|
Articles Conference Reviews |
200767SayersSession 6.7: Digital Media Studies in Detroit
Marshall Kitchens, Cynthia Gauthier, Joe Paszek, and Meghan Tonjes (University of Detroit Mercy) In this session, three students and one instructor addressed two primary questions: “What are the challenges and benefits of asking students to engage with urban environments through digital media? What role do design and theory play for these students who are composing with New Media?” Marshall Kitchens, Introduction and Instructor’s Perspective Kitchens began the session by providing some background on digital media studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, in general, and on an upper level design lab course at the university, in particular. In terms of computers and composition, Kitchens’s approach to the design lab relied heavily on students linking language and New Media with the production of their own archive and their own lines of inquiry. In the course, students conducted a lengthy period of field work (approximately eight weeks) and used a variety of computer software, including Dreamweaver, Premier, Final Cut, Photoshop, and PowerPoint. The goal of the course was to have students think through New Media, theory, and interactions with urban publics in order to compose final projects on aspects of and perspectives on Detroit. Rather than speaking for the students in his course, Kitchens gave three of them the opportunity to showcase their work at Computers and Composition 2007. Cynthia Gauthier on the People Mover in Downtown Detroit Gauthier presented her hypertext project on the People Mover, a local rail system in downtown Detroit, by unpacking and reflecting upon her approach to digital composition. She began with a brief survey of her field work, which largely consisted of riding the Detroit People Mover and documenting her engagements with the Mover in a multimodal fashion. Gauthier not only conversed with people who rode the Mover; she also captured her trips through audio-visual recordings. In fact, of all the forms of documentation that Gauthier employed, her use of video was perhaps the most intriguing. Since the Detroit People Mover is automated, one of Gauthier’s challenges was communicating with its staff. Responding to this challenge, Gauthier chose to depict the nearly faceless repetitions and everyday routines of the Mover, instead of relying upon “official” and authoritative guides. These repetitions and routines, however, were delivered in a manner that was anything but banal or quotidian. Foregrounded by an aesthetic of sound and driven by her first-person perspective, the hypertextual design of Gauthier’s project did more than represent the Detroit People Mover. Indeed, it put New Media and theory to convincing use, allowing the audience to easily imagine a typical trip around Detroit that might have otherwise been elided from popular media and promotions. Meghan Tonjes on a Recent Immigrant’s Perspective on Detroit Tonjes’s project delivered a number of insightful, intermediated interpretations of an urban environment from the vantage of a university student who recently immigrated to Detroit from Bosnia. As with Gauthier’s video of the Detroit People Mover, the audio features of Tonjes’s work were striking. Tonjes used a web-based approach, parsing a digital interview with the student into several parts for her audience. Here, Tonjes’s method and the student’s reading of the city intersected in engaging ways. Tonjes mentioned that she respected her interviewee’s reluctance to be photographed for the project. Consequently, she used a predominantly visual medium in the service of sound. Through Tonjes’s project, the audience had the opportunity to really hear the interviewee articulate her shift from a war-torn country to Detroit. And although the audience might have expected negative views on and depictions of Detroit, views which are apparently rather familiar to the people of Detroit, Tonjes’s project was a subtly theoretical navigation through the complexities of space, place, and perspective. Her analysis rendered her interviewee’s take on Detroit neither dystopian nor utopian. Moreover, it demonstrated the ways through which students use New Media to enrich both the content and design of their arguments. Joe Paszek on Detroit’s Bookies Club 870 Paszek discussed his digital video on Bookies Club 870, a now defunct Detroit gay bar and punk club, by stressing his field work, methodology, and personal interests in New Media. Paszek’s video (which can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hJppjKY6X0) couples an audio-visual argument about Detroit’s past with a simultaneous textual commentary on Detroit culture. As Paszek explained his approach to the project, it became clear that he was invested in historicizing and capturing a largely ignored aspect of Detroit, while also theorizing it. Bookies Club 870, as both a gay bar and a punk club, became a metonymy for dualistic Detroit. These very dualities were present in the design of Paszek’s video, which is often split-screen and equally as sonic as it is visual. In the context of Gauthier’s and Tonjes’s projects, Paszek’s work is also an impressive combination of the virtual and the urban. Whatever anxieties these students may have had during their field work or while learning new software were certainly sidelined in light of the compositions they showcased at Computers and Writing 2007. Each of these student projects gives instructors all the more incentive to include undergraduates not only as co-presenters at conferences, but also as peers in research and composition.
Comments? |