In the second half of the term, students will work on final projects that develop their own experiments in time - in text, sound, video, code, or some combination of these. These may be creative or analytical projects, or a mixture of the creative and analytical. Projects may consist of a piece of creative writing; an art project in still or moving images; the imitation or annotation of an author’s, artist’s, or filmmaker’s work; an essay examining how social media and other digital platforms (Twitter, Facebook, flickr, Photosynth, IM, message boards, chat sites, etc.) reproduce and evoke a shared sense of present time. Students present their projects in one of final two sessions of class.
In the first iteration of the subject, the final projects for 21L.325 were diverse and exciting. Students examined the evocation of present time in photographs, taking MIT and its population as subjects; sketched the individual moments of campus life over a 24-hour period; created a website for the analysis and annotation of photographs; and wrote essays exploring philosophical conceptions of present time and the moment.
Student Work
| STUDENT | ASSIGNMENTS |
|---|---|
| MIT Student | Sketching the Present (PDF - 5.0MB) (Courtesy of MIT Students. Used with permission.) |
| MIT Student | 1000 Words is Nothing: The Photographic Present in Relation to Informational Extraction (PDF) (Courtesy of MIT Student. Used with permission.) |
