Experimental Design for Immersive Media

What possibilities and pitfalls do immersive practices create for live storytelling? How do the affordances of a digital tool amplify or suppress aspects of a source story? What new insights into familiar stories can we generate with radical adaptation? To engage these questions, this studio seminar blends humanistic inquiry with practice. Through an examination of different contexts that are live, immersive, and theatricalized, students envision how the tools utilized therein might illuminate latent aspects of familiar stories. Topics include theatre, AR, VR, and theme parks. Additionally, this course utilizes "critical making" as an epistemology, wherein the site of knowledge creation is the process of devising an object, tool, performance, or installation in conversation with a discipline's critical apparatus. Course-long projects* will find students selecting and using immersive tools-digital, analog, or both-to radically adapt a familiar story. Importantly, while technological skills are welcome, they are not required. Students are encouraged to envision gloriously and scope effectively as they design a hypothetical or prototyped research project and complementary critical engagement. *For Fall 2022, students may choose to work on Professor Hunter's mobile AR app Wretched Excess: An Augmented Reality Trip to Early MTV or an original project.
Course Attributes: BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA VC; EN H

Experimental Design for Immersive Media

FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 453

Section 01