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Graduate Topics in Film – Screen Dynamics: A Comparative Perspective
240 001 | CCN: 26200
Location: Starr Library 341
Date and Time: M 2:00pm - 4:59pm
4 Units
In recent years, the proliferation and ubiquity of screen across the globe has raised new questions about the ontology, archaeology, and ecology of media. What is a screen? Is it a technical device, a material surface, an optical portal, a spatial construct, or a living environment? Or is it a psychic mechanism, a social interface, a cultural articulation, and a political instrument? How are these questions considered beyond the dominant scope of Europe and North America?
Locating the screen’s deep and plural histories in a variety of settings and arrangements–from religious murals to painted screens, from architectural constructs to optical illusions, from advertising walls to museum installations, from theatrical spectacles to portable media, from surveillance technologies to medical devices–our class will test the limits of a wide range of methodologies from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical race and postcolonial studies, philosophy of technology, and platform, infrastructure, and network studies. We will rethink the screen in expanded and innovative ways and consider the critical purchase regarding its theoretical, historiographical, aesthetic as well as political implications.