Critical Studies: Ecstatic Experience: Experimental Film & Video History/Theory

9 units · Undergraduate

All Semesters: 9 units An Ecstatic Experience is the name of Ja'tovia Gary's six-minute film made in 2015 that takes the idea of "ecstasy" and flips it on its head — implying a radical reversal of pain and suffering into an affirmation of resistance and freedom. This seminar focuses on complex, risky experiments within both historical and contemporary practices of experimental video and filmmaking in which ideas about the ecstatic are explored across filmic and new media materiality, immersion, duration, sound design and mark-making. Reaching back to the kinds of ecstatic models used during the sixties and seventies, fluctuating between feverish dream-states, psychedelic trips, orgiastic burlesques, impassioned revolutionary plans (Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, Ben Van Meter, Carolee Schneemann, Kenneth Anger, Stan VanDerBeek, Black Audio Film Collective), and racing forward to the legacy of that period, we will view and discuss a vast range of artists, such as New Red Order, Wu Tsang, Peggy Ahwesh, Leslie Thornton, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ja'tovia Gary, Cauleen Smith (just to name a few). Questions we will explore include: What does it mean to experiment? How have temporal, spatial and political parameters shifted? What new models have problematized and replaced earlier ecstatic models of media-inspired social change and experimentation?