Mediated Evidence

Seaside Speculations between Imagined and Depicted Coastlines

Focus area: Photography, Film, and Video - yet open to experimentation across other media

This six-week project-based module explores the coastline as a dynamic threshold - a liminal porous zone where water meets land. Treating as a case study Bergen and its extended coastal region (including Øygarden), the course investigates the cultural, ecological, and geopolitical implications of waterfront development, maritime industries, and environmental change.

Working with notions of evidence, representation and speculation, students will explore how visual practices - such as photography, video and site sensitive research - along with related textual discourses can be used to collect, document, construct, and critique narratives of place, to interrogate how coastal realities are shaped, mediated, and imagined.

During the six weeks module, members of this course will embark on different fieldtrips along the coast, with particular emphasis on the redevelopment of the waterfront at Dokken, where the relocation of the industrial port is set to make way for a new central district. While Dokken's access to the sea holds the potential to serve as a shared common, it is also a space where ecological urgency, scientific and economic ambition intersect with potentially different ideas and visions for the future of this locale, nation and the larger world.

In response to the pressing ecological and social changes reshaping Bergen's coastal landscape, students will work collaboratively while also developing individual artistic projects that consider various ways of deploying evidence in systems of visual representation to both reveal and challenge the present order and its potential for change.

This is a project-based module with a focus on how various forms of evidence can be collected, investigated, unsettled, and meditated through artistic operations.

PRO modules are designed to enrich your artist development (as explored in the ART modules) through activating skills, connecting communities of practice, and investigating disciplinary territories. PRO modules allow you to focus on a specific project critically connected to your own practice within a context established by the module leader(s).

Knowledge

• Develop awareness of relevant references and practices

Skills

• Explore approaches in relation to the collection and (re)formulation of information within artistic practice
• Identify, seek out, and apply relevant skills to a self-initiated project

General Competence

• Identify your own learning needs in relation to the subject area(s)
• Apply new knowledge and skills within your artistic practice
• Resolve, realize, and present new work