Illuminations

One of the most important questions for videographic research today is the relationship between textuality and audiovisuality. Does textuality always have to frame and contextualize video, in order for it to be research? What if textuality were located topologically within video, instead of the other way around? Is text needed at all? Can’t some audiovisual material “speak” for itself? In 2020, as the Coronavirus pandemic was setting in, I decided to launch an open call for a special issue of illuminated videos. As I wrote in the call, many practitioners did not have the opportunity to work with others this year, because of the pandemic. I thought it might be a good time to ask people to go back into their video archives and think about how they might annotate and recontextualize selected audiovisual material. Contributors were asked to work with a piece of uncut video. No editing of the video or audio tracks was allowed, except for basic corrections. In other words, the audiovisual track has to follow its own temporality, without cuts. The contributions to this special issue are presented in order from shortest to longest. I hope this will be useful way to introduce the form of illuminated video.