after.video realizes the world through moving images and reassembles theory after video. Extending the formats of ‘theory’, it reflects a new situation in which world and video have grown together. This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated video essays living in two instantiations: an online version – located on the web at http://after.video/assemblages, and an offline version – stored on a server inside a VHS (Video Home System) case. This is both a digital and analog object: manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book’.

When first launched the Biosphere 2 was sold by the media to an eager public as crucial scientific research that would save us when the earth became uninhabitable.  This was easier then explaining the complicated fact that many of its central ideas had come from an avant-garde theater troupe. But these performative roots were mirrored by Barbara T. Smiths “21st Century Odyssey.”  When Smith’s boyfriend, Dr. Roy Walford, went into the Biosphere for two years she traveled around the world doing performances and communicating with him through then cutting-edge tech like faxes and video chat. While he and the other ...