Media, Culture & Communication (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
In many political movements, the festive emerges as a major force shaping alternative social practices, forms of gathering, being together, and moving together. These alternative modes of being in collectivity are actively redefining the political. This sense of collectivity becomes particularly evident in the aesthetics of the Global South and its Diasporas. Consequently, this course explores the festive’s role in forming political movements beyond the traditional scope that reduces it to a simple byproduct of social life. It also explores how the pandemic has forced us to reimagine what coming together means. Taking Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics as an initial case, this seminar engages in a detailed interpretation of performances that challenge traditional definitions of both the festive and the political. A wide range of performance practices, such as carnival parties, sound systems, cabaret shows, popular dance styles, artworks, organized slave riots, and indigenous uprisings, shape the modes students will engage in theory and practice. For this course iteration, we will focus on questions around Black and Indigenous relations to carnival performance, structures of mutual aid as festive practice, and how they enact utopian modes of communal life, and how these modes of communal life redefine current understandings of art and politics. The class involves field trips, visits to several performance events, and conversations with artists and organizers who use the festive as a political tool to engage in political action in NYC. Questions regarding race, gender, and class will be directed to the philosophical, anthropological, and historical texts paying close attention to their involvement in the formation of colonial oppression. Performance studies’ methodologies will serve as the guiding mode to articulate these questions.
Class titles vary by section.
The introduction of the video camera into the artist’s studio pushed the boundaries of time-based media beyond its traditional use in cinema and television production to embody technology and narrative as an intimate material process. This video course will explore the various dimensions of video art, including its physical sculptural qualities, its use as a tool for poetic and conceptual gestures, performative approaches, and its role as a spatial dimension in video objects and installations. Video’s ability to collapse an art object through its process, utilizing experimental documentary approaches and research-based methods, enables unique collaborations between artists and disciplines to invent formats such as dance-on-film, poetic essay records, personal and collective social experiments, remote documentary performances, and hybrid forms of audience interaction. Through thematic case studies and assignments, students will develop and produce several video works in the semester, providing them with the art historical context, technical skills, and conceptual framework necessary for creating and installing time-based video art. The course will culminate in a gallery special video installation, emphasizing the audience’s interaction with time-based media within the visual art context of galleries, museums, and site-specific presentations.