HKUA03611U Kunsthistorie/Visuel kultur/Moderne kultur: Video Art

The course focuses on the premises and cultural implications of the first audio-visual medium that not least in its today's digital manifestations belongs to the dominant means of cultural expression: Video camera modules are in a meantime available in all conceivable technical devices which we use on daily basis. Video cameras, recorders and monitors belong therefore to the key reasons why our globalized cultures in spite of all setbacks seem to maintain their expansion course. The medium of video is, however, hardly understood as a specific medium, because of it appearance in the context of media networks, or as part of a technical or cultural apparatus. But does it make less decisive as in the 1970s? Or can the net art be regarded as video´s ‘natural’ successor?

Irrespective of video’s art-historical, aesthetic and media-theoretical meanings, we are currently confronted with the task of redefining the (inter-)cultural role of the medium of video. Can video be adequately described as a “console of experimental media art” or as a “delivery service of virtual intercourse”? Can video be reduced to an “archive of individual biographies” or perceived as a “cinematograph of the amateur”? Or does video perhaps remains as something more than the sum of its possible attributes?

These are but a few of the many questions to be posed throughout the course, in which most important features, theories, histories and artistic examples from the video realm both international and from Denmark will be presented, analyzed and discussed.

Timetable [can be slightly alterned by including either a guest and/or visiting an actual event]

1.   Veni. Vidi. Video. Introduction and allocation of tasks

2.   Video as reflexive / speculative medium [mirroring]

3.   Expanded Cinema, technology, ecology

4.   Video-guerrilla, activism, feminism

5.   Video semiotics [framing]

6.   Video as medium of monitoring

7.   Video and the critique of representation. Closed Circuit [immediacy]

8.   Video systematic and genealogy. Performative, cinematic and installative aspects

9.   Video as a tool of historical and cultural studies

10. Video as indiscrete medium: Aspects of Online Video

11. Video cultures and video aesthetics today.

12. Video art in Denmark I.

(alternative: Lorella Scacco as guest [cf. http://www.lorellascacco.it/2011/09/06/northwave-a-survey-of-video-art-in-nordic-countries/]

13. Video art in Denmark II.

14. Summary and discussion: Video and Internet art, mirrored by each other