Moving Images and Meaning

Course Description

This course focuses on how moving images and kinetic imaging techniques convey explicit, implicit, and often inadvertent meanings. We will explore the perceptual workings, psychological impact, cultural conventions, and the use and abuse of visual media. In addition to developing analytical skills, assignments (with video option) will focus on creative and effective use of sequenced or moving images.

Images inform, seduce, and confuse us. They are drawn, printed, xeroxed, photographed, filmed, videotaped, or collaged and manipulated as frozen moments in time or choreographed movements. Rapid developments in new imaging techniques render our environments to be more and more visual. We consume images every day, but spend little time analyzing their precise content, context, or meaning.

Because our culture is changing from text-centered to image-centered, learning how to analyze and produce visual information is as important as learning how to read and write.

Images have become more than icons alone: they are symbols carrying complex meanings generated by cultural conventions as well as by the imaging technologies themselves.

Moving Images and Meaning: A course taught by Petra Fallaux at Carnegie Mellon University in 1996