[online]

In everyday reading of news media, we are often exposed to a dynamic intermixing of media and arts as well as an intermixing of images and stories about events around the world. This intermixing is also prevalent in the arts and cultural expressions such as cinema, theater, visual art, text, music, and computer and video games. In this course, students will explore, analyze, and unravel some of this intermixing and transmedia. The course is an introduction to aesthetics, semiotics and structures of interart relations. Students will develop transferable multimedia reading skills in an effort to become interpreters of 21st century multi- and transmedia products. Much of the work will bridge natural sciences and the humanities.

Questions that will inform discussions and work include: Are there similarities connecting the diversity of expression in various arts and media? Can one characterize the arts as an area of research comparable and equal to scientific inquiries; and if so, how? Does art, as a diverse world of signs, help us recognize and understand reality? What can we learn about individual approaches to experiencing art and media when focusing on sensory perception?

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