Imagining a sustainable future -  moving images as a research 

This session focuses on the moving image as a mode of research which is particularly relevant in a contemporary situation through its capacity for visual, performative and speculative modes of engagement. It will explore how moving images can be employed to generate understanding through imagination and ethics through two research projects based at the department of Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Art, activating video art and documentary film making through interdisciplinary and collaborative practices. 

The Future through the Present, coordinated by professor Erik Gandini explores a documentary narrative that manages to create a projection into the future and to develop a cinematic documentary aesthetic that releases documentary film from the constraints of it's traditional role of dealing either with the present or the past. We also want to experiment with an aesthetics that reflects existential issues that are connected our near future. The project's thematic point of departure is our relation to wage labour in a time when Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and algorithms outweigh our physical and cognitive properties and automation is expected to replace us on a large scale within most professional fields. From an existential perspective this poses the question: what will we do when we don’t have to work? And challenges us to formulate a new idea about work. Beyond the role it had so far, especially in a Western context, as one of the most central activity in our lives. Can documentary film contribute with material that offers a canvas for reflection about the meaning of labour in the near future?

Image as Site, coordinated by professor Ellen Røed, is an exploration of the epistemological foundations of video as a particular mode of inquiry that activates relations between bodies, images, and places. Devices that produce images, such as cameras and microphones, invite their users to engage with the world by enabling a network of relationships. By appropriating the concept of field from certain discourses of sound art and applying it to the moving image, the project explores the capacity of video based art for enabling movement, transience, and body, in other words elements of performance characteristic to site. By considering how the moving image might be seen as a form of site in itself, the moving image manifests as a form of place on its own terms rather than as a mode of representing reality.