Mail Code PF
Hope Tucker
Jerome Liebling Center 102
413.549.4600
On leave of absence fall 2022 and spring 2023.
Hope Tucker, associate professor of video and film, holds a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and an M.F.A. in film and video production from the University of Iowa.
A MacDowell and Yaddo Fellow and recent artist in residence at Phillips Academy Andover, she has taught video, film, photography, animation, new media, and visual studies in the US and the UK.
Since 2000, Tucker has worked to transform and expand what we know as a daily form of terse, text-driven, populist narrative through The Obituary Project, a compendium of moving image that gives new life to the antiquated documentary practice of salvage ethnography. She has animated cyanotypes of downwinders and instructions for making fishing nets by hand; photographed shuttered bread factories, fallen witness trees, and decaying civil rights era landmarks; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths of Finland; written the text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of solidarity and nonviolent resistance; and retraced the path of protest that closed the only nuclear power plant in Austria.
Works from the project have screened in festivals, museums, galleries, and cultural spaces, including 21er Haus, Vienna; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Cairo Video Festival; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival, Rotterdam; Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Torino; New York Film Festival; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Zagreb Dox.
This course provides an opportunity for you to build your skills in research methods and practice as you discover what research can look like for those working in film, photography, video, installation, and related media. By looking within texts by artists, filmmakers, photographers, performers, poets, and journalists such as Joan Beifuss, Pearl Bowser, Linda Goode Bryant, Duncan Campbell, Ximena Cuevas, Susana de Sousa Dias, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jill Godmilow, Sharon Greytak, David Hammons, Christine Sun Kim, Spike Lee, John Lewis, Rosalind Nashashibi, Mike Nichols, Isamu Noguchi, Mika Rottenberg, Doris Salcedo, Dread Scott, Joel Sternfeld, Chick Strand, Rea Tajiri, Peter Watkins and Travis Wilkerson, the class will examine research-based approaches to developing, creating and realizing new works. Readings, screenings, creative exercises, and artist talks that address conceptual approaches, working methods, and a range of research strategies will allow you to deepen your skills in research as you develop and create a project of your own. All members of the class are required to present their work in various stages throughout the semester. The members of the class will provide critical, technical and production support for one another. Active verbal and written contributions to all sessions are required of each student under the guiding principle that tracking each other's intellectual and creative process will help each person develop their respective project and understanding of research practices. This course provides a structured context in which to do research intensive work at the Division l and II level. Enrolled or waitlist students who do not attend the first class session risk losing their place on the class roster. (keyword: film, video, photography, installation, art)
Animation can be used to illustrate the unspoken, document the unseen, and interpret the everyday. This course is an introduction to the fundamentals of frame by frame filmmaking and handcrafted cinema. Prior experience is not necessary. Camera-less techniques, stop motion, cut-out and alternative approaches to image design and acquisition are introduced as well as camera work, hand-processing, and editing. The development of personal vision is stressed. Our class periods will be used for discussion related to the production of animation; historical screenings to give you a sense of how other makers have approached the topic at hand; demonstrations, exercises and workshops to familiarize you with concepts, processes and equipment; and critiques of your work. (keywords: film, animation, art, video, drawing)
