Proteus Digital Initiative Archive

From 2004 to 2012, the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies hosted a web initiative—PROTEUS— to document work in new and emerging media and communication in the FAU community. The following overview introduced the Proteus website:

Overview

PROTEUS is a partner in the exploration, development, and understanding of new content forms across diverse spheres of activity, including journalism, education, the arts, and entertainment. Proteus engages with both mainstream and alternative media, and bridges the concerns and tactics of artistic, activist and industrial models of production.

Proteus is designed with three interrelated objectives:

  • To explore the unique communicative and creative parameters of new media
  • To keep pace with journalism's continued evolution
  • To consider the role of new media at the intersections of varied culture-industries including art, education, information, and entertainment

Proteus brings together researchers, theorists, and practitioners from art, communication, engineering, and computer science, in the interest of expanding the language, art, culture and theory of interactive narrative.

One of the primary roles of Proteus is the imagining and testing of innovative communicative forms, providing templates for 21st century "publications" and new media works that uniquely merge textual, visual, and aural components in a manner that will engage media handlers and their audiences both linearly and associatively. The objective is to provide models for managing multiple content channels to a diverse number of media organizations and media makers. Proteus is a partner in the exploration, development, and understanding of new content forms across diverse spheres of activity, including journalism, education, the arts, and entertainment. Proteus engages with both mainstream and alternative media, and bridges the concerns and tactics of artistic, activist and industrial models of production.

Proteus brings the real-world needs and concerns of media makers and organizations into the research agenda of the University. Proteus hosts a critically and practically engaged research faculty committed to exploring new modes of narrative and new strategies of visualization; faculty work across the historical, critical and practical terrain of print, radio, film, television, and new media.

Proteus is also the home of the Multimedia Practicum, a culminating experience for students in FAU’s B.A. in Multimedia Studies; the practicum brings video, audio, text, animation, and new media to a multifunction School-hosted website that also serves as the gateway to Wavelengths, the School’s classical music radio station webcast. As part of the capstone experience, students design and manage the website, plan and execute the radio program schedule, and create cross-media content, producing works engaged with art, culture, and critical inquiry. The website provides a public framework for student work in broadcast journalism, experimental and documentary video, and new media storytelling.

Proteus Archived on Wayback Machine

Versions of the Proteus site and related initiatives can be found on the Wayback Machine, an internet archiving project hosted by Archive.org: