TEACHING:
AN INTRODUCTION TO SANDY STONE'S PEDAGOGY

Primary areas of interest include:

New Media production, video production, performance, installation, gender and sexuality with emphasis on Transgender, and fantasy/science fiction.  All my current work involves making stuff, though inevitably the stuff is theory-laden.

Secondary areas of interest include:



The courses I teach

There are twelve ACTLab New Media courses, and I and our special guests and professional practitioners teach two of them per semester. Each is a combination of theory and making, with emphasis on making.  Ideally, six of the twelve courses make up a rich New Media sequence in which we cover almost everything we think you need to know in order to be a transdisciplinary practitioner in New Media production and studies, or what's increasingly called New Media Art. You'll find suggestions for a complete New Media course of study on the ACTLab courses page. Although the topic names are fixed, actual course content changes each semester, so you may take a course with the same name more than once. All the courses involve elements of boundary transgression, epistemic rupture, and play.  In no particular order, the complete current list is:

Dream / Delirium: Action in the boundaries between waking and dreaming; dream as discovery, adventure, and danger; secondarily, the passage from macro physics to quantum mechanics as a metaphorical hinge between rationality and delirium.

Extreme Freestyle Hacking:  Culture hacking, gene hacking, mashup, detournement, circuit bending, and plain ol' computer code. How far can you bend it before it breaks?

Trans:  Dangerous border violations. Transformation and change, boundary theory, transgender, gender and sexuality in the large and its relation to positionality and flow; identity.

Weird Science:  Social and anthropological studies of innovation, the boundaries between "legitimate" science and fakery, monsters and the monstrous, physics, religion, legitimation, charlatanism, informatics of domination.

Blackbox:  How facts become and how things mean. Closure, multiplicity, theories of discourse formation, studies and practices of innovation, language.

PostModern Gothic:  Monsters, desire, and epistemic rupture.  Theories and histories of the gothic, modern goth, vampires, monsters and the monstrous, genetic engineering, gender and sexuality, delirium, postmodernity, cyborgs.

Death:  Cultural attitudes toward death, cultural definitions of death, political battles over death, cultural concepts of the afterworld, social and critical studies of mediumship, "ghosts" and spirits, zombies in film and folklore; the spectrum of death, which is to say not very dead, barely dead, almost dead, all but dead, brain dead, completely dead, and undead.

Performance (Taking It to the Street):  Practicum in culture hacking with a documentary component. Performance and the performative, performance as political intervention, history and theory of theatre, masks, puppetry, spectacle, ritual, street theatre.

The Uncanny (New for Fall 2008):  Things, situations, sounds, and discourses that give you the creeps. Beginning with Freud's theory of the "Unheimlich", the Uncanny Valley effect in extreme digital animation, Nineteenth Century fascination with spirit communication, and technology in science fiction/fictions of science, we'll study and practice making things that evoke that sense of something hovering just beyond comprehension.