Elective Specialisations: Networked or Lens-based Media
To accommodate for diverse approaches to media and the specific support required, the Master Media Design and Communication programme offers two specialisations: Networked and Lens-Based Media. Upon application to the Course you will be asked to select one of these trajectories, which will constitute 30% of the curriculum. While the rest of the course addresses issues and skills necessary for media design and communication practices, the specialisations acknowledge and support the very necessary qualifications to work within Lens-based or Networked Media practices. Your specialisation is also supported through tutorials and group critiques.
Networked Media Specialisation
Practically speaking, the Networked Media specialisation focuses on computational, digital and networked information systems. It examines and moreover problematizes the ‘social’ in media through theoretical and practical interrogations of network topologies, by looking at software and the socio-economic conditions that produce them. Rather than taking information technology off-the-shelf and out-of-the-box (proprietary software), you will be encouraged to rethink and design your own media and tools of production.
This is why Free and Open Source Software and a do-it-yourself ethic play a key role in this specialisation. Aside from the benefit of giving you advanced operating systems, server software, database engines, programming languages, network clients and audio-visual authoring toolchains, Open Source software tends to be extremely modular, open to DIY interventions, custom applications and collaborative authorship. It gives value to seemingly outmoded hardware, and provides you with building blocks for your own projects.
Rather than software solutions that strongly preformat both the function and aesthetics of your work, you shape the tools of your production and can influence the outcome at a fundamental level. ‘Do-it-yourself’ in this context means that – within reasonable limits of a non-engineering specialisation – you learn to program, administer and build your own projects in collaboration with others. In this sense, production itself becomes networked in process and outcome.
Lens-based Media Specialisation
The Lens-Based Digital Media (photography, animation & moving-image design) study route within the Media Design and Communication Masters unites photography, animation and moving image media under the heading Lens-based Media.
In defining the area of study it should be stressed that the definition lens-based digital media also includes the digital visual media forms that use the lens as a central metaphor in their process.
EXAMPLE: 3D digital animation can be entirely built, animated, lit and filmed in a virtual environment without any use of a physical lens: but finally it is a lens-based media in so far as the virtual recording of the final work is mediated entirely through a virtual lens: in other words, the software finally centres around the metaphor of capturing optical fact through a lens, and it is this metaphor, and with similar metaphoric parameters for lighting, focus, etc. that defines both working process and final result. Thus this area of media production would fall within the Lens-Based Digital Media specialisation.
In the same way there is a wide range of digital post-production techniques that use the virtual lens as a keystone of their architecture; often in combination with operations governed by metaphors taken from earlier visual media, such as drawing, painting, cutting and pasting. The tension between these traditions, as it has been recast within digital media will be explored within the specialisation.
The use of the lens as a core organisational category for the elective allows your research and creation in contemporary lens-based digital media to be placed within a long tradition that can stretch from the use of lens-based technology by painters from the 15th Century onwards, through the development of early photographic and film technology, up to recent developments in analogue and digital image technologies. In this way it makes clear the centrality of image making for this elective. The technical approaches and historical and conceptual perspectives encountered in this elective specialisation are designed to develop graduates whose practice in digital photography/animation/audio-visual design is based on a thorough understanding of where their chosen emphasis medium is positioned both historically and in the current media landscape.