Blogging

I blog about media literacy for the IML, mobile and pervasive media on the HASTAC site, and new media art at Blur + Sharpen for KCET. Follow me on Twitter or Zotero.

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Research

My research centers on the intersection and overlapping concerns of the histories and theories of experimental film, video, new media, design, literacies and emerging modes of teaching and learning.

Key topics include:
• New Literacies: While one of the fundamental components within the broad transformation of education centers on crafting curricula dedicated to visual and media literacy, we should also be imagining literacies within the context of an array of emergent technologies and the impact of pervasive computing, and from there, considering new epistemologies that align with new modes of being and knowing in the world.

• New Tools: How do practices and tools intersect? For example, how might a software application such as Sophie, designed to facilitate the easy melding of text, images, sound and video, create new modes of writing or composing? How does a shared database such as Critical Commons with its collection of annotated video clips contribute to media education and remix pedagogy? How might a mobile phone storytelling architecture such as Mobile Voices create new modes of communication and storytelling among immigrant workers in Los Angeles? I am currently working in various capacities on all three of these projects.

• New Metaphors: What role do metaphors and paradigms play in how we describe our current moment with regard to literacies and education? Can we move beyond visual rhetoric, as well as a game-based pedagogy and the adoption of a broad range of media tools on campus, toward a pedagogy grounded fundamentally in a media ecology? Framing the investigation in terms of a media ecology allows us to imagine the collision between new media practices and computational models, providing a glimpse of possible transformations not only in ways of being but ways of teaching and learning. How might pedagogical practices be transformed computationally or algorithmically, and to what ends?

• New Urbanisms: If the city as we are to understand it is now considered dynamic and layered, a space of multiple, mutable flows, then urban screens, in their convergence and divergence, in their contradictory agendas and diverse audiences, serve as emblems, tangible manifestations of the liminal juncture between material and immaterial. What are the ways that we might “disorganize” the master narratives of mediated public space and its screens, in order to differently reconstitute our own architectures of meaning and priority?

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Projects

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Teaching

Recent courses:
IML 101: Languages of New Media
This lab-based undergraduate seminar investigates the interrelationships among technology, culture and communication in order to form a solid foundation for scholarly multimedia authoring. Students develop a clear understanding of several genres of multimedia scholarship, with the goal of being able to deploy them strategically in a variety of academic contexts and through the use of still images, moving images, sound and interactivity.

IML 104: Languages of New Media II: Life in the Network
This lab-based undergraduate seminar focuses on shifting notions of identity, the body, community and politics as they are transformed within the dynamic instability of virtual environments. Focusing on the depictions of metaverses in a broad range of short stories, novels, films and artworks, we will ask what virtual environments tell us about who we are. We’ll examine the rules of interaction in these spaces and ask how ethics shift as avatars interact with avatars, and we’ll consider how artists, activists and educators use these environments toward various ends. Students will analyze a series of films, novels, games and online environments, engage in several online worlds – including World of Warcraft, Second Life, Eve Online and Club Penguin – and create critical scholarly multimedia projects based on this research and analysis.

IML 346: Methods in Scholarly Multimedia
This intermediate course offers IML Honors students a laboratory within which to explore the parameters of scholarly multimedia in preparation for their own thesis projects, while also honing their skills with several tools and media applications. After surveying a host of new directions in scholarly multimedia, including digital storytelling, serious gaming, “hacking” amateur media for scholarly purposes and Web 2.0 tools for media-rich scholarship, the course will help students craft a set of research questions for their own thesis projects, determine an appropriate media platform, and design an initial project prototype.

Shaping Things Graduate Seminar
“Shaping Things” derives from Bruce Sterling’s book of the same title; the book invites ambitious souls to “constructively intervene in the process of technosocial transformation,” a project shared, however indirectly, by Ph.D. candidates within the Media Arts + Practice program. This biweekly seminar supports work in preparation for the written exam project critique.

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Essays

• Video: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  (2009)
• City as Screen / Body as Movie  (2009)
• Real Time Live  (2009)
• Infrastructures in Virtual Learning  (2008)
• Conceptual Vertigo  (2008)
• The Amazing Visual Language of Processing  (2007)
• Toward an Algorithmic Pedagogy  (2007)

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Bio

Short Bio

Holly Willis is Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum. She is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things (Art Center College of Design, 2007), a collection of essays, words, images and fiction that grapples with the potential and design challenges of pervasive computing, and she is the author of New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (Wallflower Press, 2005), which chronicles the advent of digital filmmaking tools and their impact on contemporary media practices. The former editor of RES Magazine, Ms. Willis has written extensively on experimental media practices for a variety of publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California.

Long Bio

Holly Willis is the Director of Academic Programs at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where she teaches, organizes workshops and oversees academic programs designed to introduce new media literacy skills across USC’s campus and curriculum. In particular, she oversees the Multimedia in the Core program, a collaborative effort uniting the School of Cinematic Arts and USC’s College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and designed to offer lab-based multimedia instruction as part of the General Education curriculum.

Ms. Willis is also the editor of The New Ecology of Things (Art Center College of Design, 2007), a collection of essays, words, images and fiction that grapples with the potential and design challenges of pervasive computing. The book is one component within a transmedia publication that brings together cell phone videos, a Web site, and other media elements to embrace new forms of reading, writing and design.

In 2005, Ms. Willis published New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (Wallflower Press), which chronicles the advent of digital filmmaking tools and their impact on contemporary media practices. The book grew out of her experience as editor of RES Magazine, a bimonthly publication devoted to experiments in film, video and new media. During her five-year tenure at RES, Ms. Willis helped redirect and redesign the publication and oversaw the addition of a curated, full-length DVD with each issue. As the co-curator of RESFEST, the company’s acclaimed traveling festival of digital media, Ms. Willis helped program dozens of screenings of music videos and design shorts for an international audience, and was invited to speak about this work at festivals and museums worldwide.

Ms. Willis’ other endeavors include co-founding Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film in 1992, a publication for which she served as West Coast Editor until 1999, when she joined the editorial staff at iFilm. She has also served as an editor and acquisitions team member at Voyager (home of the Criterion Collection); editor for the Web site Really Good Films; and catalog editor for numerous festivals. Her other curatorial endeavors include “New Cities/New Media,” a five-part screening series of videos grappling with urban space; “Race in Digital Space Digital Salon” (co-curated with Steve Anderson), two programs of digital media and live music events exploring issues of race; and “Interactive Frictions” (co-curated with Marsha Kinder), a show of interactive media installations at USC’s Fisher Gallery. She currently co-curates USC’s ongoing “Blur and Sharpen” screening series, held in conjunction with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

Over the last decade, Ms. Willis has also been an active instructor throughout Los Angeles, teaching classes on film, video and new media at the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts and Art Center College of Design, among other schools.

In addition to editing, teaching and curating, Ms. Willis has been a prolific journalist, focusing on experimental media art. She has interviewed more than 300 film and video artists and chronicled developments in digital media over the last decade, contributing to a wide range of publications, including artist’s catalogs, Web sites, essay collections and magazines.

Ms. Willis holds a Ph.D. in Critical Studies in Cinema-Television from the University of Southern California; her dissertation was on experimental media practices by women. She is currently working on a second Ph.D. dissertation at the European Graduate School; her topic is reconceptualizations of space, time and the body in contemporary media.

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Contact

Holly Willis
Institute for Multimedia Literacy
746 West Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

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