First-Year Studies: Outside Cinema: Contemporary Approaches to Video Art Production

This First-Year Studies seminar explores, in depth, the rich world of film/videomaking as artistic expression. Students will participate in a series of assignments, both practical hands-on and through lecture, discussion, and screenings (artist interviews, documentaries, and artist work). We will focus on the “voice” of the individual in the fall semester and the self as it relates to our natural environment in the spring semester. Through a series of short video production projects, we will explore moving-image forms and style that blur the boundaries among narrative, documentary, and abstract filmmaking. There is, by definition, no formula for this kind of work. Rather, this course introduces the language and techniques of film production alongside strategies for the use of film and audio design as creative expression. Fall semester projects will focus on the making of video diaries and first-person works that examine identity and alterity. During the spring semester, we will redirect these concerns to an exploration of our relationship to the natural environment—its aesthetics, politics, and science. For example, if you complete a film based on an avatar’s experience in the fall semester, you might recreate this idea in the spring semester to integrate a particular landscape or to speak to an environmental concern that you have. Over the course of the year, we will look at and analyze the pioneering work of many experimental film/video artists, including Gilliam Wearing, Doug Aiken, Pipolotti Rist, Seoungho Cho, Shaun Gladwell, Corey Archangel, and others. Readings will include selections from several texts, including: Berger’s Ways of Seeing, A.L. Rees’s A History of Experimental Film and Video, Bell Hooks's, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, and M.M. Yvette’s Figuring the Landscape: Experimental Film and the Ecological Movement. The class will also include field trips to several New York City galleries and museums.