Great conversation today about the boundaries between videographic criticism vs. online video vs. found footage films vs. video art vs. [whatever else]! I hope we might continue the discussion here outside of class. Here are a few links to spur your thoughts (as well as the various links from the Week 10 Schedule:

  • Arthur Jafa’s video “Love is the Message and the Message is Death” got cut-off in-class – here’s a (illicit) link to watch the whole thing.
  • More on Jafa: the New Yorker profile I mentioned, and a short piece on his video, including an embedded link to a “pirated gallery video” of the work.
  • On the question of exhibition contexts, you might consider “Videographic Frankenstein” – this was an in-person exhibition at Stanford curated in 2018 by Shane Denson (Stanford professor, scholar of Frankenstein, and videographic critic) in honor of the 200th anniversary of the book. The exhibition was in a room with a number of monitors with headphones, so you could focus on one of around 8 videographic pieces at a time. This online publication curates those pieces for ongoing consumption. As you’ll see, the pieces range from more conventional videographic essays to more experimental “art” pieces. (I contributed a video that’s more of the latter, in a deformative vein…)

I look forward to seeing what more y’all have to say about these boundaries between art and criticism, online access vs. in-person exhibition, free vs. (very) expensive, how such works speak to different audiences, etc.!