Courses / Undergraduate

Spring 2018

  • Special Topics in Film: After the Digital

    140-003 | CCN: 32628

    Jacob Gaboury

    4 Units

    This course will examine the influence of digital technology on contemporary film and visual media. Drawing on art history, cinema studies, architecture, and media studies we will historicize the radical shift brought about by digital technology while engaging in debates over our post-digital, post-internet, post-cinematic media culture. Rather than critique the supposed “newness” of new media, we will take seriously the claim that digital technology marks a radical break with earlier media forms, and that this transformation has had a profound influence on the way we view and understand the world around us. Ultimately we will ask what comes “after the digital” as a moment or period in the history of the media, while speculating on what might come after digitization is over, that is, at the end of the digital. The course includes weekly screenings and/or lab sessions where we will view, touch, and play a range of digital texts, including feature films by Walter Lang, Stanley Kubrick, James Cameron, and Michael Bay; experimental shorts by Lillian Schwartz, Takeshi Murata, Alan Warburton, and Hito Steyerl; technical demos from Xerox PARC and the Stanford Research Institute; interactive software including Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Cinema 4D; and digital games such as Dragon's Lair (1983), Doom (1993), Journey (2012), and Uncharted 4 (2016).