The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies

1. Summary of the research plan Object of research: This research project aims to investigate the video essay as a digital media format for producing, advancing, and sharing knowledge in audiovisual forms that enable critical reflections on media processes. While the video essay has been mainly used in film studies in the past, it has since become a defining form of audiovisual knowledge in the 21st century and a central mode of audiovisual discourse and dissemination in multiple contexts, including academia, social media, art, and political activism. This research project seeks to provide a nuanced assessment of the video essay and its future potentials by exploring three major axes: 1) the formation, sharing, and negotiation of memories in contemporary videographic practices – as shared histories, individual accounts, archival appropriations, and (media-)cultural artifacts; 2) the ecologies in and through which video essays are produced and circulate; and 3) the bodies that inhabit, perform, and present videographic research and that link memories and ecologies through these acts.Research questions: The proliferation of the video essay has led to a convergence of production methods, aesthetic practices, exhibition platforms, and networks that had previously existed separately. In recent years, partly in reaction to the pandemic, video essays have shifted away from simply analyzing discrete media objects towards network formation and community-building. These shifts prompt questions about the histories and memories, the systems and ecologies, and the actors and bodies that operate in and through videographic practice. The project asks: How have the numerous and diverse platforms of circulation of video essays led to new modes of audiovisual knowledge discourse? How does the current moment in video essays revolutionize previous understandings of media temporality, the archive, original and copy, and memory in general? How does the video essay react to, reflect upon, and utilize corporeal engagement with digital media as an embodied practice and thus change our understanding of body and identity?Hypotheses: 1) The video essay develops a new audiovisual knowledge culture, linking visual art, academia, and popular mass media. 2) In remixing pre-existing material, the video essay rethinks the archive as a space not only of memory but of historically conscious innovation. 3) In contrast to earlier remix practices, the video essay forms a new media ecology of immediacy, in which production, distribution, and exchange happen simultaneously. 4) With digital media experienced as personal expressions and as bodily extensions, the video essay develops new self-reflexive relationships between media, bodies, identities and environments. 5) Finally, the video essay reveals the ambivalent role of social media as both spaces for the democratization of knowledge, and echo chambers of misinformation.Results and impact: This project links three of the most urgent topics concerning our contemporary and future cultural landscape: memories, ecologies, and bodies, and it will establish the video essay as a best practice for critical reflection of their mutual entanglements. It will result not only in a series of 1) written and videographic publications, 2) several qualification works (2 PhD monographs, 1-2 second monographs), but also 3) establish an international center of excellence for videographic research that 4) unites two universities as well as two language regions in Switzerland. The project is highly relevant for all disciplines of the humanities because it 1) systematically investigates the widely used genre of the video essay as central for contemporary and future discussions of community, accessibility, and subjectivity within digital culture, 2) makes a fundamental contribution to the sustainable further development of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods in the humanities and 3) posits the partnership of two Swiss universities at the center of the internationally booming field of of videographic research.