Landscape Projections

Catalog description

“Landscape Projections” is an advanced production course exploring landscape as a medium, predominantly through the lens of time-based media. “Projections” implies cinematic presentation, but we will expand this idea of projection (from Latin projectio(n-), from proicere ‘throw forth’), exploring ideas around forecasts, mappings, visions, and transmission, as we consider a wide range of artists and filmmakers re-envisioning both the natural and manufactured landscape through cinematic geographies and spatial practices. From the city to the wilderness, to wastelands and borderlands, we will look to painting, literature, film, video art, land art, sound walks, and experimental geography, among other forms. Within these historical and contemporary works, we will consider ideas of the sublime within natural and industrial landscapes, poetic representations of inner landscapes, film as spatial critique, narratives of displacement, the unearthing of repressed memories and hidden histories, post-human ecologies, as well as contested territories of colonization and exploitation of the earth and its people. Through screenings, readings, discussions, journals, presentations, and individual “landscape sketches” (film, video, sound, writing, or other media), the class will engage deeply with the topic of landscape, culminating in a final project. This course is dual-listed with DMS 542.