Intermedia production stream, Dept. of Communication Studies, Concordia University

It’s been an exciting semester in Intermedia. Our first-year course wraps up on Monday, while the second- and third-year courses are taking a short break, and will pick up again in January. (COMS274 is a 3-credit, one semester, required course; in January, Professor Duff will repeat the course with the other half of our BA program’s first-year intake. Meanwhile, COMS374 and COMS474, being six-credit electives, run from September all the way to April.)

Our curriculum has undergone some important changes since last year, to better reflect emergent trends in technology, art and industry. For example, we no longer teach Flash in any of our courses; instead, the emphasis has shifted to HTML (and HTML5), the Korsakow System, and Processing. These are all ‘open source’ environments: Korsakow is an application for creating database narratives (currently being developed by a research team in the department, and led by Matt Soar); Processing is a Java-based programming language for artists and designers which began as a student project at the MIT Media Lab.

We have also expanded our commitment to analog mediamaking. In COMS374, for example, students were recently asked to remediate a favourite film, drawing on the fabulously creative traditions of artists books. Some outstanding examples are shown above; lots more here. A bookmaking workshop led by Tagny Duff helped everyone on their way. In COMS474, the students remediated work they had produced last year, creating some exciting and intriguing physical, interactive installations. This necessitated the use of Arduino microcontrollers, sensors, and Processing.

On Tuesday, the first-years will be presenting their final remix projects, some of which are Korsakow films. As time allows we’ll be posting more work right here. Stay tuned! Finally, if you’re a CEGEP or highschool student with questions about our program, or Intermedia in particular, don’t hesitate to get in contact with Tagny or Matt, co-directors of the Intermedia production stream. We can sometimes organize visits to local schools and colleges to talk about the work we do here at Concordia.

(Image credit: Matt Soar. Clockwise, from top left: ‘Night & Fog’ by Benjamin J. Allard; ‘The Wizard of Oz’ by Jeansil Bruyere; ‘Almost Famous’ by Michelle Walters; ‘Melancholia’ by Spencer Cavalier; ‘Into the Wild’ by Alex Begin; ‘Inception’ by Emily Owens; and, ‘Memento’ by Daphne Pungartnik.)

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