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 and discursive waves and engage with the theories that inform them with the objective of understanding how the mediality of art illuminate our cultural and historical present. Thematically structured, the seminar will address, in particular, the following topics: human-nonhuman interrelation; the aesthetic of the sublime; archive and the temporal turn; documentary art; participation; surveillance; artificial intelligence; ecology, and more. 

The main goals of the seminar are 

to map the main themes and turns relevant to contemporary video and digital media arts in the 21stcentury,
to situate relevant concepts and themes within larger discussions in the humanities, and
to reflect critically on subject areas in the field of video and digital media arts. 
Mandatory weekly readings will serve as the basis for discussions. Students are expected to come prepared for exploring, questioning, and analyzing together the relation between texts, images, and artworks.