Fields of Vision: Memory, Identity, and Images of the Past
This summer university program at Central European University (Budapest) brings together outstanding international faculty and focuses on the construction of memory and identity narratives through images. The study of images generated, circulated, and stored on a variety of media, and their social embeddedness take many forms. Our course enhances participants’ skills for decoding the changing mechanisms of meaning-making and new practices of image production, interpretation, and social use. The SUN seminars and workshops are designed to complement each other while developing participants’ abilities to analyze, communicate, and teach with and through images. This summer university explores narrative constructions of personal and collective identities and representations of the past (particularly the traumatic events of the twentieth century) by addressing works made in various media – modern art, documentary and fiction film, photography, TV broadcasts, augmented reality and web-based projects.
The program combines theoretical and methodological seminars and workshops on various media with presentations of participants’ own projects. During the sessions the participants discuss the dilemmas brought by participatory media, new practices of curating, and interactive media production. The intensive program targets advanced graduate students and junior faculty who seek to acquire new interpretative skills in a creative interdisciplinary environment. The participants are expected to apply the new knowledge in their own future work including developing new collaborative projects, planning new courses, and starting creative artistic research engaging visual material.