This video talk was presented virtually at “The Art of Video (in) Research,” a symposium hosted by the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). I was honored to participate and to share some of my thinking about how we might develop more critical, ecological, and queer approaches to video annotation. The symposium programme is here.
ABSTRACT
Queering Annotation:
Entanglements of Technique, Identity, and Place in Artistic Research Video
This talk will examine the practice of annotating artistic research video, understood as a method for articulating the queer entanglement of technique, identity, and place. Drawing on queer and critical race theory and other theories of embodied identity, I will show how experimental practices that focus on the innovation of technique are always also interventions in the material enactment of identity and place. In particular, I want to suggest that the videographic form itself both demands and aids the naming and confrontation of institutional whiteness, insofar as it manifests audiovisually the inextricability of technique, identity, and place in ways that are radically distinct from the dominant epistemology of writing.
My presentation will focus on examples of annotated or “illuminated” video from the Journal of Embodied Research and from my own practice research, in which textuality not only augments and enhances but potentially also speaks back to and critically transforms the appearances of audiovisual bodies, practices, and places. In broad terms, I want to consider both the onto-epistemological and the ethical-political implications of a possible turn to videographic thought, as a strategy that might or might not work to displace the logocentric and colonial legacies that continue to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge. More specifically, I want to ask how the act of annotating or illuminating one’s own audiovisual body can function as a call to develop more robust connections between the micro inventions and micro cultures of artistic research and a range of wider sociocultural discourses.