Skip to content

LAR-782P Media Landscapes

3 Credits

Media Landscapes explores landscape as medium through which vision and its accompanying technologies of sensing create political and ecological realities. Starting in the archives, students will re-collect a 16mm film depicting a 20th century US infrastructural project alongside corresponding textual records, in order to track the image of the 'American Landscape' as an exportable commodity, another kind of infrastructure project. Such inventions were created to be mobile, travel abroad and cross borders in order to establish a planetary rule to support extractive capitalism. As infrastructures simultaneously crumble upon and exacerbate the chaotic grounds of ecological change, how might the American Landscape be reconciled? Students will address this question by learning to re-mediate the original archival film and textual records, creating a short film, as a method for the re-mediation of the American Landscape. What design configurations can be imagined through cinematic vision that can be shared historically and methodologically between film and landscape?