EMRG: Courses
The Embodied Media Research Group (EMRG) provides a creative research framework to support and enhance courses taught by Professor John Crawford and associated faculty at UC Irvine. These courses engage and challenge technology-savvy art makers, storytellers and designers, providing opportunities to enhance creativity and develop new skills in socially engaged artmaking, connected design and emergent media production.
Immersive Digital Art
Fall 2020Immersive Digital Art explores how artists and designers use interactive digital systems to create immersive media experiences. These are environments that use illusory and physical cues to give participants the impression that they are inside of an experience. Case studies show how theatre, visual art, music and dance play a central role in developing immersive digital media. Students create a speculative design proposal for their own immersive media project.
Dance & Video
Winter 2021Dance & Video is an introduction to video and computer technologies for dance, with a particular focus on performance representation. This is an experiential course including hands-on training in video production and editing. It surveys methods for integrating dance performance with the film medium, discusses related aesthetic and conceptual issues, and introduces current techniques and technologies for video and audio recording of dance performance.
Motion Tracking for Performance
Spring 2021Motion Tracking for Performance is an introduction to motion tracking for intermedia performance, intended for dancers and other performing artists. Demonstrations, discussion and experiential exercises provide practical experience with motion tracking concepts and techniques. Students work on experimental projects that intersect arts, design and technology through collaborative multimodal creation, with a showcase at the end of the quarter.
Screendance
Spring 2021Screendance is an introduction to screendance for choreographers. Also known as dance film, cinedance, videodance and/or dance for the camera, screendance connects film (and filmmaking) with dance (and dancemaking) in an evolving hybrid performative practice. More than simply the recorded representation of a performance, screendance combines choreography and cinematography to create a new artifact that is a work of art in and of itself.
Online Performance
Fall 2022Online Performance is an introduction to creating and presenting fully online live performances. With recent advances in smartphones, computers and online technologies, anyone with a social media account can produce compelling online performance events at low or no cost. This course goes beyond the basics to introduce a range of different live performance platforms and how to use them most effectively. It’s suitable for graduate and undergraduate students in any performing arts discipline.