ACTlab, and hello dreamwidth
Dec. 14th, 2009 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zenithblueDid I tell you I took an ACTlab class this last semester?
No?
Did I even tell you what the hell ACTlab is?
Well, if you want the official version, you can check out their website. Here's the quick and dirty: ACTlab is an experiment. It's a "new media" class that is officially linked to the Radio, Television, and Film department at UT, though the pedagogy free-wheels across sociology, psychology, gender and women's studies, queer theory, literature, semantics, etc. And in ACTlab, you express and grapple with theory by making shit. No paper-writing, no staring at a hateful blinking cursor, no banging your head on the table due to a peer's narrow-minded reading of some concept or another. Everyone has to put together three projects, and they can be...more or less whatever you can make good. A piece of film, a game, a performance, a hacked piece of machinery, a sculpture, a song, an animation. It is entirely open.
I loved this class.
I am so accustomed to my own neurotic and isolating form of creativity, that I was both terrified and enthralled by what this class required of me. As many of you know, I love the concept of DIY, but am thin on actual DIY skills. But because the focus in ACTlab isn't on perfection so much as ambition, daring, and exuberance, it felt like I was finally allowed to just play.
Enough blather. Go check out my projects already! Oh! Didn't I mention? They're all on my ACTlab website. <3
No?
Did I even tell you what the hell ACTlab is?
Well, if you want the official version, you can check out their website. Here's the quick and dirty: ACTlab is an experiment. It's a "new media" class that is officially linked to the Radio, Television, and Film department at UT, though the pedagogy free-wheels across sociology, psychology, gender and women's studies, queer theory, literature, semantics, etc. And in ACTlab, you express and grapple with theory by making shit. No paper-writing, no staring at a hateful blinking cursor, no banging your head on the table due to a peer's narrow-minded reading of some concept or another. Everyone has to put together three projects, and they can be...more or less whatever you can make good. A piece of film, a game, a performance, a hacked piece of machinery, a sculpture, a song, an animation. It is entirely open.
I loved this class.
I am so accustomed to my own neurotic and isolating form of creativity, that I was both terrified and enthralled by what this class required of me. As many of you know, I love the concept of DIY, but am thin on actual DIY skills. But because the focus in ACTlab isn't on perfection so much as ambition, daring, and exuberance, it felt like I was finally allowed to just play.
Enough blather. Go check out my projects already! Oh! Didn't I mention? They're all on my ACTlab website. <3
