IMS: Intercollegiate Media Studies

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Harvey Mudd College IMS Faculty

Rachel Mayeri

Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Harvey Mudd College

Office: Parsons 1249
607-0461
rachel_mayeri@hmc.edu

My courses in humanities, art, and media studies are intended to promote critical thinking and creative expression. In Media and Democracy, we examine how mass media reflect and exert force upon the culture at large. In the Language of Film we analyze the aesthetic, psychological, economic, and ideological aspects of film. In Video Production, students put media theory to work - creating their own critical and creative media messages. Other courses I teach include: A History of Special Effects (an exploration of techniques and meanings of spectacle in society), Digital Cinema (an intermediate/advanced course in motion graphics and video art), Science and Visual Culture (a critical examination of scientific media), and Documentary: Fact and Fiction (a introductory seminar on contemporary and historical documentary).

I am a Los Angeles-based artist working at the intersection of science and art. My videos, installations, and writing projects explore topics ranging from the history of special effects to the human animal. My videos combine techniques of animation and live action, and experiment with documentary and narrative form. In 2004, I created a video entitled Stories from the Genome, which placed contemporary gene science within a history of speculative theories of reproduction. I have distributed my work along with many other videos by artists and scientists as a touring DVD video show and web site entitled Soft Science. An essay about Soft Science, and information about purchasing the DVD is at Video Data Bank. A chapter on artists' experiments with science documentary is forthcoming in Tactical Biopolitcs , edited by Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip for MIT Press.  Currently, I am producing a series of videos called Primate Cinema. The first is a reenactment of a primate social drama, with Hollywood actors, set in a bar in Chinatown. As a guest curator for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I contributed to a permanent exhibit Miracles and Disasters in Renaissance and Baroque Theater Mechanics. My work has shown at Los Angeles FilmForum, ZKM (Center for Media Art) in Germany, and MoMA/PS1 in New York. More information about my artwork, writing and the Soft Science project can be found at www.soft-science.org.