Midterm exam

Question 1

What’s the expressionist approach to media?

Answer 1

It focuses on the ability to stage, embody and communicate affect.

Question 2

What does stage affect mean?

Answer 2

Feature or present content that is sensational or emotional

Question 3

What does embody affect mean?

Answer 3

How the formal properties of media affect us

Question 4

What does communicate affect mean?

Answer 4

How media intends to stir emotions, sensations and desires in its viewers

Question 5

What are the 5 aspects to the expressionist approach?

Answer 5

1) How media focus people in heightened states of feeling
2) How historically romantic art turned to expressions of individual feeling
3) How art in general focuses form as an expression of feeling
4) How following Freud surrealism understood the expression of feeling as breaking through the reasonable and respectable ways in which we usually hold ourselves together
5) How media enlists the ability of viewers to be similarly stimulated or emotionally moved

Question 6

What is affect?

Answer 6

• Sensation is not reducible to “sense data” it is the seat of enjoyment and suffering
• Sensations are also dynamic and invigorating the body

Question 7

What is romanticism?

Answer 7

Subject matter is highly emotional if not shocking, there is often a focus on love, death, madness, disaster and horror of the sublime

Question 8

What are the characteristics of romantic art?

Answer 8

• Artwork tends to be very busy if not chaotic, there is a focus on the sketch or spontaneous expression of feeling.
• Unpremeditated compositions, saturated use of colour, a willingness to sacrifice clarity and realism for atmosphere, fantasy and dreams

Question 9

What’s the history behind romanticism?

Answer 9

Historically, romanticism is a modern art movement that rejects classicism and inspires the expressionistic, surrealist and abstract expressionist and neo-expressionist art movements of the 20th century

Question 10

What is the surrealist world view and method?

Answer 10

1. Surrealists celebrated the unconscious/id as a liberating force
2. The civilized and rational world was perceived to be deadening
3. Dreams were thought to be more real than “reality”
4. Deliberate/calculated art could not unleash the unconscious
5. Automatic painting and writing followed Freud’s method of automatic association in the analysis of dreams
6. Surrealists often celebrated or focused on madness, death and unconstrained sexuality in opposition to the false pretenses of moralizing conventions past traditions and so-called good taste

Question 11

What is the surrealist imagery?

Answer 11

1. Often relies on collage to put together things that usually don’t go together as in a dream
2. Incongruent jumps in time and space
3. Often distorts or utterly takes apart the human figure to attack the idea that the self is one thing
4. The frequent identification of the self with animals