(a work in progress)

 >project credits



This project is both an experimental model for demonstrating the unique educational possibilities of interactive digital media, and a specific course on Russian modernism. Since this historic movement generated many concepts pivotal to hypertexts, our courseware emphasizes lines of continuity between the so-called "new media" and old media that emerged at both ends of the 20th century.
Students enter the course’s innovative structure through an avant-garde painting that explodes into navigable material objects, which influenced the experience of everyday life. They stroll like flaneurs through a material culture zone represented by a 3-D model of an historic arcade in Moscow. Here they gain access to three other sections of the course:

Pathways – Six interactive lectures weave together a rich array of transdisciplinary materials. These lectures focus on Nothingness, Velocity, The City, The Bomb, and The Tango.
The Archive – Students have access to hundreds of images, texts, posters, gramophone records and other rare items from USC’s Institute of Modern Russian Culture. These vintage materials are organized into databases, which other sections draw on and recontextualize for their respective narratives.
The Game - At the center of the course is a role playing game called Montage: A Russian History Game for the Masses. Here students immerse themselves within key moments of Russian history. The entry into the game is through the 1896 Expo at Nizhny Novgorod, where Russians and other Europeans came to experience a vision of the newly emerging 20th century. The 3-D recreation of this expo is based on hundreds of rare photographs from the New York Public Library. Here is where the Lumiere Brothers exhibited their new invention of cinema, the first time that movies were seen in Russia.