Digital Arts Summer Odyssey
2007 Exploration Seminar in Tunisia and Sicily

Program Directors: Cynthia Caci & Noel Paul
Dates of Instruction: August 20 - September 14, 2007

The experience of travel begins with the premise that one is first and foremost a stranger in a strange land.  Authors such as T.E. Lawrence and Byron drew on the history, art, and mythology of the cultures they visited as the backdrop to their own travels, observations and literary works. Artists and writers across the millennia have had formative experiences in traveling amidst other cultures and geographies.

The Summer Odyssey is a peripatetic journey through the cultural nexus of Sicily and Tunisia, in which students will produce a document—both written and filmic—of their experience in the tradition of the great travel writers from Marco Polo to Robert Kaplan. Tunisia and Sicily form both a fascinating contrast and a striking similarity.   Together they are the bottleneck of the Mediterranean, the crossroads of East and West, North and South, Christianity and Islam.  For 3000 years the region has been inhabited by a succession of empires and cultures in collision; a trend that continues to this day

Participants will be taken on an intense journey across history and culture.  Lessons will take the form of participatory adventures, site visits, peripatetic lectures, and curious assignments.  In-country journaling will provide the notes to guide a post-immersion workup of a final travel journal.  In addition, students will work together to create a film of their experience.  Armed with small personal video cameras, students will furnish the footage in a decentralized fashion.  The film will be assembled during fall quarter, after the travel is completed.  This film will be a travel document, but not a documentary in a didactic sense.  Rather it is the filmic equivalent of participants’ travel journals.

Applicants should be energetic and adventurous undergraduates who are interested in developing skills as observers, listeners, writers, and filmmakers.  They should be ready for a rigorous schedule of travel, able to pack light, and prepared to learn the best practice of respect for other cultures.  Students will receive 5 credits of DXARTS credits at the 400-level or CHID 471 Europe Study Abroad, and be encouraged to take another 5-credit 400-level post-production course during the Fall of 2007.


Student costs:  
$2,700 Program Fee
$200 IPE Fee
Additional costs include:Round trip air/travel to Palermo, some meals, personal spending money, immunizations and insurance.

Back to 2007 Exploration Seminar List of Programs