This course introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is conceived each year around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus, providing an introduction to the many art and design resources available to students on campus. Students will compare practices from across the fields of visual art, film, dance, theater, music, architecture, graphic design, new media, and creative writing, and explore how different artists respond formally to the central themes of the course, considering how similar questions and arguments are differently addressed in visual, material, embodied, sonic, spatial, and linguistic forms.  

L&S 25 introduces students to key vocabularies, forms, and histories from the many arts and design disciplines represented at UC Berkeley. It is around a central theme that responds to significant works and events on the campus, providing an introduction to the many art and design resources available to students locally. The Spring 2023 course explores the history and future of time-based media art for students of all disciplines. Developed from the mixed media experiments of the 1960s through to new digital and virtual aesthetics of our current moment, time-based media art offers an opportunity to explore cross-pollination amongst many art forms—including cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, performance art, design, and even in literature. In addition to exploring these experiments in form, the course will introduce students to experiments in content, considering how media artists creatively address the pressing issues of our time, from climate change and globalization, to gender identity, racial inequality, and scientific and technological transformations. The course will be offered in Spring 2023 to take advantage of exciting developments on campus and in the Bay Area, including William Kentridge’s artist residency at Cal Performances and exhibitions at BAMPFA, ICA-San Francisco, and the Computer History Museum. It will also expose students to the staff and artworks of the Kramlich Collection, one of most influential private collections of video and media art in the world. Through a series of lectures, workshops, field trips, online tools, and creative exercises, this course will use the most significant time-based media art of the last fifty years to address how art and technology intersect with the key social, aesthetic and educational questions of our culture. This course is a no-experience-assumed immersion in innovation, creativity and critique in video art. Students in the course will be equipped not only to understand the work of individual artists, but also to connect their ideas and intentions to the broader political, social, technological and artistic contexts in which they intervene. Students will consider guiding questions such as: How do these artists challenge us to think differently about visual art and screen culture? How can we use new media art to better understand our hyper-mediated environment? How and why have artists used different forms of visual media? What are the unique technological and economic challenges of preserving and disseminating this sort of art? What is the future of media art, and what can it tell us about the future of media more broadly?

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Requirements class fulfills