Film and Media Studies 365: Special Topic in Film & Media Studies: Errors, Glitches, and Jams

This class will investigate the place of errors, glitches, and jams in today's digital, computational, and screen-saturated media ecology. When something "goes wrong," we routinely look to diagnose its cause, both to right the wrong and prevent its occurrence in the future. Yet those moments also invite us to interrogate what possibilities emerge for changing how things are or could be. Often, errors point to exceptions in our thinking that might free us to live otherwise; glitches surprise us, revealing alternative worlds of experience; and jams impede the wider cultural systems around us, giving us opportunities to establish different ways of going on together. We will read ideas from systems theorists, philosophers of technology, media and game scholars, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists and humorists, whose work elucidates how things "going wrong" is often the site of creative change. We will examine how human processes of reason, speech, and rule-following often "go wrong," and explore how, in the "breaking" of digital and screen media objects (e.g., video games, computer networks, memes), people create new ways to live with technology and each other. And in a media production project, students will produce errors, glitches, and james, discovering in practice what else becomes possible when we override the impulse to "get right," or go along with the world as we know it.