these research groups have encouraged my privileging of sharing knowledge. My involvement with these groups has provided me with different perspectives on the possibilities of scholarly discourse. All of these projects push on what it means to participate in knowledge communities. Mobile Voices combines aspects of community activism and organizing with communications theory and technology; Critical Commons makes space in the academy to practice media activism in the classroom; HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) Scholars forge an engaged practice for graduate students, filling the role of “Citizen Journalists” engaging with the latest issues in digital humanities; Popular Music Project takes popular music seriously, while widening the field for discussing the popular.

 

---

HASTAC Scholars

Being a part of the first cohort of HASTAC scholars in 2007-2008, I led a forum on Fair Use and the Critical Commons project. I also acted as a HASTAC Scholar blogger for the 3rd annual HASTAC Conference, Traversing Digital Boundaries, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. Click here for my HASTAC page

Project Description HASTAC was created to look toward the future of higher education in a digital age, and it is in keeping with that vision that we turn to students today those who are most engaged in participatory learning to be the eyes and ears of HASTAC. In the wake of the crisis facing traditional news media, the HASTAC Scholars are “Citizen Journalists” exploring the next-generation possibilities for intellectual dialogue imaginable through digital technology. Visit site

---

 

Critical Commons

 

Research Assistant In the Summer of 2009 I contributed commentaries and video uploads to the Critical Commons project. I also demonstrated the website for some SCA and College faculty members, while also performing some administrative tasks for CC. I feel strongly about this project and its possibilities for educators, and also for the oppportunities it presents for intellectual generosity outside of academic boundaries.

Project Description Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments. Visit project

---

Vóces Moviles/ Mobile Voices

 

Volunteer In the Fall of 2009, I began volunteering for the Mobile Voices project. The project is currently opening up to more collaborations (with Southern California Library and Los Angeles Community Action Network in downtown LA) and affords many opportunities for considering questions of community activism, mobile technologies, and media representation. One of the project’s aims is to dispel stereotypes of underrepresented immigrant workers with different types of media representation. I look forward to contributing more to the research team, and to the project at large, in this upcoming semester.

Project Description VÓCES MOVILES/ MOBILE VOICES is a university-community partnership between the University of Southern California and IDEPSCA (Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California) that connects low-wage immigrant day laborers in Los Angeles with popular communication practitioners, university researchers, and open source software developers. Together, they design, deploy and use a low-cost, mobile, multimedia platform that promotes everyday sharing and dialogue. Through Voces Móviles, immigrant workers become citizen journalists, sharing, creating, and publishing multimedia stories directly from their mobile phones. These stories represent their own experiences, perspectives, and ideas. Voces Móviles allows other communities to create their own storytelling networks so that future uses of the platform may expand the possibilities of collaboration, dialogue and cultural understanding. Visit project

---

Designing Culture — Women of the World Talk Back

 

Final Project Producer My tasks as final project producer included updating a project first developed in 1995, making it functional for more recent operating systems. The interactive documentary on DVD is a component of Anne Balsamo’s forthcoming book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke, 2010).

WotWTB Project Description Women of the World Talk Back is an interactive multimedia documentary first created in 1995 by Anne Balsamo and Mary Hocks, in collaboration with students from Georgia Tech, for presentation at the NGO Forum and the Fourth UN World Conference on Women held in August and September in China. Twelve students, faculty, and staff from Georgia Tech participated as an official delegation to the NGO Forum.

---

IV. Teaching Experience
I began working as a Teaching Assistant in the Fall of 2008. Having worked as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy for years preceding this assignment, I was excited to finally enter the multimedia classroom. In my first semester I TA’ed for Nancy Lutkehaus’s ANTH 235 General Education course on the cultures of the “Changing Pacific,” class time was fashioned in a relatively traditional format – students were required to attend lab every week. The content of the lab and the final project assignment did require that students learn new technologies and techniques, video editing, and involved their scholarship to take a new form, documentary. In the classes that I’ve more recently worked with, the pedagogical approaches have become experimental and flexible. In these teaching situations, for the Multimedia Across the College program, I’ve had the opportunity to TA for more classes and in very different scenarios, below I profile two of those courses. In my experiences with these classes, I’ve found that a willingness of experimentation from all parties involved – professors, students, teaching assistants – is required. As Randy Bass has put it, “Our ability to make the best use of any technologies to improve education hinges ultimately on the reciprocal capacities to bring our powers of inquiry to bear on educational technologies, as well as to bring the power of new technologies to bear on our methods of inquiry and our representation of knowledge about teaching practice.” Click here for rest of Bass essay

 

---

COLT 357: The Avant-Garde

 

Prof. Gloria Orenstein, Fall 2009

 

Teaching Assistant, course taught by Gloria Orenstein Comparative Literature 357 focused on the historic, artistic Avant-Garde. Throughout the course there was an emphasis on sound art, as well as visual media. Students came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and majors, this diversity was reflected in their student’s final projects. In the multimedia component of this class, we focused on the possibilities for specifically digital expression in experimental media. This emphasis on the contemporary excited the students and made the topic of the avant-garde relevant and immediate for their artistic expression.

Class Description This course will explore various manifestations of avant-garde and experimental literature, art, and mixed-media performance in the twentieth century.  We will study or interact with Cubism, Futurism (Italian and Russian), Dada, Surrealism, The Absurd, Fluxus.  Some of the genres we will focus on will include manifestos, sound poetry, theatre, the novel, film, Happenings and other mixed-media art forms.  We will also peruse such propositions as Oulipo and Situationism.

---

AMST 449: The Celluloid Asian | Asian Americans and Filmic Representation

Prof. Jane Iwamura, Spring 2009

Teaching Assistant, course taught by Jane Iwamura
This course is cross listed in the departments of American Studies and English, it examines the politics of representation in films by and about Asian Americans. For the multimedia midterm assignment, students of the class analyzed the 2002 film Better Luck Tomorrow (dir. Justin Lin) using voice-over narration, video editing techniques and effects. With these video essays, students were able to create insightful arguments in the medium that they analyzed throughout the semester, that of moving image. As the course aims to investigate “how Asian American filmmakers subvert one-dimensional portrayals and use film to tell a story all their own,” students also learned to express their own point of view through editing. AMST/ ENGL 449 Midterm Projects

 

 

---

V. Conference Presentations + Participation

 

---

SCMS Conference 2007

SCMS, Spring 2007

 

Panel Title – Rethinking the Physical: Body and Space in Digital Media, Acted as Panel Chair
Paper Title – “The Chinese Gold Farmer as Disruptive, Laboring Body in the Network”
Short Abstract: The Chinese Gold Farmer is a figure of disruption in existing networks of play. Being a racialized figure, the Chinese Gold Farmer also references a racially coded and regionally specific, exploited labor force. By working in virtual spaces specifically structured for leisure, the Gold Farmer acts as a reminder of real world economic conditions and markets. Edward Castronova, a leading analyst of virtual game economies, observes about this network of online games, “the synthetic world is something of an instantly globalized labor market.” Castronova reads effects of this “globalized labor market,” specifically cheap, exploited labor, as destructive to virtual economies.

---

 

Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT) III

SECT III, Summer 2006

 

TechnoSpheres/FutureS of Thinking
August 14-25, 2006 | University of California Humanities Research Institute
Convener: Anne Balsamo

Role: Attendee, Workshop Presenter, Assistant Coordinator For SECT III, I led a workshop on social bookmarking. I was also involved with various coordinating tasks to organize the seminar. This was a very important seminar for my early development as a digital media scholar-practitioner.
Description Participants in the 2006 Seminar explored new ways of thinking about and with technology. The Seminar included paired conversations between cutting edge technological innovators and experimental humanists, artists and social scientists, around the many issues that engage the human and the technological. The Seminar also included demonstrations of new technological devices, their applications and scholarly practices. Participants had opportunities to engage with new digital applications in the context of small-group workshops, large-group social networking exercises and art/technology installations. Visit archive

---

Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT) V

SECT V, Summer 2008

 

Creative Societies/Cultural Industries/New Humanities? August 11-22, 2008 | University of California Humanities Research Institute
Convener: Toby Miller

Role: Attendee

Description: The study of culture—of the significance, meaning, and value of its various expressions and products—has traditionally been the domain of the humanities. With the elevation of culture to industry, and of creative institutions to the mainstay of urban and regional economic activity and social arrangements, it is time to ask whether the emergence of cultural industries generates a new humanities. What new cultural comprehension and interdisciplinary tools of analysis are necessary to address the modes of conception, production, marketing and dissemination of cultural industries: their regional variety, reduction to consumer products, impacts on cities and societies; the unequal cultural exchange across the globe; and the working conditions facing those in the creative sector? What professional possibilities and responsibilities today face the humanities in engaging these recent developments? And what are the likely impacts on the humanities yet to come? Visit seminar’s website

---

VI. Developing Themes
In this section, I explore themes I am considering for the long-term project.

---

 

Stored in Broadway’s Theaters

LA's Broadway, Fall 2007

Early in the twentieth century, cinema was quite alive and at home in downtown’s spaces, to this day its theaters’ marquees still light the city’s streets. Cinema’s theaters still line Broadway between Third Street and Olympic Boulevard and now comprise the city’s Historic Theater District. And though marquee bulbs still flicker and neon still shines on Broadway, they no longer signify newsreels, performances or even second-run late-night cinema features. The vibrant screens that once displayed projections of the American imagination now remain silent and blank (if they remain standing at all), housed in abandoned or converted real estate. Read More