ARTS 225: Video ecologies
Prof. Sarah Rara

This studio course in video art investigates human connection with fraught landscapes and multi-species worlds, developing strategies by which our environment is witnessed, created, and negotiated through videographic acts. Video ecologies consider our environment as relational and invested with notions of identity. What can passionate immersion in our environment as apprehended through the senses (including and beyond vision) reveal about historical and lived experience, and the embodied effects of global capitalism? How might video serve to open up new understandings, relationships, entanglements, accountabilities? This course will critically examine socio-political and personal dimensions of ecology through readings and discussion engaging with environmentalism, intersectional feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism. With in-depth instruction on technical and conceptual strategies used in video art, the emphasis of the course will be on the creation of an original body of work that includes several short video assignments and a substantial final video grounded in research on a specific ecological subject chosen by the student. In-class tutorials provide hands-on experience with lens-based production strategies in the context of historical and contemporary examples of video art that explore the land as a site for multiple temporalities, inter-species relationships, contamination, precarity, survival, and ruin.

'Shoes, Socks, Feet'

Samori Etienne

Spring 2021

RT ~3:59, color, sound

This video is an exploration of shoes, socks and feet in contact with ground. It is about the matter on which we stand and the matter that brings us into contact with it.

'RITUALS'
Kristen Chou

Spring 2021

RT 8:03, 4k video, color, sound

This video depicts the daily rituals of five of my friends, encompassing a wide variety of routines such as quilting, morning tea, singing in the mirror, bullet journaling, and taking care of plants. I hope the comfort of these routines radiates out towards the viewer, providing a look into mundane parts of the day otherwise unbeknownst to strangers.

'Me and the Microbes that Kiss my Face'
Ella Napack

'Untitled'
Elijah Goldberg
Spring 2021