ancestors: an illuminated video by Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel. Published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 17.1 (2021), special issue on “Digital Annotation and the Understanding of Bodily Practices.”
This video article consists of three repetitions or cycles of a single audiovisual fragment. The underpinning fragment is just longer than three minutes. In the first cycle, the video fragment is presented with only subtitles added to clarify the recorded dialog. The second cycle augments the first by adding a set of textual ‘illuminations’ that provide the basic details of what is happening and begin to reveal the interactive dynamics at play in this recorded moment. In the third cycle, yet another layer of textual illumination is added, this time bringing to bear a range of critical scholarly sources that link the dynamics of the moment to larger contexts of history, memory, and nation. An accompanying research statement defines the form of illuminated video and imagines its possible futures. Together, the video and the statement are conceived as a teaching tool, introducing some of the potential that video editing brings to the analysis and publication of embodied research.
The original songwork video (‘conflicting associations 1’) can be found here.