ART 354 - Performing Mediation (Video Art, 1960-2000)

Video art began with artists turning the camera on their own bodies and their own studios. But far from being a privatized art form, the video medium implicates various popular media, including home video, cinema, television, and, more recently, webcams and online video. We will study the aesthetic precursors of video art as well as the histories of the popular media with which video art is historically and technologically enmeshed. Central to our discussions will be questions of media as well as questionings of embodiment, focusing particularly on gender and race. We will look at a wide range of video practices (analog, digital, closed-channel, broadcast, networked). We will watch videos together in class, but students should also expect to spend time each week watching videos outside of class.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): ART 201
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2023-24
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).