Programme

Teacher(s):
Dr. Markus Spöhrer  (Universität Konstanz)
PhD Kelly Boudreau (Brunel University London)
Marleena Huuhka (University of Tampere)
M.A. Philipp Fust (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig)

SWS: equalling 2 (total number of hours 24)

Credits: 6

Number of places: 15

Language: English

Credit requirements: Small group project (3 ECTS) and a short final paper (3 ECTS)

Digital games (or video games) have become a global phenomenon during the last decades, some of them produced and distributed with considerably high budgets and marketing efforts. Not only do video games form and are formed by heterogeneous gaming (sub-)cultures and practices, they can also be characterized as specific ‘media’ with distinct characteristics and medial logics.

But video games have not only been successful in terms of economic results and pop cultural appeal, they have also become the focus of various academic fields, subsumed under the label ‘Game Studies’. However, this implies neither that there is a consistent definition of what gaming or playing in a digital context means nor that digital gaming has been approached, described and analyzed by applying a unified theory or method.

On the contrary: games and gaming have been productively researched by a multitude of heterogeneous fields of study (such as for example sociology, cultural studies, narratology and media studies) and on the premises of various theoretical and methodological concepts.

This course is designed to both introduce students to the multilayered field of game studies and to expand the canon of video game research by new approaches to digital gaming. This means that we intend to introduce, discuss and expand such approaches as narratology, discourse analysis or cultural practices or concepts such as for ‘immersion’, ‘interactivity’, ‘technology’ and ‘interface’. But we also would like to investigate and apply new (or disregarded) approaches such as for example ‘performance theory’ or theories from science and technology studies and media theory.

Teacher(s):
Veronika Pöhnl, M.A. (Universität Konstanz)
Ass. Prof. Liliana Albertazzi (Universitá degli studi di Trento)
PhD Alexandra Supper (Universiteit Maastricht)

SWS: equalling 2 (total number of hours 24)

Credits: 6

Number of places: 15

Language: English

Credit requirements: Small group project (3 ECTS) and a short final paper (3 ECTS)

Looking at everyday public events it is easy to comprehend that “facts” highly depend on the way they are represented in media (and medial practices). Beyond that, media are understood as something that doesn’t just “depict” an outside reality, but rather creates events, facts and knowledge. Science is often readily contrasted to such an argument: Nature provided facts that only needed to be uncovered by the competent scientist and those facts were independent of any social, cultural, historical or medial conditions. However, this “common” or “everyday” assumption has been challenged for decades by Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Philosophy of Science by showing the role of political, socio-cultural and historical influences on scientific research. Recently, the production of scientific knowledge has also received attention in Media Studies. By approaching scientific practices and representations by use of media and art theories, scientific representations like graphs, diagrams, mathematical formulae have been analyzed and questioned regarding their medial conditions. Also, media such as microscopy, electroencephalography or sonification have been researched as techniques and practices that play a constitutive role in the production of scientific knowledge.

The course is designed to both introduce students to concepts, theories and methods of researching the auditory and visual production and distribution of scientific knowledge and to offer and discuss related case studies.

Credit requirements: Small group project (3 ECTS) and a short final paper (3 ECTS).

Teacher(s):
Ass. Prof. Pauline Chevalier (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon)
Ass. Prof. Hélène Valance (Université de Franche-Comté, Montbéliard)

SWS: equalling 2 (total number of hours 24)

Credits: 6

Number of places: 15

Language: English

Credit requirements: Small group project (3 ECTS) and a short final paper (3 ECTS)

As digital information networks developed exponentially during the 1990s, one of their main concerns was the circulation of knowledge. Museums, as institutions dedicated to the preservation and display of cultural and historical heritages and collections, rapidly joined the movement: in France, as early as 1994, the Musée des Arts et Métiers made part of its collections available online, while the Ministry of Culture’s website offered a virtual exhibition dedicated to the “Enlightenment  Age” gathering no less than eighteen museums.¹ The same year, the Museum of the History of science in Oxford launched an online exhibition entitled “The Measurers: A Flemish Image of Mathematics in the Sixteenth  Century.”² 

Today, most national and international museums offer online exhibitions, virtual tours, and access to digitized collections. Yet the multiplicity of terms such as “Virtual museum,” “online galleries,” or “online collections” illustrates the variety of projects and the complexity of their ambitions. While contemporary exhibition design tends to highlight the necessity of a sensorial, physical, and spatial approach to knowledge, the multiplicity of online exhibition models interrogates the very practice of exhibiting. Can online shows participate in the new trends affecting exhibition design today? What equivalent can they provide to the “symbolical space” which “organizes the spaces dedicated to the visit,” structures the discourse through the staging of contents, and generally constitutes one of the major characteristics of knowledge transmission in museums?

The main objective of online exhibitions is not to adapt a physical visit or a catalogue for the Internet, but rather to design a specific mode of knowledge circulation using all the resources of the medium.³ Videos, oral archives, or the spaces dedicated to visitors’ contributions are as many ways to redefine exhibitions through the Internet. Online exhibitions are, for instance, often used by historical museums and sites, because they offer a unique way to study and share non-material heritages. But if online exhibitions are a new approach to the object, they are also a new approach to knowledge⁴ and memory, allowing for new uses of sources, new relationships between different mediums, and new “visitor” experiences, developed along non-linear paths⁵  and in a transformed temporality.

This seminar will explore the history and meanings of the online exhibition,  as well  as its practical dimensions. We will examine the variety of technical tools available for institutions,  the methods and approaches developed through online exhibitions, their production cost, the types of experiences they provide, the way their contents are structured and the narratives and interpretations they offer to their audiences – in short, we will demonstrate how online exhibitions are elaborating a new exhibition language.

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Literature:

1. Cf Schafer V., Thierry B., Couillard N., « Les musées, acteurs sur le Web », in Lettre de l’OCIM, 142, July 2012.   
2. http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/measurer/text/title.htm
3. Desvallées A., Schärer M., Drouguet N., « Exposition. Regard et analyse », in Desvallées A., Mairesse F., Dictionnaire encyclopédique de muséologie, Paris, Armand Colin, 2011, p. 168.
4. Davallon J., L’exposition à l’œuvre, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2000, p. 113. 
5. McLuhan, M, Parker, H., Barzun, J, Exploration of the Ways, Means, and Values of Museum Communication with the Viewing Public, New York, Museum of the City of new York, 1969.