Socio-Political Video Feeds: from Performance to Propaganda

Catalog description

This course will offer techniques for producing performances and multi-media broadcasts via video conferencing platforms. We will consider the politician’s use and abuse of performing arts and media strategies. Assignments, screenings and readings will trace the lineage of political performance and its mediation from François Delsarte’s 19th century system for oratorical expression to current live-feed montaging used in American political campaigns. Taking into account the use of visual mediation in both process and propagandistic product, we will look at how scientific management techniques such as stop motion filmmaking are used to maximize the effect of the politician’s every gesture and word. As live performances have shifted to online platforms in our quarantine era, how do we incorporate changing notions of liveness and social cohesion into artistic and political practice? We will examine the influence of the improvisational acting style promoted by reality TV to produce bombastic, and hence entertaining performances. In our public discourse authenticity is now associated with improv acting as opposed to traditional methods of rehearsing lines to be performed, now regarded as phony. Exploring the increasing use of Zoom, Instagram live and Tiktok by theater, dance and visual artists, we will analyze the impact of pre-recorded versus live stream video, as well as the appropriation of surveillance techniques inherent in these new media.