Digital technologies and increasingly powerful software have made strategies of appropriation a standard form of creative expression online and throughout mainstream culture. They have also revived old debates about intellectual property, authorship, and the experience of (post)modernity. This interdisciplinary course traces the roots of contemporary practices of appropriation, piracy, and remix across media. Focusing on moving-image appropriation (cinema, television, videotape, and internet video), this course also draws examples from painting, photography, music, literature, and new media, at once charting the trajectories of appropriation as an aesthetic and political practice and drawing connections between disparate historical contexts. Emphasizing the moving image’s unique status in a history of media appropriation, the course also exposes students to a wide range of major works, themes, and aesthetic currents in twentieth century Western art and explore their contemporary variants and mutations. Placing archival documentaries alongside experimental found-footage films and videos, the course also looks at a wide range of parallel currents in other media, including conceptual poetry, hip-hop, Pop Art, animated GIFs, and game-hacking. [M, C, & S tracks]

Digital technologies and increasingly powerful software have made strategies of appropriation a standard form of creative expression online and throughout mainstream culture. They have also revived old debates about intellectual property, authorship, and the experience of (post)modernity. This interdisciplinary course traces the roots of contemporary practices of appropriation, piracy, and remix across media. Focusing on moving-image appropriation (cinema, television, videotape, and internet video), this course also draws examples from painting, photography, music, literature, and new media, at once charting the trajectories of appropriation as an aesthetic and political practice and drawing connections between disparate historical contexts. Emphasizing the moving image’s unique status in a history of media appropriation, the course also exposes students to a wide range of major works, themes, and aesthetic currents in twentieth century Western art and explore their contemporary variants and mutations. Placing archival documentaries alongside experimental found-footage films and videos, the course also looks at a wide range of parallel currents in other media, including conceptual poetry, hip-hop, Pop Art, animated GIFs, and game-hacking. [M, C, & S tracks]