Spring 2008:
The Fogbank - MediaScapes
Juan Azulay, Instructor.
The contemporary city is more than ever defined in the wake of a relation game of continuities and discontinuities, visibilities and invisibilities arguably best characterized by William James as ‘reality falling in passing’.

The Spring ’08 MediaScapes Studio, through the study, conceptualization and conjectural positioning of Los Angeles as the product of a series of recurring ‘nested genetic doubles’
will exorcise an encounter for forces of matter seen and unseen, extended over a time-based narrative machine.

The Fogbank emerges through those who seek to track the ethical force we use tonavigate its peculiar density. Previous models for Fogbank navigation couplings have been shown as Chris Marker’s “The Zone” in Sans Soleil, Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” in
Fincher’s Fight Club or Godard-Lang’s “Ulysses” in Godard’s Contempt. These are organizations of time and matter that proactively drive from nested mechanisms, precarious genetic codes that can alter matter and bend with it as it is instantly inscribed in culture.

The studio will be conducted as an essay film project (from film stills to direct cinema, from cinema verite to sci-fi), with the ambition of producing what we’ll reductively call documentary shorts, to be submitted to film festivals and other venues around the world.
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Fall 2007:
POST-EMPIRE SCAPES - MediaSCAPES
Professor: Ed KELLER
Assistant critic: Greg THORPE
'Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences
"Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication...
But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world..."

This voiceover from Jean Luc Godard's film Alphaville, spoken as the camera pans across nondescript post-war middle class high rise residential towers, identifies two kinds of global systems. The first is the wildly proliferating Hollywood mythmachine, which is able to colonize most of the world as America's most visible export, and which Godard satirizes directly in his film, by creating Lemmy Caution [E. Constantine] as a doppelganger of Bogart; and second, the global space which began to coalesce as the world recovered from World War Two, when urban centers were rebuilt and global networks of capital and materials intensified. The first problems of infrastructure, information science, highways, social housing on a mass scale, and systemic architectures in general emerged in macro-urban assemblies as the embodiment of such systems.

The core principles of the concept of 'MediaSCAPE' are defined through this set of catalyst conditions: the migration of vast numbers of people, caused by a range of geopolitical factors; and the emergence of a new set of infrastructures that ultimately merged the control of physical systems with the control of energetic and information systems: Media and Migration.
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The MediaSCAPES faculty is comprised of designers, media artists, directors, writers, architects, and theorists, and in 2007–08 includes Alisa Andrasek (BioThing), Juan Azulay (AiB Matter Management), Ben Bratton (The Culture Industry), Manuel DeLanda, Ed Keller, Carla Leitao (a|Um Studio), Jean-Michel Crettaz, Nick Pisca (Gehry Technologies), and Roland Snooks (Kokkugia).

Invited lecturers, workshop leaders and guests in 2007–08 include Christian Bruun [DitlevFilms], Hernan Diaz Alonso [Xefirotarch], Ben Goertzel [AGIRI], Gordon Gould [ThisNext], Perry Hall [Lovebrain], Branden Hookway [Cornell], Mark Leiter [Leiter & Co.], Noah Olmsted [Imaginary Forces], Chris Perry [SERVO], Shadi Sharoki [Shadi & Co.], George Showman, and Enrique Walker [Columbia GSAPP].