Increasingly, viewers are turning
into users of the moving image. We shoot stills and videos
with the same handy instrument, and form communities as
we share them. We download and change, record and edit
image and sound on portable devices and home computers
even as we immerse ourselves in networks of reception.
The audio-visual entity now forms a sphere of communication
as well as an open archive. It takes on the form of
notes and scribbles, diary and letter, private reflection
and public protest. Proliferating informal practices
of film, word and music have created a language in which
we have begun to make ordinary conversation. But this conversation is more rhetorical than ordinary
languages. We have also begun to create aesthetic entities
on an unprecedented scale. With the digital tool we
create art ordinarily.
The university will be incomplete without a space
where such activities are allowed into the domain of
knowledge production.
The Media Lab extends the
work of the Department of Film Studies into the new
media reality. It hosts archiving, research and
training, but in forms that are not normally explored
in our academia. It hopes to bring together the skills
of the scholar and the artist, the critic and the activist,
into one process of creative learning.
The idea is to make an intervention in the expanding
realm of the image by enhancing exposure and skill,
by providing access to films and texts, by providing
the machinery and software for experimental production,
by hosting interactions between scholars, artists and
technicians. Critical theory and hands-on work are brought into a unified practice of knowledge, something
that has normally eluded Film Studies.
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