Video

Ben Spatz

Audiovisual tracing, in its broadest sense, is inseparable from the concept of the lab. Probably every site that is called a lab produces images of some kind, from the roughest anatomical drawings to the most precise acoustic measurements. But video as an audiovisual technology and medium is a historically recent phenomenon that affords radically new epistemic possibilities.

I argue that the rise of video has the potential to destabilize the assumed primacy of writing as the sole legitimate medium of thought and knowledge. While other internet-era technologies may change how information is shared and organized, the flow of audiovisuality, like the advent of printing, changes not only what we know but how we know. This does not mean that video provides full or transparent access to the truth of what it records. On the contrary, juxtaposing video and writing can help to reveal both the constructed and interpretive dimensions of video and the embodied and emplaced dimensions of writing. The point is not that video is better (or worse) than writing as a form of knowledge, but that video sustains a radically different set of epistemic relations. Taking the epistemic aspects of video seriously means rethinking the entire logocentric philosophy of knowledge.

Without aiming to be comprehensive, this entry briefly considers the epistemic implications of video across four of the key dimensions structuring The Lab Book: space, apparatus, infrastructure, and people. I conclude by touching on my own experience developing a videographic lab practice.

Videographic Space: Since the earliest generations of cinema, audiovisual recording has offered an upended topology in which any space, no matter how large, can become the “inside” of a kind of laboratory defined by the camera’s frame. While the exteriority of the “field” as depicted in early ethnographic films might be sharply contrasted to the interiority of the laboratory, experimental documentary film has always understood audiovisual media as a way of conducting experiments upon the world.1 Today there are many emerging forms of visual, multimodal, and collaborative anthropology that approach the ethnographic as an exploratory and mutually constructed space that is in part afforded by the capacities of the camera.2 These anthropological approaches can be considered part of the ongoing development of video methods in the social sciences more broadly.3 They are also increasingly in dialogue with rapidly growing practices of Indigenous cinema, which stage their own experiments in an audiovisual frame.4 As video becomes an accepted medium of scholarly research, assumed boundaries between space and place, or laboratory and field, may be radically questioned.

Videographic Apparatus: The increasing ubiquity of video marks a striking change in the apparatus of audiovisual capture. Today, digital and networked video make audiovisual recording not only accessible but indeed ubiquitous on a previously unimaginable scale. In many parts of the world, it is now more common than not for an individual to carry on their person a mobile phone with the capacity not only to record high definition video but also to share it nearly instantly. This of course does not mean that the material costs of video production disappear or that economic differences are leveled. Rather, questions of production value are foregrounded in relation to matters of knowledge. On the one hand, the diminishing cost of high end video recording and editing facilities means that more and more researchers have access to audiovisual means of production. On the other hand, the competitive race to possess more and more data is both ecologically catastrophic and leaves more subtle and fundamental epistemic questions unaddressed. Which offers the best record of an event: a high end digital cinema camera operated by external experts, or a relatively inexpensive mobile phone held by an involved participant? These kinds of questions are carefully explored, for example, at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University (C-DaRe), a laboratory that has experimented with many different approaches to the capture and interpretation of embodied dance knowledge.5

Videographic Infrastructure: While the camera gradually transforms methodologies of investigation within diverse hybrid labs, its audiovisual outputs give rise to an increasing number of videographic journals. Documentary films have long shared knowledge in audiovisual form, but scholarly journals hold a particular type of academic legitimacy and the rise of peer-reviewed videographic journals articulates a radical intervention in the form research can take. Journals like Screenworks, [in]Transition, tecmerin, Journal for Artistic Research, and Journal of Embodied Research push the meaning of experimentation by exploring the capacity of videographic essays and articles to share and transmit knowledge in forms and ways that textual articles cannot.6 As the founding editor of Journal of Embodied Research, I can attest that many core debates in performance studies and performing arts — such as those around theory and practice, textuality and embodiment, the archive and the ephemeral repertoire — appear differently in the context of videographic research and publishing.

Videographic People: Feminist film critics, as well as theorists of race and coloniality, have long argued that cinematic conventions produce a gendered and racialized subject in front of the lens, while empowering the disembodied (paradigmatically white and male) subject behind the camera.7 What happens if we take seriously the assumption that the audiovisual body onscreen is as much a producer of knowledge as the invisible body holding the recording apparatus? Black media theorists have suggested that the rise of digital media and digital video troubles established subject/object divisions and may require new ways of understanding both the politics of identity and the politics of media.8 The question is then not only who holds the camera but how to theorize and enact the complex relationships between bodies, places, and the cameras that trace and record them. If eurocentric science has historically excluded both embodiment and emplacement from the terrain of legitimate research, then the audiovisual capacities of video have the potential to to bring both back into the epistemic frame, perhaps making possible an entirely different kind of laboratory.

My own research comes out of the “theatre laboratory” tradition, which has historically thrived upon an apparently unresolvable tension between bodily presence and quasi-scientific rigor.9 Working centrally with video in the Judaica Project since 2017 has completely transformed my understanding of the theatre laboratory as a site of investigation, provoking me to develop new research methods, new theories of embodiment and identity, and new approaches to videographic publication.10

Considering the impact that printing technology has had on the world over many centuries—for better and for worse—it is reasonable to assume that we may only be in the earliest stages of understanding the epistemic and political implications of networked audiovisual communication. Designers of hybrid laboratories for the future would be well advised to consider the role and implementation of video in their projects, not only as a means of empirical data collection or secondary documentation, but as a primary form of knowledge in its own right.

Ben Spatz (they/them) is a nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are Reader in Media and Performance at University of Huddersfield, editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research, and a leader in the development of new audiovisual embodied research methods.