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Videographic Methods and Practices

We are delighted to announce an exciting project generously supported by partnerships between the Canadian government and supporting international academic institutions. This new collaboration connects videographic essayists through the theme of "Embodying the Video Essay."  

This initiative is designed to bring together audiovisual essayists who want to develop and exchange methods within a dynamic, collaborative environment. We build on widely recognized models of videographic analysis, such as those detailed in The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy by Catherine Grant, Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, and collaborative ways of working explored by videographic projects like Ariel Avissar’s The TV Dictionary and Evelyn Kreutzer's and Ariel Avissar’s Once Upon a Screen anthologies (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2). Our goal is to expand connections within a dedicated videographic community and to unite for an intensive, in-person, week-long workshop of making and exploration. In preparation for the workshop, participants will engage in organized Zoom sessions in April, May, and June. These sessions will introduce key themes of the initiative and serve as community-building opportunities for inspiration and feedback. The week-long workshop will be held at Bowdoin College  (Brunswick, Maine, USA), July 8th-15th, and includes presentations by guest speakers, new videographic exercises developed to explore embodied practices, and ample opportunity to work on projects with the support of community feedback and potential collaboration. Following the workshop, there will be opportunities for participants to plan future presentations, exhibitions, and possible publications of created works.

Theme: Embodying the video essay

How does the video essay frame, shape, and enhance positionality, relationality, and intersectionality? How do embodied practices inform our screen-based scholarship? How do we connect to each other in the videographic criticism community? 

With a focus on performance-based embodied practices, this initiative encourages videographic critics to reflect on how the video essay engages with frameworks of identity, representation, the materiality of texts, and the senses. We invite opportunities for video essay practitioners to explore theories of intersectional practice-based research with a focus on positionality and relationality. Participants are encouraged to situate themselves in relationship to their object of study, the structures that produced this object, audiences that engage with it, and the communities and peoples that it may implicate and represent. Likewise, we ask participants to question how we might navigate and expand an as-yet nascent form of scholarship that draws on established academic structures, through interactive methods to engage with the materiality of digital texts. We are curious to explore the relationships between embodiment and the screen and how these connections might find expression in the video essay. Finally, we are keen to expand on and generate meaningful methods of engagement: to foster and develop community-based commentary, feedback, and criticism through attentiveness, kindness, rigour, and mutual responsibility.

Invited Guest Presentations and Organized Exercises

Alongside the space to create your own work, the in-person workshop and one of the Zoom sessions will include a series of presentations and opportunities to engage in videographic exercises hosted by leading videographic practitioners Johannes Binotto, Catherine Grant, Kevin B. Lee, and Jason Mittell.