New FAMS Courses Fall 2013
FAMS 343 / ARHA 231 Lost and Found: Appropriated, Recycled and Reclaimed Images
Visiting Professor Levine
Monday / Wednesday 2:00-4:00
From the found-footage experiments of the avant-garde to the digital remixes of the networked age, artists have used pre-existing material to question the ideologies of dominant media, explore technological possibilities or play situationist pranks. With the advent of file-sharing platforms, streaming video and cheap DVDs, we live in an era dominated by what Hito Steyerl calls “the poor image” – low resolution, second- or third-generation images whose quality has been sacrificed for accessibility. The availability of this material has allowed artists to work with economy, speed and to borrow the aesthetics of cinema and television for their own purposes, but it also foregrounds many problematic questions of authorship and ownership.
This course is a hands-on investigation into the practice of recycling, recontextualizing and remixing moving images. We will screen found-footage work, collage films, and remakes in addition to discussing readings by filmmakers, artists, and theorists that will provide ideas and models for our own production. The class will also review the fundamentals of editing and cinematography as we re-edit found images and combine them with our own footage.