10/07/19
Spring 2020 Honors Seminar TH 425-Media and Performance Seminar (Open to ALL Majors)
Posted by Tim on October 7, 2019 in Academics, Honors Experiences, Honors Seminars
TH 425-Media and Performance Seminar
Professor Lindsay Hunter
Registration #: 301130
Mondays and Wednesdays 3-4:20 p.m.
188 Alumni Arena
Course description: This course will consider various forms of mediated and
intermedial performance in order to examine the particular habits,
possibilities and affinities of performance in mediatized contexts.
Possible areas of focus include television and televisual performance,
intermedial theatre, and performance in video gaming and in online contexts.
For Spring 2020, we will consider the ways
representational media’s power to dissemble and intersects with the theatrical
urge toward enacting the artificial to produce the phenomenon of hoaxing, in
which a constructed falsehood masquerades as true and actual. Though the
concerns of this course are perhaps best demonstrated by the contemporary
phenomenon of “deepfakes”—that is, video doctored by artificial intelligence so
that it appears to document happenings that never occurred—the use of
representational media to present the fraudulent as real is hardly new.
Victorian spirit photography, allegations of faked moon landings, and
purposefully misleading journalism all point to the facility media possess,
even in a pre-digital era, to enact misrepresentation on a large scale. The
easy manipulability of digital media, however, certainly brings concerns about
hoaxing, fraudulence, and representational dishonesty into new territory, requiring
us to refine our critical perspectives: what separates the hoax from mere
untruth or disingenuousness, or from the artifice and illusion of
theatre? In an effort to better parse the unique possibilities and
affordances of the hoax, we will investigate its performative nature—that is,
its manifesting in the world through enactment—as well as the ways deception
and representation collude in the hoax’s constitutive acts.