Societies have always been shaped more by

the nature of the media by which men

communicate than by the content
of the communication…Marshall McLuhan

VIDEO NARRATIVE
HUAS 6393-001
Friday 12:30 to 3:15
Thomas Riccio, Professor, Performance and Aesthetic Studies
Office #972.883.2016 (voice mail)
Thomas.riccio@utdallas.edu
www.thomas-riccio.net

Course Description
The class founded on the premise that we are living in an emerging and immersive
global mythology facilitated video mediated narratives. The course is arranged in three
phases. 


Phase One, Externals: Will examine the history, language, nature, contexts, and role
video plays in our everyday lives. Explored will be how the foundational language of the
cinema has been transcribed into the populist medium of video and has come not only
pervade the way we view the world around us, but also how we view our own lives. This
exploration will include the multiple ways by which video constructs history, memory,
culture, identity, and the imagination 


Phase Two, Internals: Will examine how our video inscribed lives, have become part of
an immersive narrative changing the nature and perceptions of reality and the
construction of the modern personality. Our experiences of reality are mediated
externally and now internalized to the point that one can imagine their existence as a
series of narrative arcs, character types, and tracking shots. Voyeurism and capitalism

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are everywhere the imagination can reach; how has the power of commercial television
shaped collective memory and the emerging world narrative, its structure and content?
Phase Three, Reaction: Finally, the class itself will become the content and context.
Though a series of exercises with a video camera, students will explore and express
their inherited video cultural heritage and the video narratives that live within them.


Note: Students need not have previous experience with video or a camera to take the
class. 
Themes that will inform the course will include: video as art, surveillance,
narcissism, record, visual obsession, and communication. Genres examined will be the
expressions of, news broadcasting, home movies, commercials, the training film, reality
TV, formula Hollywood movies, independent filmmaking, and web diaries/broadcasting,
and their attempt to decentralize the power base (who controls the image and narrative?)
will also be examined as an act of political activism.

Student Learning Objectives

Video Narrative is an artist/scholar course. The course is part studio with practical
exercises and requirements, part lecture, part demonstration, and part theoretical. Thatʼs
the field of video narrative and Video art. The objective of the course is to give the
student an overview and understanding of video narrative as it relates to aesthetics,
history, culture and mythology. An understanding how video narrative---in its full scope
and dimension—has become the dominant global narrative. Strategies for how the
student/artist lives and works within this narrative will be offered and practical exercises
exposing and exploring video narrative will inform the course as to enable the student to
position their own artistic and intellectual perspectives.

Required Textbooks
Simularca and Simulation 
Jean Baudrillard 
University of Michigan Press 


T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Paperback) 
Hakim Bey,

Autonomedia 


Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, Doug Hall & Sally Jo
Fifer, editors, Aperture/BAVC 


The Broken Screen: Twenty-five Conversations, 
By Doug Aitken, DAP press

Course Requirements/Evaluation Criteria

This course requires the active participation of all students.
• Completion of required reading and active discussion of material and issues raised
by the course.
• A workbook documenting the studentʼs Video narrative class readings, class notes,
and exercises.
• The course will include a number of in and out of class exercises.
• The course will end with the presentation of a group or individual Video Narrative
projects.

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GRADING
1000pt scale
Exercises 50%
Participation 10%
Manifesto 05%
Workbook 10%
Final project 25%

1. Late or incomplete work is not acceptable

2. Incompletes will not be given in this class
3. Plagiarism and cheating is unacceptable
4. All dates and assignments are subject to change
5. Assignments will be made with ample time for completion given please be
alert to alterations or corrections in the schedule

Attendance Policy
Two (2) unexcused absences permitted; however each subsequent unexcused
absence will result in the lowering of one full letter grade per absence. Two late
arrivals (30 minutes + after the hour unless lateness is pre-arranged) will count as
one absence. Note: No Gum Chewing or Eating in Class. Soft Drinks, Coffee, and
water permitted.

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Assignments & Academic Calendar
PHASE 1
August 20
• Overview
• Video narrative
• The emerging global mythology

Read: Broken Screen

August 27
• Fractured reality
• Collective memory
• Origins of our visual language
• Re -constructing memory & moments of importance

Read: Broken Screen

September 3
• Life & myth & references to other images
• Television as narrative structure: reflective of life or as life
• Video Vs. Film Narrative

Read: Illuminating Video

Shooting Assignment #1

September 10
• Deconstructing our pop culture, video infused reality
• How to view and analyze video imagery and meaning
• Our place in the narrative continuum
• The person is replaced and/or displaced: the emerging virtureality

Read: Illuminating Video

September 17
• Genres as text
• What is Genre anyway
Read: Illuminating Video
Workbook Assignment #1
Shooting Assignment #2

PHASE 2

September 24
• Shooting Group Exercise
Read: Illuminating Video

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October 1
• Being a passive recipient
• The viewer as a television
• Living in a video narrative
Shooting Assignment #3
Workbook Assignment #2

October 8
• Shaped & informed by a cacophony of images, styles, genres
• Video images as a language & text
• Collapse between the public & private spheres

Read: Media article (via eLearning)

October 15
• The age of confession & reality TV
• Hybridization
• Video Art
• Video art as a weapon in the battle against the tyranny of images

Read: Media article (via eLearning)

Workbook Assignment #3

PHASE 3

October 22
• Dogme 95/ Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger et al
• The visual literacy of mashing
• Gestures, images, lighting effects into trance and ritual; video abstracts
• Video as fetish
Read: Simularca and Simulation
Shooting Assignment #4

October 29
• We are an audience watching a machine
• Surveillance
• Narcissism, record, YouTube and web manifestations

Read: Simularca and Simulation

November 5
Self-Conscious
• Self conscious & self-aware of the process: Post-Modern and Ironic
• Whatever one finds interesting
• Re-enact famous film scenes: life as a remix and mashing
An audience remembers memories
Read: Media article (via eLearning)
Shooting Assignment #5

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November 12
• The era of consumerism & fashions as indexed audience history
• Storehouse of old images
• Life as a spin off
• The persistence of memory—the viewer joins two scenes by imagining a story

Read: TAZ

November 19
Action
• Video as egalitarian, accessible, affordable, taking power away from the pre-
established powers
• Finding oneʼs own voice and images
• Illuminate and participate in the ongoing video narrative
• You are the content, the information, and the cipher of video reality passing through
you. YouTube, OnLine
• Everyone gets to use the camera now, everyone is a camera
• We are witnesses to how our civilization is over stimulated & desensitized
simultaneously aware yet readers of our history & heritage yet suffering from
amnesia

Manifesto Due

November 26
Thanksgiving Break
Work on the Final Project

December 3
3 December Presentations
Final Project/Workbook Due

Student Conduct & Discipline

http://www.utdallas.edu/dept/graddean/CAT2008/appendices/Appendix1.htm

http://www.utdallas.edu/deanofstudents/conductguidelines.html

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