Breaking new ground as the first transdisciplinary reader in this field, Video Theories is a resource that will form the basis for further research and teaching. While theories of video have not yet formed an academic discipline comparable to the more canonized theories of photography, film, and television, the reader offers a major step toward bridging this “video gap” in media theory, which is remarkable considering today's omnipresence of the medium through online video portals and social media.
Consisting of a selection of eighty-three annotated source texts and twelve chapter introductions written by the editors, this book considers fifty years of scholarly and artistic reflections on the topic, representing an intergenerational and international set of voices. This transdisciplinary reader offers a conceptual framework for diverging and contradictory viewpoints, following the continuous transformations of what video was, is, and will be.
Prof. Dr. Dieter Daniels is Professor of Art History and Media Theory and Art History at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany. He is also the Gutenberg Fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany. He is an expert in the fields of video art and media theory.
Jan Thoben is program coordinator at the University of the Arts Berlin, Germany, and research assistant at the Mainz University of the Arts, Germany. He has accomplished extensive research on the audiovisual components of video.