Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

The Poiesis of Image-Signs in Modernist Cinema: A Poetic Investigation of Things

This project proposes to utilize videographic criticism to visually connect ‘high modernist” films of the 1960s and 1970s to early 20th century avant-garde “collage” as both an aesthetic and philosophical practice. Through a logic of fragmentation, reduction, re-assemblage, and collage, early avant-garde artists de-contextualized familiar objects, signs, and images, revealing the structural formations of cultural, social, political, and linguistic organizational systems. This project proposes to link these earlier practices to modernist filmmakers’ cinematic sign-creation through their shared phenomenological and poetic investigation of the relationship between “things” and consciousness.