Proposed Course
The history of video keeps repeating one pattern: artists play inside a new system, use that play to interrogate the corporations and platforms absorbing it, then go on living inside the resulting condition long after the technology stops feeling new. Video ran that cycle from broadcast through the internet, and the cycle is running again with generative systems, where a dataset or a model becomes not only a tool but a collaborator. This is a post-AI condition rather than a clean break from what came before.
Students test the cycle firsthand across four assignments. The vulnerability of early single-channel confessions is tested through the supercut and the seamless loop. Questions of gender, power, and identity, as video moved into broadcast and surveillance, are tested through a portrait assignment. The absorption of video into the internet itself, from webcam performance to algorithmic curation, is tested through a found-footage assignment that reframes material already circulating online. The final assignment returns to origins: one minute of labor recorded in a single unbroken shot, with no cuts, no staging, no narration, and no model in between. What does an unedited shot still reveal, now that a century of editing and a decade of generative systems have both found new ways to obscure it?