Graphic Design ART 740, Intermediality: Typography, Motion, Meaning

What does it mean to be contemporary and what are the conditions of contemporaneity? How do we locate our work relative to notions of intermediality, search, and buzz in a moment where one assumes 24/7 interconnectedness across all media? As we become increasingly habituated to conditions of intermediality, the differences between modalities appear to grow ever thinner in exchange and expression, at the personal and the institutional levels. Our design activities capitalize on media’s interdependence—explicit and implicit, one to the other—as relevant vehicles of representation and signaling. We focus on the corporeal intermediality of our bodies as media platforms where we understand our tools as prosthetics to our eyes, ears, and mouths. We consider the circulation and motion of the sign as it increases in velocity and replication via the logic of search in contrast to a perhaps outmoded modern notion of uniqueness and aura. For our purposes, the aural specificity of audio communication serves as the initial content source—the podcast as delivery to conscious cognition. Tasked with selecting and researching content that has invaded their being through their ears, students generate proposals exploring ideas and positions from the class discourse combined with their individuated content. Students’ interpretations, understandings, and misunderstandings find form in “motion”—film, video, gifs, glitches, animation, motion capture, puppets, etc. Narratives may be linear, or not; iterative, exploratory, and just slightly off.