The project “The Digital Video Essay” from Evelyn Kreutzer explores the current state of critical audiovisual transformations of existing moving-image media known under the umbrella term of the digital video essay. It considers how moving-image media in the digital era perform as open, living archives of sounds and images, which are subject to constant audiovisual appropriation, and how their digital accessibility shapes our collective media experiences, environments, and histories.
While the project focuses particularly on academic video essays and digital methods of audiovisual scholarship, it also examines how moving-image media objects (predominantly excerpts from existing films, television programs, and online videos) circulate in-between and transcend formerly distinct media technologies and different realms of media production and audiences more broadly, including experimental, documentary, and installation media.
Through close analyses, interviews with moving-image makers, as well as my own engagements with videographic research methods, I aim to investigate how contemporary video essayists quote, (re-)contextualize, juxtapose, fragmentize, mix, and transform existing works. I will also reflect on their implications for the present and future of digital moving-image media scholarship, specifically in regards to the blurring lines between media theory and practice.
The project is funded by the Walter Benjamin Programme of the DFG.
