Ways of Doing Newsletter #3
September 2024
Our dear WoD subscribers,
Welcome back to another newsletter. We hope the summer treated you well, and that if you wanted to be somewhere hot, you got to be, and if you yearned for the cold, you got that too.
There have been a few things going on with our work.
Lucy and Colleen both participated in Ariel Avissar’s summer workshop series on parametric exercises. As per the constraints of the workshop, all the videos are hidden from public view at present, but a curatorial project is in the works! They both produced four new videos for the series, each exercise based on an already published work: Catherine Grant’s “Satis House,” Matthew Payne’s “Who Ever Heard…?,” Nick Warr’s “Honolulu Mon Amor,” and Colleen’s “Eye-Camera-Ninagawa.”
Alison and Colleen attended the Asian Studies Conference Japan (ASCJ) in Tokyo in July, both on the panel “A Ghostly Chronology: Video Essays on the History and Evolution of Japanese Horror Cinema”. Alison presented her video essay Suffocated But Screaming and Colleen, who thought she was going to get away with just being the panel discussant, was coerced into giving one of her videographic presentations/performances: “Japanese Cinema and Videographic Criticism.”
While they were in Japan, they went to The Dawn of Taiwanese Video Art in the 1980s-1990s exhibition at the MORI Art Museum in Tokyo, and Where Humanity Meets Nature, a large-scale immersive exhibition between photographer and film director Ninagawa Mika and the creative team EiM, held at the Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art in Aomori prefecture. While these exhibitions have now ended, the links to the web pages are still worth a look for some fantastic audiovisual inspiration for your own work.
Colleen’s essay 家 (pronouced “ee-ay”) was published in Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays.
Dayna’s FoUBARthes: Death of the Author piece has been selected for exhibition at the Zlatý Voči International Film Festival of Audiovisual Theory and will be screened in Prague, Czech Republic, this month.
Dayna, Colleen and Alison all have pieces in the newest special issue of [in]Transition on aging studies, curated and organized by Barbara Zecchi. This special issue is due out imminently, so keep an eye on the new home page for [in]Transition, here.
As always, here is a list of things we have particularly enjoyed engaging with recently.
One thing we have noticed is how, in the past year or so, a number of journals have dedicated special issues to video essays (and, as a bonus, are often themed around feminist concerns). Here are a few that have caught our eyes, recently (and, cough, in which a few members of WoD may have work featured in too):
Bean, Jennifer, M. ed. (2023), “Feeling videographic criticism,” Feminist Media Histories, 9.4,https://online.ucpress.edu/fmh/issue/9/4.
Fernández Romero, Diana and Barbara Zecchi, eds. (2024), “Con derecho a la rabia: Subjetividad y activismo / Right to rage: Subjectivity and activism,” Teknokultura Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales / Teknokultura. Journal of Digital Culture and Social Movements, 21.1, https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/TEKN/issue/view/4092.
Fowler, Catherine, ed. (2023), “Special issue: Feminist Videographic Diptychs,” [in]Transition, 10.3https://intransition.openlibhums.org/issue/1211/info/.
Galibert-Laîné, Chloé. ed. (2024), “Sitting, standing, dancing with our screens,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, June 26, https://necsus-ejms.org/sitting-standing-dancing-with-our-screens-an-introduction/
Paranyuk, Viktoria (with Ariel Avissar and Vicente Rodriguez Ortega) eds. (2024), “Also Starring,” Tecmerin 13.1,https://tecmerin.uc3m.es/issue-13-2024-1/?lang=en
Peirse, Alison. ed. (2024), “Doing women’s (global) (horror) film history,” MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 13,https://maifeminism.com/issues/focus-issue-thirteen-doing-womens-global-horror-film-history/.
If that is not enough videographic viewing pleasure for you, here are a few other of our favorite video essays, the things we have on our screens right now:
Viktoria Paranyuk: “Still Lives of Jeanne Dielman”
May Santiago: “Aubrey Plaza: Screen Stars Dictionary”
Catherine Grant: “On Drill Team and the Musicality of Videographic Criticism”
Barbara Zecchi: “Uncontaining Horror: 20th-century Spanish Women’s Meshes of Fear”
Onyeka Igwe, “A So-Called Archive” [extract]
In our next newsletter, we are planning lists of academic journals and film festivals that we know accept video essays for publication and screening. We hope you will find this useful - we’re very aware that with a format like the video essay, knowing where to begin with submitting for publication or exhibition can be rather daunting.
Also, we would love to know what you are watching, and what you recommend we have a look at. We are always on the lookout for new videographic inspiration, for our own work, and for the WoD site. Equally, if you make any of our feminist citational practices exercises, please drop us a line and we will consider featuring it on the site with our other examples.
We wish you all the best for autumn and we’ll back in touch soon,
Take care,
Love WoD
(Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, and Alison Peirse)