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tags: mdf-report
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# Aden Solway: Media & Design Fellow in Art, Film, & Visual Studies


Media & Design Fellows provide direct support to specific courses, helping students develop and complete multimodal assignments. MDFs also host workshops in multimodal communication, multimodal storytelling, and presentation techniques. They also provide general support to their departments by developing resources and hosting events that support multimodal scholarship.

In this report, you can read about:
* The **training with the Learning Lab** Aden did to get ready to support projects in AFVS
* The **courses and projects** Aden worked on this term

## Learning Lab Training

During MDF orientation in August and throughout the bi-weekly fall MDF meetings, Aden learned:
* how to **design activities, prototype assignments, and create resources** that help students in the particular courses they are supporting.
* a set of **multimodal pedagogy and instructional design best practices** and ways of connecting it to their discipline
* **the affordances of different media** and what students gain, intellectually and analytically, by engaging with those media forms

To get ready to support AFVS courses, the **tools** that Aden specializes in include:
* **cameras, lights, and other filmmaking tools** that we use to illustrate cinematic principles that could be useful for students' video essay and other film projects
* **Final Cut Pro**, a video editing tool used for video essays and other film projects
* **AI tools**, including custom GPTs, Stable Diffusion, Fluxus, and other multimodal AI APIs

## Course Support
Media & Design Fellows provide direct support to specific courses, helping students develop and complete multimodal assignments. MDFs also host workshops in multimodal communication, multimodal storytelling, and presentation techniques.

### AFVS 99: Senior Tutorial
Aden will support this course by:
- **Designing and facilitating documentation workshops** about using media forms—like 3D modeling or photography—to document (or maybe even use in the production of) their art.
- These workshops will address the specific interests of the current cohort of students in AFVS 99 and might also open up to other undergraduates and graduate students as well.
- Through this project, Aden will help AFVS concentrators prepare their senior thesis portfolios and think about representing and publicizing their artistic work after graduation, while also helping students make informed choices about the media and forms they use in their artistic practice.

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## Department Support
Media & Design Fellows provide general support to their departments by developing resources and hosting events that support multimodal scholarship.

### AI in Art-Making Resource
Continuing on Julia Sharpe’s MDF project from last academic year, Aden is exploring existing AI tools and workflows that could be used in one’s artistic practice. This exploration will culminate in a **resource** that can be shared with members of the department—faculty, concentrators, graduate students-who are interested in using AI to augment or document their work. Aden's first resource focuses on the tool Fluxus and used Aby Warburg photographs for a test case.

### Print Histories Workshop for AFVS Students
AFVS students encounter artists’ books as objects of study and as a potential form that they can use to present their work.

To help graduate and undergraduate students in the department learn the formal affordances of print media and to gain hands-on experience producing artists’ books, Aden is developing a series of workshops that will:
- **Introduce students to the history of artists’ books**
- For this workshop, Aden will partner with AFVS faculty Laura Frahm, who wants to integrate this workshop into her VFS Writing Seminar
- **Demonstrate technical tools** that could be used to design and print artists’ books
- **Offer a workshop** where students collaboratively design a small publication, first in a physical format and then in a digital format.