The Department of Media Study is an experimental media arts program committed to providing both graduate and undergraduate students a community in which they can develop their own voice as artists. Students can take courses in a wide array of research areas including independent film and video, documentary forms, sound, electronic poetry, digital poetics, media robotics, media urbanism, social computational media, locative media, performance, story and game. A wide offering of film and media history, theory and criticism courses complements the production curriculum which blends practice and theory. We give students the flexibility both to work in these areas and to combine them in unexpected ways. We are also guided by Marshall McLuhan’s observation that ‘media’ comes from the Latin word for ‘public’ and that media are inherently social. We believe that media making should be aware of its cultural and theoretical assumptions and be prepared to challenge these assumptions. This department is strongly linked to artistic practices and conversations in the departments of Anthropology, Architecture, Art, Comparative Literature, English, Music, Theatre and Dance and the Center for the Americas. In addition, we participate in an interdisciplinary program in Film Studies. We encourage our students to combine their work in this department with study in other disciplines.
The following list offers a point from which to begin exploring the research areas of individual faculty:
Josephine Anstey – Associate Professor
Marc Böhlen – Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
My practice queries issues at the edges of accepted scholarly-engineering practices. It investigates areas the engineering fields do not ‘see’ and the humanities can not ‘touch’. It identifies and invents problems not necessarily recognized as such and devises objects, systems and situations by which to explore them. There are three main research areas into which the activities fall: speculative robotics, numeracy and the public realm.
Speculative robotics query automation systems for their capacity to imagine and make ‘the unlikely’. Numeracy seeks new subcultures that give numbers agency in the age of big data. The public realm, finally, considers the potential of adaptive ambient systems to reinvigorate public life.
keywords: speculative robotics, ambient informatics, numeracy, the public realm, mixed methods research
Elliot Caplan – Professor and Artistic Director, Center for the Moving Image
Tony Conrad – Professor
Sarah Elder – Professor
Loss Pequeño Glazier – Associate Professor
David Pape – Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies
Roy Roussel – Professor, Department Chair and Director of Film Studies
Teri Rueb – Professor
My practice unfolds in the extended fields of mobile media, sound, land and environmental art, and landscape and cultural studies. I create site-specific public installations and writings that traverse the various terrains of media, landscape, architecture, urbanism, and sonic and acoustic space. I recently earned a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design where my research focused on constructions of wilderness and subjectivity in mobile network society. I am also founder and director of Open Air Institute, a platform for connecting field-based learning and collaborative partnerships at the intersection of landscape, technology, media art and community-based design. Email me.
Keywords: sound, critical spatial practices, landscape, architecture, urbanism, interaction, mobile media, networks, collaboration, theory
Mark Shepard – Assistant Professor
My work addresses new social spaces and signifying structures of contemporary network culture. Current research investigates the implications of mobile and pervasive media, communication and information technologies for architecture and urbanism. This work has been presented at museums, festivals and arts events internationally. I recently edited Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space, published by the Architectural League of New York and MIT Press, which was based on an exhibition I curated at the Urban Center in New York. I hold a joint appointment with the Department of Architecture, where I co-direct the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies.
Keywords: architecture, urbanism, sentient systems, critical spatial practice, locative media, urban computing, ambient informatics, embodied interaction, participatory structures, networked collaboration
http://cast.ap.buffalo.edu
www.andinc.org
www.situatedtechnologies.net
survival.sentientcity.n
Vibeke Sorensen – Professor