Module: CME5000-20 - Everyday Media Making

Level: 5

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor: Richard White

Module Tutor Contact Details: R.White2@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module:

Everyday Media Making is a practical and critical exploration of creative motivation and content production as social practice. The module enables students to develop their creative voices in the context of media making, doing and connecting. Supporting progression into Creative Media Level 6, students apply and extend production skills developing a diversity of personal/professional attributes essential for successful progression.

Everyday Media Making explores the premise that media making can:

• empower people through connecting

• expose, challenge and critique dominant cultures

• provoke different ways of thinking/seeing

• embody participatory practices

Taking inspiration from the activist DIY Media, Maker, Hacktivist, Craftivist, socially engaged and iconoclastic art movements of the past 100 years, this module encourages thinking beyond the typical limits of mainstream media content and production.

The starting point for this module is that media making should no longer be treated as a special case or an extraordinary activity. As David Gauntlett argues in Making is Connecting (Polity 2018), ‘we are seeing a shift from a ‘sit-back- and-be- told culture’ to a ‘making-and-doing culture’ ’. This spirit is manifested in networks and tendencies from craftivism and eco-activism to networks such as Wikileaks, Adbusters, XR and Black Lives Matter, all using everyday media to challenge the dominant Read Only culture.

2.Outline syllabus

Following an exploration of the work of scholars such as Gauntlett, Freire and Robinson and some contextual consideration of art movements and creative social action from Dada to the Situationists and the post Occupy movements students are encouraged to consider how they might harness everyday media arts, crafts and tools to share ideas, ask questions, create and discover connections.

Central concerns for this module are:

• play, experimentation and learning: iteration, failure and reflection

• connecting through making: demystifying the processes of production;

• broadening students range of tools and creative strategies

• globalized consumer culture, ‘the Spectacle’

• interventions and provocations

Example projects and areas of activity include:

• socially-engaged media making or ‘craftivism’: e.g. physically making and displaying a cabinet of ‘craftivist’ curiousities;

• performative challenges, pop-ups and provocations exploring identity and space: e.g. revealing the limits of public space by busking the ‘unbuskable’;

• subverting advertising and marketing materials in order to challenge their ‘preferred’ readings: e.g. ‘detourned’ cosmetic packaging to reveal concealed animal testing

3.Teaching and learning activities

The module is organised around a series of lectures, workshops and maker lab sessions. Each session begins with a structured input setting the scene. Workshop activity follows students work in groups and on their own. Lectures introduce the key topics, concepts and debates that frame and inform making activity – e.g. contemporary debates and challenges to mainstream, western consumer society, socially-engaged making, craftivism, making and connecting. By exploring examples of everyday, DIY, and experimental media making, these sessions begin to highlight the range of media, tools and forms of creative expression available.

Lectures and seminar discussions will be supported by the use of appropriate audio and visual material; background reading in books, on line and across a range of media forms. These, and additional resources to encourage debate and research both within and outside the classroom, will be made available through the online learning environment and in classes.

Workshops will feature discussion and analysis of issues raised in the lecture; review, evaluation, and exploration of the week’s course reading material; provide space for discussion and critique of students ongoing research and media making.

Research projects will be negotiated and respond to student interests, personal development plans, and contemporary social, cultural, political and economic issues.

Following the intent of the Maker movement, the module allows students to take control of their own learning by taking ownership of projects they have not only designed but also defined. In collaboration with the tutor, students devise an individual creative project broadly responding to those central concerns. This will either be presented, or documentation from the project shown, in exhibition at the end of the module.

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: Course Work

• Description: Independent Creative Media Project (2500 words equivalent)

• % Weighting: 50%

Assessment Item 2:

• Assessment Type: Course Work

• Description: Media Making Portfolio (2500 words equivalent)

• % Weighting: 50%