Hooked up with an old friend recently, a slap bass maniac back in the day who is now busy satellite-mapping the planet. He’s been reading the Lev Manovich classic: The Language Of New Media, and various Marshall McLuhan books and asked if I could recommend any interesting contemporary writers tackling video. It made me realise I get a lot of reading from RSS feeds, websites and email lists, and that I’d like to find some more theoretical writing about video today, beyond dissecting it’s technical capacities and unfolding distribution potentials. Will add to the list below as I gather links… Drop a line if you have something to recommend…
Discussion
The VJ ‘eyecandy’ email list & vjforums.com are lively forums thrashing out about pixels.
( Oxff is another good ‘live video’ mailing list )
The Videoblogging e-mail list has a quite overwhelming flow of hyperactive discussion. I skim it at best, but am always learning lots and picking up good links from it.
Between We Make Money Not Art, The Turbulence Network, Rhizome & Eyebeam , just about every would-be or has-been video installation artist and avant-video installation technique is covered. And then some. Which is useful for gauging the available terrain, but not necessarily for scraping behind the pixels, for thinking beyond the pixels, or provoking why or what pixels should or could do.
The seminal Gene Youngblood “Expanded Cinema” (1970) book is now available via Ubuweb [PDF, 4.6 mb], a good place to explore
Mark Pesce provokes about media distribution trends, and how this might level the playing field for videomakers. There’s lots of writing about emergent distribution opportunities though, whether via peer to peer software online, mobile phones or handhelds. Yes, the economics and distro-technologies are changing, but who is writing about what video means in this new context, or what being a videomaker can mean?
Adrian Miles writes often about experimenting with the very form of video blogs. And there are a lot of other passionate ( near evangelist ) video bloggers out there, eager to both carve themselves a niche and see the artform itself rise up. Most other videoblog writings focus on technicalities and distribution though.
I’ve just borrowed ‘Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film’ from the library, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. Looks like a nice anthology, with 13 themed chapters and about 80 or so articles… and lots of colour photos..
The VJ BOOK is a book I am reviewing soon, a timely reminder brought to me by Stefan G below. VJing is but one type of video expression though, but I look forward to diving into the book nonetheless.
From Saskia: “One book i really love, though its pretty dense, is called “Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video” by Catherine Russell Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. It’s specifically about the intersections between documentry video and anthropology. So lots of stuff on politics of representation, discussion of experimental films and things like that.”
Video artist Lynn Hershman was recommended by VJ Jane Da Pain, but neither Lynn’s site nor blog offer much reflection about her work. Her work is cool, but looking for critiques & reflections.
The Experimental TV Center was recommended by Andrew Deagman (VJ Epoch), and seems to host a very extensive link list and bibliography, as well as various papers if you dig around. Much to explore there…
Matt Hanson’s ‘The End of Celluloid: Film futures in the digital age’ looks like it tackles a decent variety of video possibilities, and his bloghosts his research on an upcoming music video book (& ).
Via Goto80 in Sweden ( go the chip tunes~! ) :
“Rhythmic Light is focused on light synthesizers and color organs and stuff, but there’s heaps of PDF’s to read that stretch back to the 19th century…”
That’s a start… will add more links as they come~!
Any recommendations of lucid video writings would be well appreciated…
Bonus points for URLs pointing to good writing about unique aspects of video today…
Check
http://www.thevjbook.com
The VJ book By Paul Spinrad Published by Feral House
is probably the definitive current writing on the subject
thanks stefan, am actually reviewing that shortly.. forgot to add to the list – am also on the lookout for any good non-VJ video writings too if you know of any… cheers
Bill Nichols. His Ideology and the Image blew me away once, heavy going though.
One book i really love, though its pretty dense, is called “Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video” by Catherine Russell Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999. It’s specifically about the intersections between documentry video and anthropology. So lots of stuff on politics of representation, discussion of experimental films and things like that.
I’d like to say you get a visionary wrap up of everything in digital-age cinema (although didn’t touch on the VJ stuff) with:
The End of Celluloid: Film futures in the digital age, by Matt Hanson
… I would say that as I wrote it. It includes theory but less from an academic point of view. Manovich-lite! Altho, I have quite different specialities/focus to Lev. Also the book is super-visual.
I’ve also started blogging again, concentrating on music video at the moment as that is what the current in-progress book is about.
Eternal Gaze // Beyond Cinema
Paul Virilio is the old standby I guess. A good one has a blueish cover and ‘sky’ in the title. (maybe only good for sky noise, heh heh).
His books are fairly inpenetrable for a lunkard populist like myself – but he has done lots of interviews where it all becomes clear.
i ran across this. http://www.rhythmiclight.com/archives/index.html
it’s focused on light synthesizers and color organs and stuff, but there’s heaps of PDF:s to read that stretch back to the 19th century…
there’s an article of Patricia Silveirinha, from Portugal, that’s very good. it’s about video-art and it’s aspects. It’s called “A Arte VÃdeo – Processos de abstracção e domÃnio da sensorialidade nas novas linguagens visuais tecnológicas”. I don’t know if it has any translation to english, but it’s a very fine article.
I have come across cultural theorist Fredric Jameson’s essay ‘Video…’ in his book ‘Post Modernism and Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. I guess the essay tried to deal with some of the philosophical questions like memory, disjunction of signifier and signified etc related to video. Conscious video practitioners can try to see the limit of those hypotheses, that might be a good experience in video.
Debkamal Ganguly
Malcolm LeGrice has been writing interesting articles about film, video and digital since the 60’s as well as being a film maker himself. His book “Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age” takes some really in depth looks at moving images, can be quite dense sometimes but always for good reason.
I also really loved “Light Moving in Time” by William Wees, very easy to read but no less meaningful for that.
Nathaniel Dorsky did a book adapted from a talk he gave once called “Devotional Cinema” which is brief but, well, beautiful.
More generally I find the ideas and style of Deleuze and Guattari to be really freeing when thinking about this kind of stuff, though they aren’t everyone’s cup of philopsophy. And on aesthetics and quality I’m lovin “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence” at the moment by Robert Pirsig.