The course aims to guide students through the rapid transformation of the media landscape from the perspective of nostalgia. According to a number of theorists, nostalgia is an increasingly important, though often hidden, motif and functional element of contemporary culture, from politics and marketing to art. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, cultural theorists such as Mark Fisher and Svetlana Boym specifically noted how recurrence, the constant return of “undead” images, genres, and sentiments, shapes the way emerging generations understand not only the past, but also their imagination of the future and the present. For the field of artistic production, which has traditionally been strongly shaped by returns to past forms and genres, the course offers tools for grasping and critically deconstructing this recurrence in the context of the rise of new media and artificial intelligence tools. These are fundamentally transforming the possibilities for relating to archives and the remnants of visual culture, as well as for extracting new visions of both the past and the future. An important element of the course will be an effort to connect selected theories and artworks with the individual experience and issues that students address in their own practice.

The thematic seminars will be preceded by brief individual preparation by students through assigned texts, audiovisual works, or online projects. Emphasis will be placed on active participation, collective discussion, and the critical interpretation of contemporary visual and cultural phenomena through selected theoretical frameworks. Teaching methods will connect the analysis of scholarly texts and artworks with reflection on students’ individual experience and their own artistic or research practice. The course will also include the sharing of individual approaches to nostalgia, contemporary visual culture, new media, algorithmic platforms, and artificial intelligence.