Reboot By The Sea

It might be hot. There are several quarries for swimming. It might be cold and rainy, and we’ll be in a non-heated, non-air conditioned barn. There will be mosquitoes. So began a long list of somewhat unsettling particulars describing conditions for the six-day DesignInquiry residency that took place at the end of June 2018 on Vinalhaven, an island halfway up the coast of Maine. I had applied six months earlier, intrigued by the year’s theme, “Rewrite,” and was delighted when I was accepted. I was stepping down from a decade-long leadership stint, having cocreated and chaired a new department in…  Read more

In 1993, I was a graduate student in a Critical Studies Ph.D. program studying independent, avant-garde and feminist film and video, figuring out how to write about them, and thinking about what it meant to write at all. I adored high theory—the thickness of it, the heady political ambition, the philosophical complexity. But I liked zines and the wild world of alternative publishing, too, along with the community of readers eager for experiments that these publications augured. My advisors discouraged involvement with Filmmaker—a career-killer, for sure—and when I was offered a short-term job at Variety one summer, they rolled their…  Read more

A few months ago, one of my students tried to kill himself. He took a handful of pills and got into bed. Luckily, he mentioned what he had done to someone else, and a little while later, the campus police showed up at his dorm door. They took him by force to the hospital, and then — a day later, again by force — from the hospital to a lockdown facility on the edge of Los Angeles. And so, late one Friday night, I found myself handing over my keys, cell phone and identification to a stern guard inside a…  Read more

Traditional Teaching Ends Here

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25 Sentences

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Posthumous Experimentation

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Paradigms of Change

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Embodied Teaching

The notorious 1964 film Scorpio Rising opens on a tangle of metal, pieces from a disassembled motorcycle, and a young man tinkering with the detritus in a garage. Ricky Nelson sings “Fools Rush In” on the soundtrack as the camera pans lovingly over rugged boots, bulky links of chain, and then down over the back of a leather jacket with the film’s title and director’s name — Kenneth Anger — written in shiny studs. The man wearing the jacket spins around, and we’re suddenly up close both to his crotch and the soft naked skin of his belly. I was…  Read more

Building Better Entertainment: SCI-Arc’s MA in Fiction and Entertainment

Liam Young is an architect, but rather than building skyscrapers or designing public squares, he makes movies. “I call myself an architect, but I solely work in the spaces of fiction and film,” he says from his studio in London. Indeed, his entire practice is devoted to interrogating the increasingly blurred boundaries among film, fiction, design and storytelling with the goal of imagining our future. Using speculative design and the conjuring of imaginary cities that are assembled from the physical world around us, he opens up conversations querying urban existence, asking provocative questions about the roles of both architecture and…  Read more

Investing in Change: The Ghetto Film School

Just after the Oscar nominations in 2015, Derrick Cameron wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter titled “How to Fix the Oscars: Take a Cue from the Sports World and Fix the Talent Pool” in which he argued that “we have not invested in developing new voices in American cinema, particularly from communities that reflect our various cultures.” In contrast, Cameron and a team of other passionate educators have worked for more than a decade to make precisely that investment. They are the team responsible for Ghetto Film School. Founded in 2000 by Joe Hall in the South Bronx,…  Read more