[Reader-list] [Announcements] video essay in the digital age

[Ursula Biemann]

Stuff it: The Video Essay in the Digital Age edited by Ursula Biemann 
for the Institute for Theory of Art and Design, Zurich ISBN 
3-211-20318-4
With the entry of documentarisms into the arts, the video essay, as a 
visual reflection on reality, has gained much attention in recent art 
debates. Moreover, due to its subjective, dissociative, and highly 
self-reflexive characteristics, this video genre has become a 
preferred visual medium for theoretical considerations regarding the 
major shifts taking place in visual culture.

Stuff it maps a wide range of contemporary essayist video practice. 
Following the discussions on post-structuralist cinematographic 
experiments in the 80s, the publication seeks a deeper understanding 
of how essayism relates to the digital cultural developments today. 
On the one hand, the discursive and compressed video genre is 
presently situated in the context of new media, hypertext and digital 
image production. This raises the question of how these technologies 
emphasize or mutate the characteristics of the essay and potentially 
open up new possibilities for a critical engagement with them. On the 
other hand, the video essay faces an increasingly complex society. 
The great geographic and cultural diversity of recent video making 
redirects the theoretical discussion from a eurocentric literary 
tradition towards a postcolonial cultural studies perspective where a 
new set of issues including diaspora, migration and the ambivalent 
experience of nation, borders and belonging are being addressed.

Stuff it is a profusely color illustrated collection of texts by 
video artists and cultural theorists who illuminate the video essay 
in its role as crossover and communicator between art, theory and 
critical practice in all its variations: from monologues of 
disembodyment to cartographies of the transitional, from the essay as 
organization of complex social shifts to transnational positionality 
and non-linear memory structures.
With contributions by Nora Alter, Ursula Biemann, Christa Blümlinger, 
Eric Cazdyn, Steve Fagin, Jörg Huber, Angela Melitopoulos/Maurizio 
Lazzarato, Walid Ra'ad, Steve Reinke, Hito Steyerl, Alan James 
Thomas, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jan Verwoert, Rinaldo Walcott, Paul 
Willemsen, and a video archive.

The publication is in English and is a continuation of the Stuff it 
symposium, organized in collaboration with the Migros Museum Zurich 
in June 2002.

published by Edition Voldemeer Zürich / Springer Wien New York, 2003
168 pages, color ill., (= T:G series, vol. 02), CHF 43.50 / EUR 27
ISBN 3-211-20318-4

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