FMSA 314: Core Studio: Experimental

This studio course will serve as an exploration of what are broadly understood as experimental film and video practices. Encompassing structural film, eco-approaches, amateur, found film, diary or personal film, underground, surrealist, queer, activist and handmade cinema, poetic, DIY, avant-garde, and embodied making, this course engages with media forms as material and considers cinema as process and exploration, rather than as product or professional mastery. Students will engage with the history of works that have challenged dominant modes of operation and explore the evolution of media structures with a critical eye. Class activities include screenings and discussion, hands-on workshops, exercises, improvisations, challenges, individual and collaborative projects, assigned readings, and short reflexive responses and exercises. Working with a wide range of analogue film, video and digital media, students will employ a variety of approaches and emergent philosophical frameworks. Students are asked to play, engage in creative risk-taking, encounter perspectives outside their own, challenge themselves, transgress convention, get uncomfortable, experiment with new concepts and techniques, discover new artistic identities, to practice and think critically about modes of media production and consumption. In addition to a series of process-based explorations, students will develop projects which are grounded in personalized approaches and practices. Students will engage in concept development and visual research and create a written articulation of their work which includes historical reflection, contemporary context, and considerations of reception and the cinematic footprint. Some of the project work is collaborative, developing students' multidisciplinary, team-working and project management skills.