Video Art, Guerrilla Television, and Alternative Media

Graduate / Professional

Video art has been an important aspect of contemporary art since the 1960s, born out of the increasing pull of mass media on society and alongside the political unrest of the times. A form of moving image unique to the later half of the twentieth century, video is the embodiment of the heterogeneity and repetition that characterize postmodernism, as noted by theorists like Rosalind Krauss and Fredric Jameson. This course places video art within wider cultural, theoretical, and political contexts. Over the course, we trace video and other moving image media as an alternative ecosystem of production, distribution, and exhibition, observing artists, collectives, and movements that have used the technology to communicate, comprehend, and critique the changing media and lived realties of the second half of the twentieth century. Emphasis is the connections between video and corporately controlled media as we examine artists who attempted to provide an alternative vision of mass media through subversive interventions and utopian alternative programming. We also analyze video’s changing place within recent exhibition practices with the increasing presence of documentary modes and works reacting to an increasingly networked and surveilled society since the 1980s. W 1:30pm-3:25pm