MRes in Filmmaking, Photography & Electronic Arts

Structure A personalised programme The programme is personalised for each student, and is based on your individual research into your chosen practice. It gives you the opportunity to develop appropriate research skills and to pursue a research practice project of your own design, developed and reworked in discussion with a personal supervisor. The curriculum is personalised for individual students, but all students will share a common curriculum and receive training and guidance in ethical and legal obligations, and be encouraged to accommodate feminist, anti-racist, decolonising and other appropriate approaches to their chosen subject. The course will add value to recent MA practice graduates and to film, photography and electronic arts professionals by giving a deeper and more specialised engagement in a major research project supervised by staff experienced in both creative and professional research. Research training will give you the skills to design and complete your own research and to work to research briefs. All students undertake the Practice-Based Research Methods Seminar in the first term, producing a detailed 5000 word project outline at the end. They will also take in the second term one of a selected range of optional modules to help develop their critical and theoretical awareness. In the first term, they begin work with their personal supervisor on the design and execution of their project. Supervision will determine the specific means used: some students will embark directly on a single piece of work; others may undertake a series of workshop-based activities. Aims The programme's subject-specific learning outcomes require you to think critically about a range of issues concerning the media, understood in the widest sense, and to be able to justify their views intellectually and practically. The central outcome will be to design and conduct a substantial practice-based research project. As appropriate to each individual project, you will be encouraged to analyse, contextualise, historicise, and theorise your chosen medium with reference to key debates in history, sociology, anthropology and philosophy of film and the media. You will learn to produce high quality research under time constraints, by working independently. All students will develop a range of transferable qualities and skills necessary for employment in related areas. These are described by the Quality Assurance Agency as: ‘the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility, decision-making in complex and unpredictable situations, and the independent learning ability required for continuing professional development’. You will be guided to work independently and to think through the intellectual issues. Progress is carefully monitored, to make sure that you are making progress towards the achievement of the outcomes. Different kinds of practical and intellectual skills are required for each part of the programme. In consultation with supervisors, you will be guided to the most appropriate practical and intellectual approaches, and to the most appropriate technical and critical sources. Structure You take the following modules: Practice-Based Research Methods (30 credits). This module provides research methods training for the MRes in Film Photography and Electronic Arts, and may be taken by practice-based students in the MPhil programme in Media and Communications. In all years it will address the legal and ethical constraints operating on research by practice. In any given year, the syllabus will address such topics as technique (colour, composition, editing, post-production, sound-image relations, text-image relations), anti-racist, feminist and decolonial critique; hardware and software studies; environmental impacts of media production, dissemination and exhibition; media critical approaches to art, political economy, and truth. The interests of students and supervisors will guide the selection of specific content of the course in its delivery, whose aim is to inculcate advanced thinking on the making, delivery and audiences for research-based practice. Indicative reading Ahmed, Sara (2014). Wilful Subjects, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Crook, Tim (2009). Comparative Media Law and Ethics. London: Routledge. Cubitt, Sean (2014). The Practice of Light. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Henriques, Julian et al (1998). Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. MacKenzie, Scott (ed) (2014). Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press.. Mulvey, Laura and Anna Backman Rogers (eds) (2015). Feminisms: Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam (2003). Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press. Research Project (120 credits). The project in the MRes Film, Photography and Electronic Arts comprises a portfolio of practical work (such as photographs, video, film, installation, websites or other digital/print material) alongside a textual component. The work submitted should be original, and be as integral to the research aims, processes and outcomes of the project as the textual component. The final project as a whole will therefore demonstrate the integration of its practical and research components, so that text and practice reflect critically on each other. The length of the textual element should normally be between 5,000 and 10,000 words. The practical component should be a ‘substantial’ body of work. Given the potential range of media that can be used, and their differing potential relationships with the research process and the textual component, it is impossible to be precise. In the case of film/video it would normally entail the submission of a work (or works) of about 25 minutes in length (or more), but detailed requirements will be worked out on a case-by-case basis. Students will undertake to design and conduct a substantial practice-based research project in collaboration with their supervisor. The project will be informed by research, as appropriate, into the materials, techniques and critical contexts of production, distribution and exhibition in audiovisual, electronic image and allied arts. As appropriate to each individual project, students will be encouraged to analyse, contextualise, historicise, and theorise their chosen medium with reference to key debates in history, sociology, anthropology and philosophy of film and the media, especially in relation to anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, environmental and other key ethical and political dimensions of their aesthetic practice. They will learn to produce high quality research under pressure, by working independently. The exact conceptual and methodological direction of the research must initially come from the student, though this will be developed and reworked in discussion with the personal supervisor. Areas of research can be drawn from a wide remit, including the full range of media and cultural forms of contemporary societies and may be theoretical or empirical; technically- or more academically-based. Projects which are conceptually coherent, and practicable in their aims and methods can be considered, subject only to the in-house expertise of staff. The module encourages the development of knowledge and skills specific to the production, distribution and exhibition of contemporary media. Indicative reading Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt (2014). Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts. London: IB Tauris.. Kellison, Cathrine, Dustin Morrow, Kacey Morrow (2012). Producing for TV and New Media, 3rd Edition. London: Focal Press.. Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinska (2012). Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.. Mignolo, Walter D (2011). The Darker Side of Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham NC: Duke University Press.. Modrak, Rebekah and Bill Anthes (2010). Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.. Rabiger, Michael (2014). Directing the Documentary. 6th Edition. London: Focal Press.. Shiva, Vanadana (2005). Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Brooklyn NY: South End Press.. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd edn. London: Zed Books.. Wells, Liz (ed) (2003). The Photography Reader. London: Routledge. You'll also take one option module during the spring term. Those currently available include: Module title Credits. Experimental Media Experimental Media 30 credits or 15 credits The moving image created a revolution in perception. It changed much more than the media: it opened new ways of seeing. Fairly quickly after about 1906, the standard forms of the modern cinema began to stabilise; just as later TV would stabilise around the half-hour segment and the 30-second advert. This module focuses on those who refused to settle down, and who continued the immense deregulation of perception inaugurated by the cinema in 1896. Between the industries of cinema, TV and digital on one side and art institutions on the other, generations of artists have worked in and on moving image technologies to offer alternative projections of the world. Sometimes personal, sometimes spiritual, sometimes political, this diverse body of work is both a treasury of advanced forms of creativity, and a storehouse of techniques and ways of thinking for new generations. Experimental Media will address moving image and other recording technologies to analyse the breadth and boundaries of what might be considered an experiment, in artistic, activist and popular forms of media production. Topics may include the idea of beauty, medium-specificity, abstraction, sound, time ‘poor’ and ‘imperfect’ cinema, DIY aesthetics, expanded media and installation works. 30 credits or 15 credits. Media Geographies Media Geographies 15 credits. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives (including cultural studiesand anthropology) this module will address the role of ‘tele’-technologies (technologies of distance - such as the telegraph, telephone, and television) in constructing the post-modern geography of the contemporary era, The module takes a non ‘media-centric’ perspective, focusing on the different. historical and cultural contexts within which these technologies operate and on the articulation of material and virtual geographies We begin by focusing on the ‘moral panics’ that have always accompanied each new medium - from the radio, to the cinema, etc. The module highlights the role of what we have come to know as ‘television’ - as the most important medium of the last half century, with a particular focus on its contexts and modes of consumption. The question of technological change will be approached from a historical perspective, for instance, in relation. to the late 19th century – as a period featuring a particularly rapid rate of technological change, compared with our own times. We shall review a range of micro-studies of the household (and public) uses of communications and information technologies, and the module will offer a critical approach to the futurological discourses concerning the supposed powers and effects of today’s ‘new’ communications technologies. We conclude by examining the role of various media (big and small) in processes of identity/boundary construction (at different geographical scales) within the broader context of processes of globalisation. We will also address the role of the media in articulating the private and public spheres, in the construction of national,. disaporic and transnational identities, and in relation to the various mobilities (not only of information, but also of people and commodities) that characterise our era of ‘time-space compression’. 15 credits. Technology and Cultural Form: Debates, Models, Dialogues Technology and Cultural Form: Debates, Models, Dialogues 30 credits This is the second core module in the MA in Digital Media: Technology and Cultural Form programme and it offers a series of debates, models and dialogues on the issue of technology and cultural form. The module is divided in two parts and in the first part it develops those questions of power, politics and subjectivity which were introduced in the first core module. In the context of the relation between technology and power we will explore issues of surveillance and control and globalisation. In the context of technology and politics we will investigate diasporas and the re-organisation of news journalism. And in the context of technology and subjectivity we will look at Foucault's notion of technologies of the self and at more recent work on posthumanism. This part of the module highlights the key conceptual concerns of a contextualised approach to digital media plus the relevant debates and models formulated by key figures such as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. The second part of the module consists of four sessions: nature/culture, systems, networks, spaces of flows. Here we offer a more abstract, creative and dialogic analysis of some of the ideas which have been generated under the banner of 'new media' and through debates on technology, subjectivity, politics and power. Where the ideas addressed in this part of the module are associated with some of the more deterministic thinking and writing of new media, they will be grounded and interrogated here in four sessions structured and organised as a dialogue between two individuals representing different theoretical and/or practical interests. The aim here is to generate a dialogue around some of the most intellectually stimulating, contentious and contemporary ideas in the field without necessarily seeking a resolution or synthesis. Concepts of networks, systems, nature, culture, spaces and flows rightly remain open and contested in contemporary theory and culture, and this part of the module seeks to help you develop your own critical and where appropriate, practical perspective. Topics discussed on this module will include: Technology and power (surveillance and control; globalisation);. Technology and politics (diasporas; technology, organisation and news);. Technology and subjectivity (technologies of the Self; the posthuman; nature/culture; systems; 'alternative' networks ; spaces of flows).. By the end of the module you should be able to: articulate central debates in the relationship between technology and power, technology and politics and technology and subjectivity;. critically examine the theoretical models developed by key figures addressed in the module;. develop your understanding of technology in one of the areas specified in the module;. recognise and represent the contest of meaning over contemporary concepts addressed in the second part of the module.. 30 credits. Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual 15 credits Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.. This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique. 15 credits. Assessment There are two assessment points: A: You are required to write one 5,000 word essay linked to the Practice-Based Research Methods seminar. The exact theme and title will be decided in discussion between you and your supervisor and relate to your specialist field of research, but as a guide it will demonstrate your readiness to undertake the project through critical evaluation of legal, ethical, critical and reflexive parameters and functions of practice-based research. In addition, you will be assessed in the option module you undertake during the Spring Term. B: The project in the MRes Film, Photography and Electronic Arts comprises a portfolio of practical work (such as photographs, video, film, installation, websites or other digital/print material) alongside a textual component. The work submitted should be original, and be as integral to the research aims, processes and outcomes of the project as the textual component. The final project as a whole will therefore demonstrate the integration of its practical and research components, so that text and practice reflect critically on each other. Download the programme specification for the 2018-19 intake. If you would like an earlier version of the programme specification, please contact the Quality Office.