This is meant to serve as a brief introduction to my teaching interests and approaches. In my teaching, I share the sensitivities of an ethnographic approach with my students and encourage them to think critically about the shifting terrains of new media. Graphically represented in the sequence below, I am interested interested in studying the shift in layers of content that we are asked to negotiate as audience and participants in this era of digital production. The shift represented here is the spread of individual frames or windows of content from one space to a multitude of layers.

Practically speaking, I have been working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Macau since the fall of 2008. A teaching blog for this coursework can be found here and a tumblr site here. My courses, are designed to weave a historical perspective and critical approaches together with practical instruction in digital production techniques. An example assigment is the “digital eliminations” project wherein students cut out film and televisions characters form the surrounding frame, so as to encourage them to examine both the mise-en-scène, lighting ratios, and explore the material and culture realities that populate the frame.

During my time in Macau, I have also taught a series of workshops on video production wherein students produce short narrative videos around a given theme. “The Fantastic in the Everyday,” and “Modern Folklore,” are themes from the past semesters. Each was designed to encourage students to tell stories drawn from their everyday life. In these workshops, I try to further blur the already overlapping lines between documentary and narrative traditions. I introduce Reality television, single camera sitcoms, and improvised comedies, as representative of a recent shift back to the aesthetics of documentary even if devoid of it’s intent. Similarly, I introduce the work of Tsai Ming-Liiang, Jim Jarmusch, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, and others as approaches to the mundane that simultaneously take advantage of cinema technological abilities to reveal the everyday through the fantastic.

Relevant Links:
youtube user profile
teaching blog
tumblr blog

This is a collection of 3d models inspired by the Munny vinyl toy, textured and designed by students in one of my graphic design classes.

Representative Courses:
Audio Visual III Spring 2009
Video Workshop Year 4 Fall 2008 and Spring 2009
Digital Graphics Design and Production Fall 2008
TOSMI Trainings in Open Source Media Instruments (EU funded trainings in Sofia, Bulgaria and Thessaloniki, Greece)