COURSEMATERIAL: Audiovisual Data in the Digital World

The course will be part of the interdisciplinary minor program "Responsible Innovation" for students of the Leiden University, Delft University and Rotterdam Erasmus University.

Course Description:

"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second" (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960). So what about 360-Virtual Reality, at 120 frames per second? In the digital world, audiovisual data is everywhere. From photographs to videos, games to mixed reality - we're truly living in an audiovisual age. On one hand, new media technologies such as Augmented Reality or 'deepfakes' are in a state of permanent becoming. Innovative formats continuously enter the market place of ideas long before the old ones are fully understood. On the other hand, in this era of fake news, our audiovisual data has become much easier to manipulate than ever before. In this course, we will explore current digital trends and critically investigate the impact of new media technologies on society. Lectures will reflect on various cases of audiovisual data in the digital sphere such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, AI-robots in moving images, #deepfakes, hacking, webbased-interactive hybridformats from the perspective of audiovisual data in academic research.

Course Timetable:

Week 1: A very short Introduction into Audiovisual Data - From Cave Paintings to Mixed Reality
Week 2: Data a nd Storytelling on Interactive Web-Platforms; Hybridformats; #FakeNews: New Ethical Challenges
Week 3: Living in a Digital World: Sensitive Audiovisual Data in Mixed Reality (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality)
Week 4: How Stories of Artificial Intelligence Robots in Science Fiction Shape the Vision of Future Technology and Society
Week 5: The Art of Hacking: Of Deepfakes and Toastercats
Week 6: Design Science to Design Methods
Week 7: The Bigger Picture: From Design to Action
Week 8: Wrap-up and A Speculative Design View into the Future of Audiovisual Data

Essay

1. Write and publish an essay on a chosen subtopic of „Audiovisual Data» Between 1.000 and 2.500 words. You will reflect on the importance of data-driven innovations for confronting a complex societal challenge within the domains of academic research, digital media, or media technology. (e.g. AI-robots, deepfake, fakenews, VR/AR…).
2. Publish on medium.com, deadline 5th of October Put it online. You’re free to use your own name or a pseudonym to create an own account at medium.com.
3. Peer-feedback on digitalblog article (5th — 11th of October), Ask at least two of your colleagues to read and comment your article. Write a response to your colleagues.
4. Create a pdf print and upload it on blackboard, FINAL deadline 12th of October, upload it on blackboard.

Video

1. Create groups of three to five people.
2. Produce a very short video about one of the topics. Format is open to you: it can be a statement, an interview, a fiction story, a video report.
3. Deadline for the video is due our last meeting, the 25th of October. We will make screening session with presentations about the videos in this meeting.

Further interesting, optional articles/webpages:

http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/digital-tribalism-the-real-story-about-fake-news/

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

http://www.alteredimagesbdc.org/

https://twitter.com/BBCAfrica/status/1044186344153583616