Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader

by Dieter Daniels (Editor), Jan Thoben (Editor)

Overview

Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader in this field, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. While theories of video have not yet formed an academic discipline comparable to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television, the reader offers a major step toward bridging this “video gap” in media theory, which is remarkable considering today's omnipresence of the medium through online video portals and social media.

Consisting of a selection of eighty-three annotated source texts and twelve chapter introductions written by the editors, this book considers fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following the continuous transformations of what video was, is, and will be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501354090
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	02/24/2022
Series:	International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics
Pages:	600
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.31(d)

About the Author

Prof. Dr. Dieter Daniels is Professor of Art History and Media Theory and Art History at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany. He is also the Gutenberg Fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany. He is an expert in the fields of video art and media theory.

Jan Thoben is program coordinator at the University of the Arts Berlin, Germany, and research assistant at the Mainz University of the Arts, Germany. He has accomplished extensive research on the audiovisual components of video.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface
Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben

I Foundations

1 Formations | Exemplary Discourses
Introduction
Dieter Daniels

Draft for Gutenberg Video (1960). Facsimile
Marshall McLuhan

Biennale Seminar on Video, Venice 1977
Marshall McLuhan

Videotape: Thinking about a Medium (1968)
Paul Ryan

Gestures on Videotapes (1973)
Vilém Flusser

Video (1973–1974)
Vilém Flusser

2 Medium Specificity and Hybridity: The Materiality of the Electronic Image
Introduction
Jan Thoben

Video: From Technology to Medium (2006)
Yvonne Spielmann

Surrealism without the Unconscious (1991)
Fredric Jameson

Between-the-Images (1990)
Raymond Bellour

Video as Dispositif (1988)
Anne-Marie Duguet

Video Media (1993)
Sean Cubitt

Is There a Specific Videocity? (2002)
Wolfgang Ernst

Video Intimus (2010)
Siegfried Zielinski

Toward an Autobiography of Video (2016)
Ina Blom

Video, Flows, and Real Time (1996)
Maurizio Lazzarato

3 Video and the Self: Closed Circuit | Feedback | Narcissism
Introduction
Peter Sachs Collopy (guest editor)

Some Aspects of the Significance to Psychoanalysis of the Exposure of a Patient to the Televised Audiovisual Reproduction of His Activities (1969)
Lawrence S. Kubie

Self-Processing (1970)
Paul Ryan

Two Consciousness Projection(s) (1972)
Dan Graham

Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television (1979)
Dan Graham

Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976)
Rosalind Krauss

Video Art, the Imaginary and the Parole Vide (1976)
Stuart Marshall

Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977)
Martha Rosler

Narcissism, Feminism, and Video Art: Some Solutions to a Problem in Representation (1981)
Micki McGee

Discover European Video: For a Catalogue of an Exhibition (1990)
Vilém Flusser

Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits (2012)
Krista Geneviève Lynes

Screen Births: Trans Vlogs as a Transformative Media for Self-Representation (2016)
Tobias Raun


II Relations

4 Video | Film
Introduction
Marc Ries

Filmgoing/Videogoing: Making Distinctions (1973)
Douglas Davis

Video in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews and Statements (1969–2001)
Jean-Luc Godard (compiled and introduced by Thomas Helbig)

The Withering Away of the State of the Art (1977)
Hollis Frampton

Video and Film (1987)
Gábor Bódy

On Video (1988)
Roy Armes

Video: The Access Medium (1996)
Tetsuo Kogawa

Interface (1995)
Harun Farocki

Penultimate Pictures (2018)
Marc Ries

5 Video | Television
Introduction
Dieter Daniels

The Politics of Timeshifting (2011)
Dylan Mulvin

Global Groove and Video Common Market (1970)
Nam June Paik

Television: Video's Frightful Parent (1975)
David Antin

Talking Back to the Media (1985)
Dara Birnbaum

[Portable Video] (1995)
John Thornton Caldwell

[The Videographic] (2002)
John Ellis

6 Video | Sound and Synthesis
Introduction
Jan Thoben

The Sound of One Line Scanning (1986/1990)
Bill Viola

AFTERLUDE to the Exposition of EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION (1964). Facsimile
Nam June Paik

Versatile Color TV Synthesizer (1969)
Nam June Paik

Video-Synthesizer (1969). Facsimile
Nam June Paik

Soundings (1979)
Gary Hill

Light and Darkness in the Electronic Landscape (1978)
Barbara Buckner

7 Video | Performance and Theater
Introduction
Barbara Büscher (guest editor)

Transmission (1998)
Joan Jonas

Moving Target: General Intentions (1996)
Diller + Scofidio

Studio Azzurro: Re-Inventing the Medium of Theater (2012)
Valentina Valentini

Intermedial Interplay between Real-time Videos, Film, and Theatrical Scenes: Bert Neumann's Spaces for Frank Castorf's Dostoevsky project Erniedrigte und Beleidigte (2014)
Birgit Wiens

Multiplication. The Wooster Group (2007)
Nick Kaye

8 Video | Internet: Online Video and the Consumer as Producer
Introduction
Martha Buskirk (guest editor)

Do It 2 (2009)
Cory Arcangel and Dara Birnbaum

In Defense of the Poor Image (2009)
Hito Steyerl

Shiny Things So Bright (2017)
Andreas Treske

YouTube and the Syrian Revolution: On the Impact of Video Recording on Social Protests (2017)
Cécile Boëx

Nothing Is Unwatchable for All (2019)
Alexandra Juhasz

The Dangers of Ubiquitous Video (2020)
Siva Vaidhyanathan


III Repercussions

9 Sociality | Participation | Utopias
Introduction
Dieter Daniels

Videotopia (1972)
Alfred Willener, Guy Milliard, Alex Ganty

Guerrilla Television (1971)
Michael Shamberg

Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1985)
Deirdre Boyle

Women's Video (1981)
Anne-Marie Duguet

10 Communities | Amateurism | Ethnographies | Participation
Introduction
Dieter Daniels

[Wedding Videos] (1993)
Sean Cubitt

[Bootlegging Video] (2009)
Lucas Hilderbrand

[Splatter Videos, Scene Selection, and the Video Store] (2014)
Tobias Haupts

Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy (2004)
Brian Larkin

The Other Within (1989)
Juan Downey

Defiant Images: The Kayapo Appropriation of Video (1992)
Terence Turner

Decolonizing the Technologies of Knowledge: Video and Indigenous Epistemology (2003)
Freya Schiwy

11 Surveillance | Exposure | Testimony | Forensics
Introduction
Dieter Daniels

Photographesomenon: Video Surveillance as a Paradoxical Image-Making Machine (2005)
Winfried Pauleit

CCTV. The Stealthy Emergence of a Fifth Utility? (2002)
Stephen Graham

The Cultural Labor of Surveillance. Video Forensics, Computational Objectivity, and the Production of Visual Evidence (2013)
Kelly Gates

Drone Warfare at the Threshold of Detectability (2015)
Eyal Weizman

Webcams, or Democratizing Publicity (2006)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

“The Woman in the Blue Bra”: Follow the Video (2015/2017)
Kathrin Peters


IV Dialogues

12 Artistic Practice and Video Theory
Introduction
Dieter Daniels and Jan Thoben

Video 1965: Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik. A Specific Moment of Unspecificity (2018/2021)
Dieter Daniels

Pop Goes the Videotape (1965)
Andy Warhol

Electronic Video Recorder (1965). Facsimile
Nam June Paik

Before the Cinematic Turn: Video Projection in the 1970s (2015)
Erika Balsom

Video as a Function of Reality (1974)
Peter Campus

Videor (1990)
Jacques Derrida

[Processual Video] (1980)
Gary Hill

Compulsive Categorizations: Gender and Heritage in Video Art (2015)
Malin Hedlin Hayden

Video as a Medium of Emancipation (1982)
Ulrike Rosenbach

Video in the Time of a Double, Political and Technological, Transition in the Former Eastern European Context (2009/2020)
Marina Gržinic

[Video Direction Theory] (1989)
Boris Yukhananov (edited and annotated by Andreas Schmiedecker)

Index

Editorial Reviews

The book by Daniels and Thoben is a game-changer both for Media Studies and for Art History, making available an important body of texts which have so far been either unknown, or inaccessible. The editors' knowledgeable selection and their intellectually rich proposal for ordering the historical discourses about the medium of video should raise objections and debate, but what will prevail is the phenomenal achievement of this publication that makes such debate possible in the first place. An essential source for anybody interested in visual media.” —Andreas Broeckmann, Art Historian, Leuphana University, Germany

“This book is a long overdue must-read primer for anyone thinking about and teaching the many meanings and epistemes of video. Read this book and you will find a compellingly structured overview of video theories and histories covering a wide range of discursive fields.” —Hanna B. Hölling, Associate Professor, University College London, UK and Research Professor, Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland

“This exiting and much-needed volume brings together an impressive array of voices on video. Its interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and intercultural scope offers a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the discursive field of video theories–a field that is as multifaceted and everchanging as the medium of video itself. The most laudable accomplishment of the book is that it celebrates the “hydra-headedness” of video without falling prey to it: the volume doesn't lose sight of the main (t)h(r)eads of the medium, nor does it attempt to silence any perspectives on video at the benefit of a singular canonical viewpoint. Instead, by structuring the volume around themes and by providing insightful introductions to each chapter, the volume manages to interconnect not only a multitude of heterogenous video theories, but also to critically relate artistic practices to written reflections, as well as the past, present and future of video.” —Janna Houwen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands and author of Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (2017)

From the Publisher