By Tom Lindblade

2011 was the year of Media Studies’ encroachment upon traditional performance and arts-related disciplines, and this encroachment is nowhere more apparent than in high-visibility best-selling tomes. Jaron Lanier markets his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, Jane McGonigal probes gaming technology and future art forms in Reality is Broken, and Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect posits a new interdisciplinary era of creativity, collaboration, and collision. Media Studies, a grafted discipline to Communications and Sociology (yet another grafted discipline), is fast becoming one of the most in-demand offerings of undergraduate liberal arts curricula across the country.

This rise in popularity owes itself to multiple factors: the compelling combination of theory and praxis, the necessity of technological literacies, the rise of a distinct critical school of digital principles of narratology residing in the arts, the promise of compelling and continuing graduate school studies, the matriculating generation of techno-geeks, and finally, the simple realization that interdisciplinary studies seems to be here to stay.
 

I would argue that Media Studies, in its present morphology, has a natural home in the academy as an interdisciplinary program in traditional performance and arts-related disciplines. Just as English became the elephantine all-consuming humanities department in the 1970s, encompassing journalism, critical studies, comparative literature, folklore, creative writing, and even film studies, so too the liberal arts fine arts curricula seem poised to absorb Media Studies, a field that fiercely defines itself by the initial artistic idea—“killer app,” if you will—and the ensuing promise of creativity as a guiding force.
 

In the eye of this pedagogical hurricane, Colorado College went forward with plans for a new program in Film and Media Studies, eventually hoping to craft a compelling media component that resided in the fine arts and equitably combined theory and praxis.  (Film Studies, a hearty program within the English Department, will move to its new environs and synaptically connect with Media Studies.) Eventually, the hope is for a program anchored by three new full-time professors and regular guests, resulting in a major appropriate to a liberal arts college: a tenure-track filmmaker, a tenure-track new media artist, and a tenure-track media scholar/theorist. The scholar/theorist in Media Studies is the first appointment.(Film Studies has been staffed with an Artist-in-Residence for approximately ten years, and may become concretized in the near future.)
 

The sociological etymology of the phrase “Media Studies” became crucial to Colorado College’s search for a media scholar/theorist, and hence deserves some clarification. The search committee’s discussion began with the job announcement, and how the word “media” would be postured. “Media Studies” evokes traditional Communications Department positions. “New Media” or “Digitalized Humanities” evokes the specific revolution of digitalization, and also generally omits historical emphases and theoretical discourse as central concerns.
 

The search committee settled on the widest possible term—“Media Studies”—with a clarifying description in the job announcement: the professorship would reside in the humanities division under the rubric of performance and arts-related disciplines with an emphasis on the artistic idea’s creation and critique, and would be responsible for assisting interdisciplinary arts programming and outreach under new Colorado College initiatives. The position would be a scholar/theorist in Media Studies, and not a practitioner. In short, the successful candidate would see Media Studies through the lens of the arts. This first hurdle—the basic semantics of the job announcement—took most of the search committee’s preparatory time.
 

After the job announcement hurdle and its defining parameters, the search committee faced a second obstacle: Do PhD candidates exist who could possibly fill a non-social science Media Studies professorship? Especially one that is centered on the creative and performing arts? Initial research of various graduate programs suggested “yes” as the answer and encouraged the search committee to move forward, also validating our belief that an undergraduate major in Film and Media Studies skewed toward the arts could lead to rigorous and marketable graduate programs.
 

Notable examples include MIT’s programs in Art, Culture, and Technology Program (adjunct to MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Architecture) and Media, Arts, and Sciences, Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, concerned with “cultural studies of science and technology, with designing and creating digital artifacts, and with communication in a variety of media contexts,” Brown’s Modern Culture and Media, and the panoply of Masters in Professional Studies programs at NYU Tisch.
 

The idea for a Film and Media Studies program, rooted in the arts, arises from a specific confluence of curricular and pedagogical traditions at Colorado College, and also follows a large outlay of capital resources for traditional and interdisciplinary arts in the past ten years. Almost by institutional happenstance, tradition, innovation, creativity, and cooperation all played a role in this relatively unique addition (usurpation?), and this confluence provides a useful template for future considerations of interdisciplinary arts stand-alone positions.

1. Avoid preoccupations with “turf.” In guiding architect Antoine Predock during the design phase of the Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center (completed 2008), Colorado College professors began discussing multiple use buildings and ways to maximize square footage usage, but gradually realized that such interdisciplinary thinking was how they worked “in the real world.” Hence, space-intensive disciplines like art studio, dance, art history, filmmaking, and drama were willing to give up “turf” and resultant ownership in order to foster a more collaborative and creative academic environment, mirrored by a new interdisciplinary arts space with technology and media as its core tools of translation. This surrender of “turf” was the result of six years of painful discussions, but led to more vibrant pedagogy.

2. Create a culture of team-teaching. On Colorado College’s Block Plan (one course at a time, for a duration of three and a half weeks), team-teaching opens up a natural dialogue of interdisciplinarity for faculty and students alike. 72% of Colorado College faculty team-teach on a regular basis, an ideal situation for a new program in Film and Media Studies. Media Studies, then, seen as a translative arts discipline, can easily combine an arts-practitioner professor with a scholar/theorist professor, and this symbiosis can be intra-artistic (two professors from one department), inter-artistic (two professors from different arts disciplines), and extra-artistic (two professors from inside and outside the arts, respectively). In an often-fragmented general liberal arts curriculum, team-teaching creates a recognizable linkage between disparate elements; a program in Media Studies rooted in the arts becomes a galvanizing force college-wide.

3. Identify, design, and staff a committed arts building in which Film and Media Studies resides. The search committee had the luxury of the new Cornerstone Arts Center as a solid covenant with the prospective Media Studies candidates. “Interdisciplinary” does not negate all territorial concerns of a program’s necessary elements: specialized technological and showcase spaces, proper software and equipment management, and specifically dedicated staff maintaining the standards of the program are central to an arts-concentrated focus on media. Luckily, these necessities were aligned prior to the search. The building contains two media labs available for teaching theoretical and historical courses in Media Studies and practical classes in devising art and performance. (Under the Block Plan, these labs can rotate with filmmaking, film studies, theatrical design, animation, and installation graphics courses.) Also available are smart classrooms, a large capacity screening room, neutral performance spaces, two theatres, an IDEA space (interdisciplinary experimental art gallery) and a film/video/media studio. An IT specialist oversees software licensing, equipment rental, lab proctoring, and other interdisciplinary teaching tools. In essence, the building was waiting for the hire of the Media Studies scholar/practitioner, and established an expectation of creative use with the students and faculty. Indeed, the building was conceived with a Film and Media Studies program housed on one entire floor and one-half of another. Without requisite visibility and high-profile infrastructure, a Media Studies professorship housed with traditional performance and fine arts disciplines could not foment a viable and self-sustaining program.

4. Provide meaningful artistic and pedagogical opportunities for curricular enhancement. In addition to regularized curriculum, interdisciplinary arts flourishes when accompanied by guest performers, major artists’ exhibitions, post-doctoral candidates in a limited media arts field, student internships with artists drawn to media studies, installation, performance, and digitalization, and guest lectures on the cutting edge of a given media arts field. (Of course, such an outcome can be said of any interdisciplinary program in the natural sciences or social sciences as well, but Media Studies in an interdisciplinary arts context puts a premium on “the public-ness of the event, and its performative nature,” as Judith Butler states.) Thinking creatively about new pedagogy is “Arts Funding 101” to most granting organizations at present; once the college had provided important seed monies in escrow to support a bold pedagogical vision, interest from various granting organizations (Mellon Foundation and Sherman Fairchild Foundation in particular) seemed to follow. At the time of the hiring process, the Mellon Foundation gifted Colorado College with a sizable grant to establish a culture of interdisciplinary arts, providing stipends for emerging artists, special events, internships, and seed money for faculty experimentation in interdisciplinary artworks and pedagogies, respectively. This support money emboldened the search committee to hire immediately, providing a critical mass of support for the Film and Media Studies program residing in the fine arts. However, it should be noted that “good-faith money and support” upfront by the college was crucial in the process.

5. Use successful and noteworthy critical approaches to Media Studies that are unique to your institution. The Film Studies program, under the auspices of the English Department, uses narratology as its guiding pedagogical principle. Film, it is argued, is another text to be read, deciphered, and calculated. Programs in visual culture and performance theory appropriate a similar critical approach, coming out of critical schools of reception aesthetics, semiotics, and postmodernism of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Hiring committee discussions revolved around the geography of such a Media Studies approach at our particular institution, and provided a useful check on our own critical vocabularies as well as justifying an arts and performance-based Media Studies hire as a kind of arts epicenter for the campus, both in theory and praxis.
 

The basic building blocks of a successful program were in place, and the hiring process was an educational experience not just in terms of the unique approach taken to a Media Studies hire, but also in terms of expanding critical vocabularies and developing multiple literacies of arts disciplines. A traditional social science Media Studies candidate requires mastery of historical and emerging ideas steeped in a prevailing context, while an interdisciplinary arts Media Studies candidate requires a high level of multivalent critique throughout the liberal arts.
 

I want to go back to an earlier point now; the notion that the artistic idea may be the seed of “killer app” in industry, let alone in the academy. In the late 1980s, mavericks like Jim Clark and Marc Hannah at SGI, Glen and Thomas Knoll, and Steve Jobs at Apple understood the importance of the arts as an ur-template for creatively brainstorming. Groups like SMARTS (roughly, “Science Meets the Arts”) combined performance visionaries like George Coates with engineers at NASA Ames, Intel, and SGI. The Knoll brothers, from humble beginnings in their professor father’s photography lab, collaborated with Adobe, ILM, and Apple, developing Photoshop in 1989. Brainstorming sessions often ended up with the artists inspiring the engineers in creating the “killer app,” establishing multivalent and profitable uses for all parties involved.
 

And now, twenty-two years later, we seem to be returning—in industry, at least—to media evolving out of creativity, the arts, and innovative thinking. Perhaps this return is the driving force behind theorists like Johansson, Lanier, and McGonigal. Richard Florida also hints at this phenomenon in The Rise of the Creative Class. As more liberal arts colleges strive for relevance, marketability, and sustainability, Media Studies may gradually posture itself as an artistic discipline. MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences describes itself as a multivalency of “computer science, cognitive sciences, communications, design, and the expressive arts.” And it is clear in their white paper that the latter category is of central importance. As a Colorado College hiring committee, we were looking to initiate a prototype program that would be attractive to undergraduates who were often times creating their own majors in Film and Media Studies, attempting to find a balance between theory and praxis and looking for technology as a translative tool of the artistic idea.
 

In retrospect, it’s clear that the students drove the inquiry here, requesting a new vision in this new building for the new marketplace. They wanted, it seems, the “killer app” for their undergraduate career. Interdisciplinary arts represents, as a concept, a new expansion of curricular thinking for a senior faculty that came of age in the 1970s, but such trends are dismissed at an institution’s own peril. The morphology of Media Studies into an arts-related hiring opportunity represents a new metalinguistic approach to curricula of the future, curricula that can accommodate the baby, the bathwater, and all related precedents into an experimental, historical, and theoretical whole.
 

About the Author

Tom Lindblade is an NEH Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Colorado College. He directs, writes, and composes for theatre, opera, and film, and at Colorado College. He was Chair of both the Department of Drama and Dance and the Cornerstone Arts Initiative for 15 years.