The City College of New York
MFA in Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice
The Operative Image: approaches to the political in contemporary moving image practices
Fall 2017
Course Description
What can an image do? How does the image represent? How does the image convey a historical narrative or event? This course will focus on viewing and discussing various contemporary artists’ moving image works that reflect on the political. We will investigate the complexity of media and consider the production and employment of images to reveal both its power and its highly malleable nature. Formal experimentation and innovation will be central to this course. The works presented in class will provide a broad view on artistic political moving image-making, considering experimental approaches to production, the performance and retelling of history, the personal perspective, witnessing, the forensic, postcolonialism, post-ethnography, representation, the Anthropocene among other topics. Many of the works and readings could be considered through the lens of many of the other topic headings. Students are expected to make these connections discursively and in their written responses, and as a group we will weave these topics and approaches together as we make our way through the materials over the semester. The intersection of these topics and approaches should also be reflected in the final projects by the students.