This course will examine the nostalgic and utopian impulses of documentary work in a range of genres: prose, poetry, photography, and film. We will be charting the extreme transformations of regional and urban culture that took place over the course of the 20th century as they were expressed—and produced—by works of experimental documentary. We will study sites whose endangered cultural artifacts demanded preservation by civic bodies, asking how efforts to salvage them through art led both to transformations of practices being “preserved” and to the articulation of new modernist aesthetics, as well as sites that compel artists to participate in developing futures by documenting events in an activist vein. We will be attuned to the distressed tempo of articulating a passing present, asking to what extent "the news" participates in history, how the documentation of the present or passing aims to alter the future, and how art oscillates between or blurs these temporalities. We will dwell throughout in the foregrounded or receding mediation of the real by technology and text, asking whether recording constitutes merely an act of preservation, or whether it contributes to a transcribed object/environment’s growth and emergence. (20th/21st)