Bethan Hughes
/How can artists co-opt, reframe, and decontextualise the aesthetic language of emerging technologies to tell a different story? /
Prevalent narrative threads spun by the makers / producers of many emerging technologies interweave optimism, optimisation and advancement. These technologies, their marketing departments tell us, are the solution to the polycrises that society faces, a key to the betterment of health, wealth and planet. The slick visions that companies create and share across online video and social media platforms to promote their wares are typically one-dimensional: The dark underbelly of techno-capitalist ambition — the exploitation of land and labour — remains hidden from view.
Where private-public partnership underpins the development of many new technologies, the line between political propaganda and marketing tool is increasingly blurred.
In this course we will investigate and develop artistic tactics of reappropriating found footage in order to develop new narratives.
We will study and gather both archival and contemporary examples of moving image production about technological advancement, considering it from ethical, aesthetic and political perspectives.
We will then experiment with various simple but powerful creative techniques — video collage, editing, captioning — allowing us to dream up realities that lie beyond technosolutionism.
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