AAH 3001 / St. Lawrence University / Fall 2014
Download Syllabus
Video art enables us as practitioners to address the body and consciousness moving through time, experiencing being as duration. Your work throughout this course will use temporal media (video, film, site-specific installations) to construct questions about how your viewer subjectively experiences temporality, constructs memories, and approaches time as what Sanford Kwinter called a “complex, interactive, thick manifold of…durations.” Through our reading and studio work we will begin to think together about what these complexities might suggest for video art practice in the 21st century.
In this course you will learn the basics of video production, and make a commitment to working consistently throughout the semester. This course will provide a space for your personal growth as a video artist, or as an artist responding to and utilizing time as a medium, and therefore the responsibility to generate work and ideas is your own. Through discussions, critiques, readings and screenings, you will be given critical, theoretical, technical, art historical and creative information which will help you to develop the tools necessary to make dynamic, contemporary and insightful video art.
TOPICS
Video as art/video as vernacular. Techniques of propaganda. Music videos and accompanying aesthetics. Surrealism and Dada. Situationist International. Issues of duration. Performance art. Sound art. Role of video in political arena. Documentary traditions in filmmaking, video and photography. Personal history and the imaged Self. Still image sequence. Sound and image. The political implications and uses of collage.
TEXTS
Auster, Paul; Karasik, Paul - City of Glass ISBN: 0312423608 Picador
Mondloch, Kate. Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art
Video art class collaborative installation on facade of SLU Library building.
