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’.

City Rising from metahaven on Vimeo. This short video is about “the internet” and the global spread of affective, precarious labor, captured in the notion of love. It is also an homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys, architect of New Babylon. New Babylon was a utopian city for which Constant developed models, plans, and writings throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. New Babylon would give free reign to a life of play, as people would be liberated from the obligation to perform productive and manual labor. Models of New Babylon were filmed as bizarre, beautiful shapes in the foreground of the image. Now ...

The YouTube Commentary Project invites artist to reflect on existing videos NY based artists Nina Katchadourian comments on a freehand drawing of a perfect circle

West Africa’s Guinea-Bissau declared unilaterally independence in 1973 and was recognized internationally in 1975 along with the other former Portuguese colonies. Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Over Yet) is the title of a documentary film on the country’s post-independence left unfinished in 1980. Even in its fragmentary form, it is but one of several testimonies of a decade of militant cinema in the country, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism, between 1963 and 1974, and the subsequent nation-building. The remains of this period of politically-engaged cinema, including finished and unfinished Guinean films, audio ...

Like all collaborative endeavors, bringing together an edited collection is about fixing as much as gathering the insights and details (and yes, flaws and limits) of individually or jointly conceived pieces to bring about a larger conversational whole – a drawing forth, or drawing together, of scattered threads and pieces into something considerably messier than a quilt. All the more so when the collection is the result of a generative collaboration, bringing guest editors Lara Houston, Daniela K. Rosner, Steven J. Jackson in conversation with the continent. collective to present this special issue “R3pair Volume”. The conversation of course runs ...

Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s novel “Simulacron Three” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2 part TV production is a science-fiction classic that explores the notion of a computer-generated other world, pre-dating The Matrix by 26 years. Since its original broadcast in 1973 it has rarely been seen and following increasing demand the Fassbinder Foundation have restored this remarkable film. Reader published to coincide with a two-part screening of Welt am Draht / World on a Wire (Parts I and II) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, (1973) Screening Sunday 31 March 2013

Interview with Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess of Geocinema.

A DIALOGUE ON MARGINAL GEOLOGY This dialogue was developed during Home Workspace Program 2013-14, at Ashkal Alwan – Beirut, Lebanon, 2014.

Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another.

The chances are that you are reading these words on a mobile device. There is a good chance that you are spending a lot of time on that device every day. If that is the case, you are not alone. It is reported that in the US alone, the average adult spends two hours and 51 minutes on their smartphone every day. That is eight minutes longer than Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. But it is a good hour and ten minutes shorter than the average time that a French worker once spent watching TV. In China in 2018, the average daily time ...

Author’s Note to the Second Edition: Why do a second edition of Distracted? Because it is now starkly clear to me that there is a limited number of concepts, figures and postures that a writer is here to create and possibly elaborate (in my case: freezing, diegetic silence-over, over-turn, radical closure with irruption of unworldly ahistorical fully-formed entities, the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, etc.). The extra material that was in my first book still awaits its writers—paradoxically getting rid of it is indirectly a way of avoiding future imitators. This version of Distracted is a second edition, in relation ...

Collective Çukurcuma included video works of Funa Ye and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective as part of the FLOW OUT exhibition, hosted by Bilsart, Istanbul until June 30, 2019. The program is based on the common practice of thinking, expressing and writing collectively about the present. As co-authors, they continued to write the collective essay through email exchanges — no one is the owner of the piece, whereas each of them is a participant. FLOW OUT does not belong to a place, but it refers to contemporaneity, addressing the problem of authorship in a collaboration, and experimenting with the idea ...

Bulletin #5. Chance and control. Photography, video and the web. Part II Part II: 02 Online filming 03 An art that generates itself Part I on Bulletin #4 Since the coming of image technologies (and particularly with photography, video, and the Web) contemporary culture has lost control over images, which became more and more independent from their author. Luca Panaro formulates his thesis by reinterpreting the works of theorists (Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Vilém Flusser), writers (Luigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino, Penelope Lively), even film directors (Buster Keaton, Michelangelo Antonioni, Wayne Wang), and finally contemporary artists (Franco Vaccari, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Wolfgang Staehle, Roberto Cuoghi, Carlo ...

Organized in collaboration with Antje Ehmann and Doreen Mende, this issue of e-flux journal pays tribute to Harun Farocki (January 9, 1944–July 30, 2014) with a series of essays and reflections on his work and life by friends, collaborators, film scholars, and admirers. Those who knew Harun personally remember not only the epic influence of his work, but also his generosity as a friend and collaborator. As for us, we have never before dedicated a full issue of e-flux journal to a single artist… Editorial—Harun Farocki Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle A Question They Never Stop Asking Kodwo Eshun Also of Things: Notes for a Film Remembering ...

Finding Fanon 2, made by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, uses the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. Finding Fanon 2 was commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense—notwithstanding that, as he put it, many, if not all of his books, most of which were published by Forthcoming Books, “continue to be forthcoming even after their publication.” In relation to one of these books, he wondered: “Does not a book titled Forthcoming suggest, ostensibly paradoxically, a second edition?” Here’s the revised edition of Forthcoming, a book first published nearly a decade and a half ago by Atelos press. —Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

Author’s Note to the Corrected Edition: Gustave Flaubert: “Why are you wasting your time rereading Graziella when one has so many things to reread? That’s an inexcusable distraction” (Lettres de Flaubert (1830-1880), édition Conard, 1926-1930; édition électronique par Danielle Girard et Yvan Leclerc, http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspondance/; my translation). From November 2009 onwards, one should answer Flaubert’s question thus: I am rereading Graziella—without having read it in the first place! (Flaubert noted the following in a letter to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852: “Let’s chat a little about Graziella. It is a mediocre work, even though it is the best thing Lamartine has done ...

Raspberry Pi Ad-hoc Video Exhibition built on liblib and liblib-exhib for the Kadist Art Foundation. La Nube Oscura is a mobile video program of contemporary artworks, curated (and carried) by Joseph del Pesco. The program is accessed via wifi and viewed on whatever device you have with you: smartphone, laptop or tablet. The contents of the program continue to change and evolve, so log-in to see what’s currently on view. Please note that headphones are highly recommended for video viewing. There has been some confusion about a variety of new terms recently developed to help us understand parts of the internet that ...

Michael Snow traces the dualistic structure of his work to his Canadian upbringing between two cultures—English and French—and his early awareness of the different qualities of sight and sound, learned from his parents. Having studied at the Ontario College of Art in his native Toronto, he travelled in Europe in the 1950s and lived in New York in the 1960s. Snow’s contributions to three spheres of cultural activity—visual art, experimental film, and music—have been recognized internationally.

This is the the book that Steve Fagin created to go along with the 55 minute video (see and buy the video separately in our Movies by artists). Oliver Kahn is a 55 minute video which is decidedly a piece about Leeds United, Johan Cruyff and Bayern Munich, but done through a lens more inspired by Samuel Beckett than Franz Beckenbauer. In fact, the piece can be viewed as a misbegotten adaptation of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, with old soccer matches replacing the collected audio diaries of the character. We witness the way the protagonist thinks his life through these soccer ...

Styrofoam seagulls, replicant owls, and explosive donkeys casually amble through this visual primer on some aesthetics, histories, and cinematic legacies of artificial animals. Comprising three commissioned essays and a pool of visual research tracing hidden overlaps between technical and natural forms, Scrim Sinews connects DARPA robotics with the HUAC testimony of Bertolt Brecht, and the chronophotographic gun to the high realism of Pinnochio. Convened and edited by Benjamin Tiven and Per-Oskar Leu on the occasion of their joint exhibition at 1/9unosunove gallery in Rome, Nov. 2014-Jan. 2015. Includes commissioned essays by Homay King, Philip Glahn, and Jonah Westerman. Design by Lucas Quigley using ...

Video is everywhere, like a space in which we move, an ocean we can dive into. But video is no longer the video we once knew. To address this techno-social shift, Andreas Treske sketches the outlines for a philosophical and practical understanding of online video, offering up a theory for the YouTube generation. Video is examined up close and as a societal phenomenon. The images of a video constantly refer to other images, to the user and to the world outside. There is a ‘thickening of the image’. Videos also exist in relation to each other. On YouTube each video is ...

Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” — In Your Dreams Dedicated to William S. Burroughs, the author of My Education: A Book of Dreams, who turned into a writer, then a painter with a shotgun,1 to deal with his murder—while possessed—of his wife The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait” arrives in a desperately wounded condition at a deserted chateau with his valet. How was the narrator mortally wounded? Neither Poe nor the narrator tells us about that. Given that we are not provided with a specific reason for the wound, it is appropriate to look for a general, ...

The development of sculpture in outer space.

If the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, are a surpassing disaster then beyond not only the immediate death toll and the manifest destruction of buildings, including museums, libraries and temples, and of various other sorts of physical records, but also the long-term hidden material effects, in cells that have been affected with radioactivity in the “depth” of the body, and the latent traumatic effects that may manifest themselves après coup, there would be an additional immaterial withdrawal of literary, philosophical and thoughtful texts as well as of certain films, videos, and musical ...