First EMA study abroad course takes students to London

calendar icon28 Sep 2022    user iconBy Kathe C. Andersen

Lincoln, Neb.--Eleven students in the Emerging Media Arts program in the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts traveled to London last May for the study abroad course, “Story Abroad: Future Fictions, London, U.K.,” led by Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts Ash Eliza Smith with Carson Center Founding Director Megan Elliott.

“We were using the city as a kind of laboratory,” Smith said. “The city is very generous with giving lots of material, stories and viewpoints of the world. It was a total immersion out in the streets of London every day.”

The course examined how fiction (and non-fiction) shapes the city, and how the city, in turn, shapes the story. Students attended museums, galleries, historic sites, artists’ studios, artists’ talks and performances. Site visits were interspersed with theme-based prompts that culminated in a final film project completed on a team within 72 hours and screened to the public.

“They were really thinking about the city as a character and time and space,” Smith said. “One day, we gave them a brief that began in Harrod’s, this over-the-top expensive kind of department store. Then, when we finished there, we went to Ridley Road Market, an Afro-Caribbean market in the Hackney East End London area, so they were exploring these ideas of commerce and supply chains, what a market is and having these vastly different experiences.”

Emerging media arts senior Trystan Nord knew immediately that he wanted to take the course.

“I haven’t really traveled much abroad, other than a family trip to Mexico, but to see culturally how that would affect the fiction and how it would affect how we view fiction and storytelling, I thought would be massively interesting and a great experience,” he said.

Students also visited with dancer/artist/technologist/futurist Ghislaine Boddington; toured the creative studios of interaction design and architect Jason Bruges; had workshops with Marshmallow Laser Feast, one of the world’s leading immersive art collectives, and Blast Theory; and collaborated with students from Central Saint Martens’ Narrative Environments program.

Among their other activities were visiting the Tate Museum, Design Museum, Big Ben, Kew Gardens, London Fields Market, Columbia Road Flower Market and Somerset House, and they took an architecture and science fiction tour of London. They even saw some of the Queen’s Jubilee while they were in London.

“I had them journal and write field notes and think about the story-worthy moments of their days through exploring different parts of the city,” Smith said. “Trying to create this process and noting the ways you can mine and cultivate ideas through this kind of practice.”

Emerging media arts senior Sophia Stueven was surprised to find a study abroad experience in her major.

“I always knew I wanted to go abroad, and I thought it wouldn’t be possible because of my major,” she said. “Luckily, they made this program, and I was so grateful to be able to go. I wanted to go to expand my world knowledge. I thought that was very important.”

Among her favorite experiences was the immersive theatre experience by Punchdrunk (Burnt City) at Royal Arsenal and a talk and studio visit with user test with Marshmallow Laser Feast, which led to several emerging media arts students receiving internships to work at the premiere of their immersive piece, “Evolver” at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, including Stueven.

“That was insane,” she said. “Just being able to be face to face with these people wasn’t something I was expecting going into the trip, but it was really exciting. And just being able to see that the artists who are at the top of their class also have their struggles sometimes.”

It was a highlight for Nord, too.

“As somebody who loves medical technologies and medical VR, seeing the art and medical merge in that way was super cool. I loved it,” he said.

For emerging media arts sophomore Hank Ball, of Elmwood, Nebraska, the study abroad course was a chance to experience something new.

“It seemed interesting to me,” he said. “I hadn’t been on an airplane before and have barely traveled. The craziest place I’ve been to is Chicago, which is a nice place. I’m so glad I went. It was so amazing, not just being there in a different country and experiencing so much. I learned so much with the programs that Ash and Megan did. We met a lot of professionals.”

It also helped him to expand his network of peers.

“I had friends in my grade, but this helped me to expand out to other grades,” he said. “It helps me get a lot more friends and more people to work with, making connections that way.”

Thea Lahey, a junior history major, also took the course.

“My Mom [Willa Cather Professor of Sociology Julia McQuillan] told me about it, and I said that sounds fun. I don’t know anything about creating movies. I don’t know anything about any of this, like VR or the new technology stuff. But I really wanted to go to London. There’s so much interesting history there, and I think it’ll just be a very interesting thing, and it really was. It was unlike any other trip I’ve been on before,” Lahey said.

Both of her parents are professors, so she has traveled to Europe before with them.

“Usually, I’m going to the oldest places in whatever city we’re in. It’s very interesting, and I like it,” she said. “But this trip was like the opposite. It was going to what is the newest thing and the emerging media happening. As someone who is interested in old things and historic things, it was very eye opening to see all the stuff that’s happening, but also seeing how much history there is in all of the new things coming up.”

One of the new things they saw was a performance by Punchdrunk, the world’s leading immersive theatre company.

“That was three hours of wandering around this immersive theatre experience,” Smith said. “It was great for some of them to see because we study this in our classes here in the Carson Center, but when you go and actually see it and experience it, it’s a whole different thing. That’s why London was amazing, in terms of an emerging media arts major, just because we do tend to show things as examples. All of a sudden you get dropped in London, and you see four or five things in one day that you’ve only heard about online or you’ve only heard about in class. There, you’re surrounded by emerging media and XR.”

Nord agreed that the experiences in London brought clearer focus to his emerging media arts studies back in Lincoln.

“I think a lot of the Carson students put themselves down almost and say this is a good educational environment, but once we get out to the real world, it’s not going to be like this,” he said. “One thing in London and then in New York [with the Marshmallow Laser Feast internship], I started to realize that the skills that we’re learning are skills that directly translate to things that other artists and creators are doing. We are learning the lingo they are using in the real world. We are actually at the forefront of these experiences and will be well prepared for jumping right into the real world and into the workforce.”

Ball said the Punchdrunk performance was the best experience he’s ever had.

“It was this huge warehouse of what seemed like hundreds of actors. You could just go wherever you wanted and follow whoever you wanted. You could feel the music and all the stuff. It was so amazing. It opened me up to so many different areas of art that I had never thought of before. We all had totally different experiences.”

Lahey wasn’t familiar with immersive theatre and wasn’t sure why everyone else was so excited to participate at first.

“I don’t know what I’m walking into,” she said. “My favorite part was at the end of the evening when we all got together again. We took the tube [subway] home and talked to each other. Every individual had their own experience because we were all immersed in different parts, so we all got to experience something different. We all came together and tried to piece together what was going on. It was so cool.”

For a final project, the students received a prompt to think about the city as character and created a film in 72 hours. They collaborated with performance students from the Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film, who were also in London studying at Shakespeare’s Globe.

“We formed teams that were a mix of emerging media and theatre students,” Smith said.

They each brought a different perspective.

“We wanted them to be just as much in the creation process and to see the ideas where they came from the dancing and acting perspective, and where we were coming from the technological and storytelling perspective,” Nord said. “That flow and mixing of ideas was really fun and just a great space to work in, throw ideas into and to create.”

The students had to work with the idea of the city as a character. They were given a time paradigm and a different space or borough of London to work with.

“They had to use body and voice, and they also had to use a line of text that came from T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’” Smith said. “These films are just fantastic.”

Smith hopes students continue to develop a passion and desire to travel after taking the course.

“One of the subtexts of the course was where do good ideas come from? Where does creativity come from?” Smith said. “Using that city laboratory as a place to create. That’s what traveling and going to new places and experiencing new things gives us.”

She also hopes students learned good networking skills.

“The networking that happens when you travel manifested by our going to Marshmallow Laser Feast, and then some of them immediately were offered paid internships,” Smith said. “That was so exciting. Meeting all these people as you travel that are now in your network forever, it gives you a global perspective.”

Lahey enjoyed getting to know everyone on the trip.

“I really enjoyed just getting to know everyone and experiencing things with them,” she said. “I loved that we lived together and had communal space where we could hang out and talk at the end of the day about what projects we were working on, things we learned or just having a fun time eating different foods. That was really fun.”

Even though she’s not an emerging media arts major, Lahey said she will take some things from the trip back to her own studies in history.

“I hope to work in museums and maybe museum curation or anything like that. I went to so many museums while I was in London, and so many of them were museums I would not normally go to. They were so interesting, and they were so interactive. They were storytelling. And that’s what history is—storytelling. I think that it was just a really interesting way to see how history can be shown or experienced in museums or outside of museums.”

The students also got to experience London.

“That was probably one of my favorite parts since Ash and Megan have both lived in London, at one point,” Ball said. “They had all the places to see. Going to all the little restaurants in different areas and see all the experiences they had for us.”

Ball said the trip was “mind opening.”

“When I came here, I was going to just be a film guy,” he said. “I slowly got opened up to the art aspect of everything. I realized there’s just so many different places you could take EMA [emerging media arts] to instead of just filmmaking. It was probably the best experience of my life, honestly.”

For Stueven, the experience confirmed her career aspirations.

“I just feel a lot more confident in my process and more guided to the art I like,” she said. “I think knowing that there are people out in the world who do more of the immersive and emerging media was more life changing to me than probably anything else. Here in Lincoln, it’s less accepted. If I tell my friends I worked on VR, they’ll be like ‘What?’ But there, everyone knows it. They do it all the time. This isn’t crazy that I’m doing this. That was awesome.”

She also said it was important to her to travel to a city like London that has more diversity than Nebraska.

“That was important for me to be able to go to a place and have more knowledge about countries and their history,” she said. “it’s important to be able to know diversity in that way if you’re going to tell stories because that shapes culture. Being able to tell diverse stories is very important.”

Lahey said study abroad is a good way to get out of your comfort zone.

“This might be scary. I might not know different things,” she said. “But it’s a really great way to let yourself be willing to learn and be kind of vulnerable, but in a really safe and healthy way. You can grow so much.”

The course is planned to be offered again with different countries and topics selected, such as Berlin, Sydney, Buenos Aires, etc. But for now, the Carson Center is planning to offer the course to go to London again in the summer of 2024.