Home of the Brave – Archaeology of the Moving Image

“The function of the image, as Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolize it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.”
Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

Under the roof of the title Home of the Brave, Corner College evolves a series of rather heterogeneous events with lectures, talks, screenings, workshops, performative relations and experiments that de-automate our “experiences of vision” (Vertov), in a multivalent engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the moving image and its creative, analytical, critical and feminist power, rather than to represent certain concepts of trends or schools.

We, borrowing this “WE” from “WE: Variant of a Manifesto’’ by Dziga Vertov, which is actually a collective persona of three: a director, a camera operator, and an editor, we, “a collectivity” of themes, problems and questions, we, with the magnitude and collectivity of the event, “on the wing of hypothesis” and analysis, we contemplate the moving image as a collection and composition of relations of movement and rest, we go with the rhythm of its movements to experience the moment of the direct image and concrete time: “Drawings in motion; Blueprints in motion; Plans for the future;” and beyond.

The main title of this series is appropriated from Laurie Anderson’s 1986 concert film or multimedia ‘talking opera,’ in which one can encounter a hallucinatory world of bizarre magnitudes of composed sequences or lengths, mobilizing all quantity and intensities of disconnected virtual raining drops that come down and go underground and then come back, as they are composing quantities. These dots of ungrounded or groundless smaller and larger pieces are the virtual impregnation of the real with thousands of specters.

See the complete text by Dimitrina Sevova announcing the series: PDF (145 KB).