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Extra Curricular
by Holly Willis
Media in the Middle: The Emerging Media Arts Program at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ash Eliza Smith's interaction course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Asked about the fundamental goals of the program of which she is founding director, Megan Elliott is expansive and enthusiastic. “We have a very strong interest in the myriad places our students can go as storytellers, makers, artists, entrepreneurs and innovators, not just within the film industry, but far beyond it,” she explains. She acknowledges that these ambitious goals also pose challenges. “There is always a tension that exists within any design, architecture, arts or media program about how you teach both technical and creative skills that are rigorous and experimental, and how to hold space for all of that.”
Holding space for all of that is precisely what the Emerging Media Arts program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln does. Housed in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts in downtown Lincoln, the undergraduate EMA program was jumpstarted in 2015 by a $20 million gift from the Johnny Carson Foundation and held its first classes in fall 2019. Designed to be deeply interdisciplinary and forward-looking, the program includes classes with titles such as, “Games, Play and Performance,” “Computation and Media Studio” and “Foundations of Entrepreneurship.” Indeed, as a newly designed program, EMA is not burdened with—or narrowed by—prior histories and media forms, such as cinema, video art or game design. Instead, while drawing from these areas, the program is firmly oriented toward a progressive, expansive view of media makers for the 21st century. A powerful vision for the program and its potential, a teaching philosophy attentive to embodiment and mindfulness and a focus on how being in the Midwest can be a feature rather than a bug make EMA an incredibly compelling program teaching students how to lead us into the radical futures of the moving image.
Filmmaker and media artist Jesse Reding Fleming, an associate professor in the program, helped design and launch it. Rather than training students how to use specific tools, Fleming’s more holistic pedagogical approach puts sensory and perceptual witnessing at the center of his teaching and the curriculum. Eschewing any desire for conformity among students and outcomes, Fleming works to uncover each student’s specific desires.
“What I teach is how to identify what’s going on internally based on what external stimuli are present, and I think from that anchor, people become really strong and adaptive,” Fleming says. “What gets me excited about teaching is trying to steward a person who is given complete agency to follow their own path and to be able to identify what their unique capabilities are, how they translate the world, so that they can succeed in any direction they choose.” This process is ongoing and core to creativity at this moment. He says, “Being able to turn the arrow of attention inward, while simultaneously projecting outward, is fundamental, as are the core tenets of perception, cognition, story, meaning and, ultimately, well-being, from the individual to the collective.” This fundamental commitment to the student’s own identity contributes to the list of things that make the EMA program unique.
Media artist Ash Eliza Smith, also an associate professor, brings her background in performance to the program, expanding on Fleming’s contributions. “Thinking about the body as a technology and how the body is always involved in media practice is core to my teaching,” she says. “At this particular time, in this context—when so many things get extracted from the body and the earth, and we’re just using our hands to endlessly scroll—we can forget that we, and the technologies we make, are connected to the earth’s systems.”
As an example, in the “Games, Play and Performance” class, students learn how to be collaborators and listeners, as well as how to be alive, present and engaged in the moment; the emphasis is on the improvisational. “Yes, in this program, you’re going to have amazing interfaces and work with screens, tools and techniques, but what can you make that is fun or imaginative or that asks provocative questions even without all of the digital?” Smith says. “The focus is on the materials around us, and the body that we have right now as a starting place.”
The program also moves beyond a narrow and obsessive focus on storytelling. “We are so tired of these very Western and linear ways of thinking about story,” says Smith. “There are some really great things that we’ve gotten from that tradition, but we want to be more expansive, with a focus on beats, rhythm, dramaturgy.” She, Fleming and Elliott agree that knowing how to communicate information as well as how to ask questions is important and therefore opt for “meaning making” as a better term to capture how they’re orienting their students.
The term “meaning making” allows for an expansive view of what students are learning but doesn’t quite capture the excitement of their innovations. When I visited recently, students and alums Reid Brockmeier, Hank Ball and Alex Gee had connected a VHS camera to ComfyUI and were basically live-recording and creating real-time generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) images for the Theater of Latent Possibilities live cinema project. For his thesis project this spring, recent EMA grad Michael Pritza used motion capture, Fortnite and Unreal Engine to create a short film that doubles as a game that can be played in Fortnite. “This is something that no one has done before,” he explains. Another project, Art and the Machine, was a live cinema, theater and radio performance that included GenAI to explore Leonardo da Vinci’s interest in wind, birds and flying machines. In each of these instances, students are actively innovating and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with contemporary media.
While Fleming and Smith bring thoughtful teaching and curriculum design to the program and students bring a willingness to invent, Elliott brings a vision attuned to how the program is situated in the Midwest. She is actively engaged with the region to see how to bolster a broad ecosystem that could provide career opportunities for graduates. EMA links students to existing organizations and companies in the Innovation Studio class, and there is a focus on entrepreneurship more broadly. Elliott also advocates for engagement between the program and community, actively inviting people to the frequent Open Studios events as well as sharing the program’s resources during the summer months in the form of summer camps and artist residencies. There is funding dedicated to bringing artists to campus on a regular basis and to helping students travel domestically and internationally.
“Innovation happens at the margins,” Elliott sums things up. “It just so happens that in this country, the margins are in the middle, where we have both blue skies and blue sky thinking.” Given current turbulence across so many sectors nationally, including academia and the film industry, EMA’s expansive curriculum, attention to embodied creativity and commitment to nourishing a regional ecosystem all represent a holistic vision for the futures of our artform.
