Bloomsbury Academic Video Theories: A Transdisciplinary Reader: 14 (International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics)

Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader on video theory, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. With video regarded as a ubiquitous medium, it’s surprising that video theory as an academic discipline has not yet been established in comparison to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television. This “video gap” in media theory is remarkable considering today’s omnipresence of the medium through online video portals (such as Youtube, Vimeo, Snapchat or Instagram). Video technologies address us in our everyday online tasks, and they have opened up and superseded text-based web browsers in many aspects. Consisting of a selection of annotated source texts and chapter introductions written by the editors, this book takes into account fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This is also accompanied by a timeline to help contextualize and frame the techno-cultural developments of video since the analog days. Theorists and artists old and new, like Jacques Derrida, Marshall Mcluhan, Jean-Luc Godard and Paul Virilio, are joined together in this unique collection with almost half the work translated into English for the first time. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following up the continuous transformations of what was / is / will be video. Review The book by Daniels and Thoben is a game-changer both for Media Studies and for Art History, making available an important body of texts which have so far been either unknown, or inaccessible. The editors' knowledgeable selection and their intellectually rich proposal for ordering the historical discourses about the medium of video should raise objections and debate, but what will prevail is the phenomenal achievement of this publication that makes such debate possible in the first place. An essential source for anybody interested in visual media. --Andreas Broeckmann, Art Historian, Leuphana University, Germany This book is a long overdue must-read primer for anyone thinking about and teaching the many meanings and epistemes of video. Read this book and you will find a compellingly structured overview of video theories and histories covering a wide range of discursive fields. --Hanna B. Hölling, Associate Professor, University College London, UK and Research Professor, Bern University of the Arts, Switzerland This exiting and much-needed volume brings together an impressive array of voices on video. Its interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and intercultural scope offers a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of the discursive field of video theories–a field that is as multifaceted and everchanging as the medium of video itself. The most laudable accomplishment of the book is that it celebrates the “hydra-headedness” of video without falling prey to it: the volume doesn’t lose sight of the main (t)h(r)eads of the medium, nor does it attempt to silence any perspectives on video at the benefit of a singular canonical viewpoint. Instead, by structuring the volume around themes and by providing insightful introductions to each chapter, the volume manages to interconnect not only a multitude of heterogenous video theories, but also to critically relate artistic practices to written reflections, as well as the past, present and future of video. --Janna Houwen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands and author of Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (2017) About the Author Dieter Daniels is Professor in Media Theory and Art History at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany. Jan Thoben is Lecturer and Program Coordinator in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the University of the Ar