Videographic Criticism: Aesthetics and Methods of the Video Essay

Öffentliches Symposium der FU Berlin

This one-day symposium is dedicated to videographic criticism – a digital method that uses the materiality of film and media to produce audiovisual analyses, commentaries, and scholarship.

It brings together practitioners, curators, scholars, and teachers to present their recent videographic work and to exchange ideas about their individual approaches to videographic criticism and their preferred aesthetics and methods for producing video essays.
The participants will also discuss the potential of the video essay for critically engaging with and studying film and media texts as well as its promises for scholarship, teaching, and forms of public engagement.

9:00 Welcome

9:15 Film and Media Scholarship in the Digital Age
Allison de Fren (Occidental College / NYU Shanghai), “The Scholarly Supercut: A Critical Approach to a Fannish Practice” Kathleen Loock (FU Berlin), “Deep Focus: On the Process and Affordances of Videographic Scholarship” Chloé Galibert-Laîné (École Normale Supérieure, Paris) and Kevin B. Lee (Merz Akademie Stuttgart), “Desktop Subjectivity as Videographic Methodology”

11:00 Roundtable
with Allison de Fren, Kathleen Loock, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, and Kevin B. Lee
Moderators: Julia Leyda (NTNU Trondheim) and Volker Pantenburg (FU Berlin)

13:30 Theory, Practice, Performance
Liz Greene (Liverpool John Moores University), “Brows on Fleek: Shaping Stories from Eyebrows to Scousebrows” Shane Denson (Stanford University), “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon” David Verdeure (Filmscalpel / LUCA School of Arts), “Rebuilding the Shrine: Artisanship and Technology in the Performative Video Essay”

15:15 Roundtable
with Liz Greene, Shane Denson, David Verdeure
Moderators: Evelyn Kreutzer (Northwestern University) and Nguyen Tan Hoang (UC San Diego)

16:15 Concluding Discussion

Free and open to the public.