www.campusreform.org: A new course at Carnegie Mellon's School of Art is requiring students create a new genre of pornography or sexual fetish that will be graded on the basis of arousal.
Internet Resistance, according to the online syllabus, is a course where students “develop terrible ideas for the networked society” and discuss “critical issues in cyberculture.”
4 comments:
No comments? Wow, ok. Well, I guess that regardless of the blatant explicit nature of this assignment, it would be a very interesting thing to study, to say the least. I could see that it would be uncomfortable, but I’m sure that can be remedied for the students who wish not to participate. For those who do, however, I see no problem in looking into the cultural aspect of fetish porn as long as it connects back to art in some way, which knowing this school it must have to. Seriously, if every year the graduating class strips naked and streaks the Chosky stage than consenting adult students can do this project. I’m just surprised that nobody has heard of this project, I feel like it’s something that I would have heard of before I looked through the blogspot articles. I would say that I’d be interested in hearing about what these students discover or create, but in honestly I really don’t think I’d want to.A
Woah. I'm all for this. Let's push boundaries, let's explore topics that are publicly regarded as taboo. Of course, I have about a million questions. The most prevalent one seems to be how do you measure arousal? I mean, I don't think it's an all or nothing scenario. I imagine arousal being kind of spectrum. Furthermore, how do students go about creating a porno? Are there some kind of university rules about committed sexual acts on film? Here in Drama, we definitely don't keep it PG, but there are guidelines on nudity and sexuality for the stage. Are there some kind of precautions set in place for the actors in the film should the project get leaked? I mean, this is obviously for a class project, but everyone might not realize this if they stumble across it on the internet one day in the future. Overall, their main theme of "How can I come up with something new when everything has been done?" is a evocative question and one we should definite pursue here. Classic shows, like, I don't know, Much Ado about Nothing, have been done hundreds and hundreds of times. How can we make this production different?
Really interesting concept for a class -- like Katie, I'm in a bit of a 'woah' moment myself for the candid nature of the article. Who knew Carnegie Mellon could be so bold? However, I'm not sure if taking pornography (though a substantial medium with a broad range of seemingly attractive topics for audience to choose from) and making it the platform for how we teach students how to reform an old topic in new ways is a good idea. Perhaps I'm being a bit too much of a hard-core feminist, but the idea of people thinking up ways to subject women (though pornography can also subject men) in even more disgusting ways makes me a bit sick. But of course I understand the meaning behind the lesson, and I think it's an important lesson to learn. Not to mention when you put pornography in a class description you'll have hundreds of eyes at your beck and call. College students want to take classes that are both interesting and out of this world -- for an experience. And how more diverse an experience can you get than trying to create a new type of porn?
Okay, I will give them this- it’s bold, it’s exciting, it’s more interesting than math problems. However, I wonder how necessary this exact assignment was to the lesson they are trying to teach. It says that the assignment is supposed to give the students experience in finding something new in a tapped market, but was there really no other way to do this? It says in the article that there is a conceptual version of the assignment for those uncomfortable with creating porn. What, Carnegie Mellon? If you know people are going to be uncomfortable becoming pornography producers for a class, why assign this? I also find it very frustrating that the grading rubric for this assignment is, “Did it cause arousal?” What? Did it cause arousal? Whose arousal? And how do we measure that kind of thing? If you mean to tell me a student’s grade is going to be based on the number of erections his or her research can produce, you can count me out of this one.
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