080005 VU B620 Gesellschaft: Audio-Visual Media and Embodiment: (2021S)

The course aims to trace the sensory experience acquired through the use of audio-visual recording technologies that have been transforming our everyday lives. Recognizing the agency of both human and non-human actors in this relationship, we will revisit the history of media technologies while focusing on their performative capacities, and their effects on the human body, senses, and emotions. Media technologies will be approached as an extension of the embodied subject with its racial, gendered, and socio-economic issues.

Theoretical approaches to embodiment and audio-visual technologies will be drawn from film, media and cultural studies, sensory ethnography, and post-humanism. The practical aim of the course is to conduct research on our daily lives under the influence of digital media technologies -especially under the conditions of the pandemic. Students are encouraged to imagine their online classes as a field of ethnographic interrogation and cultural analysis and expected to create a (multi)media project which could be an ethnographic film, sound work, video or photographic essay. Experimentation with media is welcome!

No previous skills in audio-visual media production are required. The basics will be taught. We will embrace a Do-it-yourself approach and work with the tools we have at our disposal.

The language of the lecture is English. However, students are welcome to conduct their projects in German.