Postgraduate Course
Eugeni Bonet, Course Content Co-ordinator
Carles Brià, Technical Co-ordinator
The FCB-URL (Facultat de Ciències de la Comunicació de la Universitat Ramon Llull) and the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) are joining forces to organize the first Postgraduate Course in Video Art and its Applications to the Performing Arts, which will take place from October 2005 until May 2006.
This ongoing establishment of programs directed towards training and higher education is an essential aspect of the MACBA’s own educational policies. Over the last few years, the Museum’s programming in this area of various formats, debates and collectives has meant the beginning of a new, more complex phase. Specific workshops or debates which have been organized over these years now form part of a wider-reaching structure – a structure which puts them into a clear relationship with an overall unity. The postgraduate course - looking as it does at basic aspects of image and new technologies at a time when video art seems to be gaining a hegemonic place within the art world – is a fundamental part of the MACBA’s new educational policies.
The concept of videoart has always been highly controversial and widely questioned, but in the end it has managed to make space for itself, opening up an area that embraces a wide variety of directions, forms and spheres of performance. Even though there are very few creative artists who would define themselves as video artists, the general consensus being that video is just one more resource, over the last few years video and related practices, audio-visuals and multimedia, have acquired a growing presence in the art world (museums, galleries, biennials, alternative and cultural diffusion spaces, and in private collections), as well as in all kinds of artistic disciplines.
Though the earliest expressions of videoart appeared in the 1960s, knowledge of this background is often superficial, as it is when it comes to discussing the various directions videoart has taken as it has evolved through the years.
Today video has become a tool that is habitually used, though some expressions of this art form are weakened by a lack of information that can explain in depth its uses and applications in different artistic spheres such as visual art (in the wider sense used today), the performing arts (theatre, dance, performance) and, in some aspects, music and cinema.
This course will provide a solid knowledge of this open and plural field, and will be led by artists and renowned specialists. It is structured in a way that is almost completely new here, having only been used in occasional seminars or workshops, since even those courses that set out to train artists end up treating video and its related practices more as a craft to be placed at the service of industry than as an artistic path in its own right. At the same time, the aim is to offer a balanced training that combines theoretical and analytical aspects, the acquisition of a series of essential points of reference, and the practical and experimental side of video.