What Makes An Act of Criticism Successful?

A Collaborative Approach to the Deformative Video Essay

Below are ten videos that I have created as an exercise designed to generate discussion about methods, goals, standards of value, and best practices in the still-emerging field of parametric/deformative videographic criticism. Since the total running time exceeds half an hour, feel free to watch excerpts or skip around.

(Note: most of the videos contain rapidly-changing images and occasionally an effect like flashing lights, which might pose a risk to viewers with photosensitivity.)

For those unfamiliar with the notion of deformative/parametric criticism, here are some starting points. The three links offer some seminal examples of the form, too.

  • Parametric criticism aims to create new forms of knowledge about media objects by subjecting them to algorithmic or rule-based deformations.

  • There is some disagreement, however, on the relative merits of videographic deformations. Are they experiments just for the eyes of the experimenter, yielding results that need to be translated into a more traditional mode of scholarship? Are they studies and cases to be incorporated into a larger video work? Should they be offered and received as standalone scholarship, since by their very nature they create images and sounds that cannot be boiled back down into words? If it’s the latter, how do we determine which experiments are most desirable?

  • Jason Mittell writes, “videographic deformations may not stand as scholarship on their own, but they do function as research, pointing the way to further scholarly explorations. Whether that subsequent scholarship is presented in written, videographic, or multimodal forms is still to be determined, but such work shows how videographic criticism is more than just a form of digital dissemination. Likewise, videographic deformations convey affective and aesthetic dimensions that textual deformances often lack.” (link) (see also!)

  • Alan O’Leary takes a more radical position, writing, “The knowledge fashioned … is procedural and creative rather than propositional: it suggests not ‘Given this, what do we now know?’, but ‘Having made this, what can we do next?’” He also argues for deformative criticism as a post-human form of resistance to traditional academic knowledge production: “Imagine a gerundive scholarship – a ‘knowing-doing’ – that goes beyond knowing-how to knowing-with. Or perhaps an unknowing: a scholarship that makes non-sense of things. OuScholPo is absurdist in method and (typically) outcome because it expresses a distributed subjectivity. It opens prospects inaccessible to the merely human scholar.” (link)

My aim in creating these videos and showing them to scholars at this conference (and others after it) is to begin to establish, as a community of scholar-practitioners, a set of answers to the question “what makes an act of criticism successful?” in the case of parametric/deformative/algorithmic criticism. Along the way, I might be suggesting one of two “new” tools for the parametric toolkit.

Each video below consists of a deformative/parametric intervention on a clip from Hollis Frampton's 1968 experimental short Surface Tension. The deformation will play at first without any explanation. As you watch it, do your best to guess "what it's doing" (in some cases this will be obvious, in others perhaps less so) and decide whether you find this deformation meaningful, successful, philosophically productive, or otherwise (and why). At the end of each, I offer some explanation of my aims and ideas.

As you ponder the videos below as potential acts of scholarship, please ponder:

  • Was I successful in communicating my intent or argument?

  • How could I have communicated my intent or argument better?

  • Considering Alan O’Leary’s manifesto, was my argument relevant or even desirable (that is, did the piece work better without me forcing my intent on you, and why)?

  • Does the video clip function as a successful act of criticism (or productive act of scholarship), and if not, what do you recommend?

1. The original clip

Surface Tension [excerpt] (dir. Hollis Frampton, 1968)

 

2. Premiere 1

 

3. Premiere 2

 

4. Premiere 3

 

5. Database 1

 

6. Database 2

 

7. Database 3

 

8. Content 1

 

9. Content 2

 

10. Content 3

 

Thank you for watching.