1. Introduction In 2022 we applied for funding from the Teaching Innovation Fund to start an Analogue Media Archive. We have used the funds awarded to acquire 18 analogue cameras (with more on our agenda), and to contribute to the running of a project with the third-year Multimedia Design students, which we concluded as a pilot project. The archive is currently housed in the Multimedia Design Department, and we are in discussion with the Faculty to grow the archive into a new space, where a part of it can be on display. The archive was used in our ongoing teaching project on analogue nostalgia, which explores the relevance of analogue media to understand digital technologies, and the nostalgia users of digital media have for the physicality of older media (Caoduro 2014; Niemeyer 2016). The pilot project has given us much to consider, and one of its consequences was the realisation that students need more time with cameras, as the transition to analogue media is very complex. We thus need more cameras (and have already taken steps to acquire funding from the FRC ; we started with nine cameras and have doubled that number). At the outset of the project in 2022, we implemented the approach of “learning by doing” (Dewey in Tishman 2017: 107). As a result of this hands-on approach, the research essays students wrote demonstrated far more proficiency in identifying the characteristics of analogue photography than in years before, since users emulate them in digital media. We will reflect on this in our upcoming conference presentation (see below). In 2023 we will further explore the opportunities the archive offers for a pedagogy of “experimental media archaeology”, as scholars refer to it (Fickers & van den Oever 2022). The archive is then envisioned as a teaching, exhibition, and archival space, where groups of students can use the equipment with lecturers. This means students and staff can have discussions and ‘tinker’ with the equipment through processes of ‘thinkering’. The archive is envisioned as a working laboratory of functioning and useful devices, which are actively experimented with in the teaching of theory and practice of photography and media nostalgia, with possibilities to accommodate diverse curricula in the Faculty. This also offers exciting research possibilities for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Arts and Design. Envisioned 2022 pilot project outcomes • Students become familiar with how analogue photography works by handling cameras and film in producing their own analogue photographs. • Students can make links between analogue photography and its associated aesthetics, and how digital photography has appropriated its formal features in analogue nostalgia. • Students integrate their understanding of academic research on analogue nostalgia and their own practice in digital photography, establishing complex links between theory and practice. Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2022 71
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