What does it mean to make moving images in the information age?  How do we critically engage the traditions of media practices while pushing beyond established forms?  What responsibilities do media artists and producers have to their subjects and audiences?  In Mediaworks, students will engage with these and other questions as they gain skills in film/video history, theory, critical analysis and media production.

We will explore a variety of media modes and communication strategies, including animation, documentary, audio art and experimental film/video, emphasizing the materiality and specific artistic properties of film, digital video and other sound and moving image media, as well as the various strategies that artists and media producers have employed to challenge traditional or mainstream media forms.  Our emphasis will be on experimental and/or alternative conceptual approaches to production that include non-fiction, autobiography, audio-visual essays, and strategies of image and sound production using digital video, film, and sound in live-action and animation.  Students will also have opportunities to extend their media experiments into performance and installation modes.

In fall and winter quarters, students will acquire critical and technical skills as they work collaboratively and individually to explore different ways to design moving image works, execute experiments in image-making and sound, and “read” films and video tapes.  Students will strengthen critical and conceptual skills as they learn to analyze visual material, and negotiate the politics of representation through readings in media criticism, film theory and history, seminars, research and critical writing.  Students will integrate this theoretical material into their media practices as they develop skills in pre-production planning, drawing, animation, cinematography, multimedia, film and digital video, audio, and post-production techniques.  Artist statements and project proposals will be developed in preparation for individual or collaborative projects that will be produced in the spring.

Throughout the year, students will participate in regular critique sessions.  Critiques are another form of collaboration, in which we help each other to evaluate and improve our work.  Therefore, it is vital that all Mediaworks participants strive to create a supportive, critically engaged learning community in which issues can be aired and productive collaborations can occur.  If you join Mediaworks in 2007-2008, we ask you to commit to that and to these additional program expectations:  year-long enrollment; full participation; collaboration; integration of theory and practice; and openness to the exploration of a range of media formats, genres and styles.