Time based media John Skoog

Classe Prof. John Skoog

Some notes from Time based media class Mainz

* Film-thinking – The Filmklasse is a constellation of students working interdisciplinary but with a focus on lens- and/or time-based art. However, other materials, medias and textures are used, but what we have in common is using film-history and moving-image culture to decipher the world we live in.
* Horizontal history – Film is a medium with an infinite potential across genres and formats, lengths and production budgets. To honor this realization, the class is attempting to read/watch film-history horizontally, avoiding to only look at what some would call the important or good films.
* Individual works – To construct an individual and personal vocabulary is a struggle we are all dealing with here. To accommodate this, the way the class functions shape-shifts in response to the needs of the work that is being done.
* Collaborative works – How do we learn, and how do we teach each other? To escape these banal questions, binary modes of teaching and outmoded hierarchies, the class collaborates on new work continuously.
* Film as an integral part of art-history – Since it’s invention in the late 19th century film has been a fundamental part of art-history and the class is looking at art history with an understanding that someone like Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman, Luis Bunuel, Lucretia Martel, Tex Avery, Kathryn Bigelow or Agnès Varda is as important to the development of art of the 20th and 21st century as fx. Andre Breton, Isa Genzken, Donald Judd, John Cage or Cindy Sherman.
* Travelling/seeing – The class is also using the placement of Mainz as a reason to “go and see”. Not only exhibitions but also other places of cinematic quality such as factories, video-game developers, flipper museums, “the mountains”, graveyards, shooting-ranges, Märchenwälder-Parks, baroque staircases or a Magritte mural in a Belgian seaside casino.
* Expanded cinema – To us it seems contradictory to define art learning and teaching in writing. Since it’s something that is ever-developing depending on who we are in the class and where we are in the world, and since we are all here because we at some point felt that there are things that are better expressed in other ways than words.