Bloomsbury Music Video Spaces: Atmospheres, Imaginaries, and Negotiations of Audio-Visual Spatial Relations

Music videos conceive, depict and perform a variety of imaginary, communicative, social and cultural spaces and thus can contribute to sharpening our artistic and academic sensibilities and imaginations of the production of space. The production and representation of space and place in film and (popular) music has received increasing scholarly attention. However, a surprising gap appears at the most obvious intersection of these two fields of study: the music video. While urban settings have dominated in music video history due to many popular music genres close ties with urban scenes and sounds, some music videos address classical tropes of the sublime and concomitant representations of nature, like forests, deserts, mountains or the sea, while others explore the spatialities and visualities of recently emerging scopic regimes, such as Google Street View, the vertical perspectives of Google Earth and drone footage. The collected case studies cover a variety of European cultures and geographies, including mountain, desert and urban landscapes. In so doing, the edited volume probes and underlines the versatility of music videos as a highly sensitive medium of spatial reflection of times in which societies, political formations and the climate are undergoing radical changes.