MA Interactive Media Practice
Programme leaders: David Chapman and Roshini Kempadoo
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This distinctive programme explores interactive media practice from the practitioner's perspective. It is aimed at those interested in developing a practice-based career across the range of interactive media. Production orientated activity and engagement with practitioners' experiences are therefore central to the programme. The continual and rapid development of digital technologies directly affects our engagement with media, the practicalities and aesthetic strategies of production. The MA Interactive Media Practice programme maps and actively investigates this shifting environment. This includes examining genres such as net.art and software art, cyber-activism, open-source practice, generative media production, peer-to-peer technologies, database aesthetics, immersive environments, intelligent media and more. The programme is located in the context of interdisciplinary debates about the culture and politics of digital media and considers how these inform the production of innovative materials for the World Wide Web, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and reactive and immersive multimedia installations.
We recruit students who want to build an interactive media practice based on previous production experience. Taught through lectures, seminars, workshops and project work, the course offers support to the methodology and creative process of students' individual digital media practices. In this way, we aim to accommodate the different emphases that students might wish to give to technological and conceptual approaches. The programme is taught and run by practitioners and is supported by a diverse range of guest speakers, including leading practitioners and practice-based researchers who contribute to the ongoing digital media debates integral to this MA programme. Through these varied approaches we provide students with a range of theoretical and experiential perspectives, which both stimulate and contextualise students' own practice.
We offer introductory technical workshops as part of a wider process of researching and developing digital media products. The programme therefore aims to equip the student with the range of necessary tools to develop a critically-informed interactive media practice.
Core Modules include Interactive Media Practice in Semester A, and Research Methods in Media Practice and Dissertation by Practice in Semester B. Possible optional modules include Audio Vision, Cybernetic Culture, Digital Aesthetics, Digital Cultures, Media Production, Software as Culture, Work Practices in the Media Industries.
