Learning Objectives
The module aims at combining technical skills, artistic approaches as well as theoretical foundations to inform and inspire students' practice to work with images through these three complementary approaches. Following the idea of control and subversion through thematic weeks, students will be offered practical workshops, theoretical lectures as well as guest inputs from and about artists, technologists, designers, scholars and curators.
Students will acquire concepts of photography theory and media studies, and will learn creative programming skills, while developing critical and artistic approaches to image technologies and their role in physical and networked spaces.
Content
Photography has played a major role historically in perpetuating and enabling social control through practices of surveillance, forensics and analysis. Throughout this module, students will first learn about image-based strategies for control that are put in place in public and networked spaces. From CCTV cameras to face recognition technologies on Instagram filters, students will learn to critically engage with hidden logics of control, and how they shape identities and behaviours through photographic technologies.
The course will offer a series of artistic positions that subvert, disrupt and ultimately reclaim control of these spaces, including sousveillance strategies and extended documentary practices. Artistic examples will be accompanied by practical tutorials with the goal to teach students skills related to a number of image technologies: from AR in urban spaces to face filters, from appropriating CCTV cameras to creative coding. Each student will experiment with a range of different approaches to misuse, challenge, and disobey image control and reclaim both physical and virtual spaces through interventions experienced during the module.
Course language
English
Lecturers
Marco De Mutiis, Leonardo Angelucci
