The tradition of artists incorporating their own bodies and lives into their work is a long-standing and fertile one, blurring the boundaries of the documentary and the fictional, the experimental and the traditional, self and other. Recent work in this area is particularly stimulating, as it engages the rapidly shifting configurations of the contemporary psyche. This advanced production course will examine and experiment with the use of the self in video, with incursions into the territories of web site design, video installation and DVD authoring.

Utilizing a combination of film/video screenings, viewing of web-based
work, technical workshops and contemporary reading as a springboard for exploration, the goal of the course will be to produce a series of individual works culminating in a final project, "The Self as Other".

Exercises will be undertaken to present the self in various modes and personae from the relatively straightforward autobiography and diary genres to more expressionistic and subjective interpretations and finally to constructions entirely fictitious and even duplicitous.

The works of such artists as Sadie Benning, Caveh Zahedi, Miranda July, Pippilotti Rist, and Vito Acconci will be viewed and discussed.