Video and digital media arts in the 21st century: theory, discourses and practices

The recent history and developments of video and digital media arts have been marked by a series of so-called “turns.” While the beginning of the 21st century witnessed a “documentary turn,” the second decade gave rise to a “temporal turn.” More recently, an environmental turn seems to have taken hold of contemporary art, including video and digital media arts. This seminar will explore these artistic waves and map out the theories and discourses that have shaped video and digital media arts of the last two decades with the objective of understanding how these practices intertwine with our cultural and historical present. Thematically structured, the seminar will address, in particular, the following topics: the documentary, the temporal, the sublime, surveillance and biases, global economy, infrastructure, realism, climate change, and human-nonhuman interactions. Through discussions and analysis of texts and artworks, we will learn to situate the latter both aesthetically and conceptually within a larger theoretical framework and to distinguish the contemporary traits of current video and digital media practices.