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’.

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

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Against the prevalent post-traumatic amnesia encountered in post-war Lebanon, and which is exempli ed by the unjust and scandalous general amnesty law that was passed by parliament on 28 March 1991 (Law No. 84/91) and that pardoned all political crimes prior to its enactment with the exclusion of “crimes of assassination or attempted assassination of religious gures, political leaders, and foreign or Arab diplomats,” writers and lmmakers should have devised af rmative scenarios and strategies either to remember or not to remember: — Not to remember—without forgetting. He could no longer stand their post-traumatic amnesia and so he volunteered for one ...

The Urban Screens Reader is the first book to focus entirely on the topic of urban screens. In assembling contributions from a range of leading theorists, in conjunction with a series of case studies dealing with artists’ projects and screen operators’ and curators’ experiences, the reader offers a rich resource for those interested in the intersections between digital media, cultural practices and urban space. Urban Screens have emerged as a key site in contemporary struggles over public culture and public space. They form a strategic junction in debates over the relation between technological innovation, the digital economy, and the formation of ...

In this 2009 conversation, artist Amanda Beech introduces her work, and discusses the relation between image, critique, and political agency in contemporary art, theory, and popular culture.

Three presentations from the 2015 event explore the historical and contemporary relationship between choreography, technology, control, and subjectivation

In this text written for the 2016 UNdocumenta film festival in Gwangju, Anne-Françoise Schmid investigates the relation between film and philosophy, and presents a series of mini film-scripts to explore the method of ‘without’. Accompanied by images from Benoît Maire’s series Cloud Painting

In an epic trawl through the heroic narratives of Hollywood action movies, TV crime drama, and their maverick protagonists, from The Maltese Falcon to Dexter via 24, Amanda Beech explores the depiction of law, violence, and the politics of contingency, and asks what the resolute actions of these heroes have to tell us about conceptions of the political force of culture

In this episode of Urbanomic’s Yarncast series, artist Amanda Beech discusses the compelling power of crime fiction, TV shows and movies, the materiality of language and image, and how her video work interrogates the subject-positions and theories of knowledge and power embedded in these popular narratives.

Posthumous Introduction to the First Edition: Writing the introduction after finishing the rest of the book, my memory is coming back to me, and so at present I can give some indication in what context to place it. Why write on vampires in 1992? It is precisely because vampire films and novels are back in fashion (Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula …) that one should ask: why on vampires now, by what coincidence? How come what functions in the too-late and too-early mode is being written about now, when it has become fashionable? But isn’t it characteristic of telepathy that it reaches ...