Skip to main page content
Ideas
  1. Course Search
  2. AFVS 174E

Surroundings: Media and Environment
AFVS 174E

Course Information

Description

This seminar investigates the relationship between media and environment, charting their changing and overlapping senses from the 19th century to today. The course both reconsiders the “environmental” in the work of fundamental media theorists and examines how contemporary filmmakers, artists, and writers provocatively blur art and science, the human and the non-human, the cultural and the natural. Questions focus on how climate, economic, and political realities challenge artists to critically trace and intervene in the often-invisible interconnections of energy, material, infrastructure, finance, and computation. Topics include air-conditioning, ambient media, science fiction, and petroculture. Sessions include archival visits, class excursions, film screenings, and listening exercises.

School Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Credits 4
Cross Reg

Available for Harvard Cross Registration

Course Component Seminar
Grading Basis FAS Letter Graded
General Education N/A
Quantitative Reasoning with Data N/A
Divisional Distribution Arts and Humanities
Course Level For Undergraduate and Graduate Students