Manovich’s focus on the integration of film history and technique into new media theory provided me with a way to present my course material in an interactive manner that draws students directly into the central concerns of our field. Because I believe praxis is essential in engaging students by asking them to actually create a new technology or a new process from the inside (instead of learning to only critique the completed work of someone else), I decided to take Manovich’s ideas a good deal further by asking my students to invent a new form of cinema. For the last year and a half I have asked students to bring film and new media technology development to the next level as we work to create a next generation theater, a holodeck of sorts, that now has students thinking of themselves as next generation film makers and as new media information designers.
The project students have been working on is called the Lumiere Ghosting Project, and the new media, immersive theater they are designing is called the CompuObscura. The poetic conceit that draws the entire work together is the human fascination with the unseen which has often been presented in theater, poetry, prose, photography, and film through the image of the ghost. In many ways, for a year and a half now, our students and faculty have been working on a sophisticated but deceptively simple haunted house.
This essay or hypertext cluster is actually three separate essays combined into one interconnected hypertext work.
The first essay in this hypertext
cluster introduces readers to the histories
(personal and social) that support this ongoing pedagogy
project. I begin this section of the essay (Inspiration)
by discussing what I learned about teaching by running
a small English language and culture school in the countryside
outside of Osaka, Japan.
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