Some Thoughts Occasioned by Four Desktops

by Ariel Avissar

This video is my response, in desktop documentary form, to the other four videos included in this audiovisual section (by Johannes Binotto, Katie Bird, Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, and Ritika Kaushik). This seeks to serve as an alternative to the traditional, written form of response to videographic works, as is the case in most academic journals publishing audiovisual scholarship, such as the written reviews in [in]Transition.[1] My initial idea was to create one response video that took a broader perspective on all four videos and their use of the desktop format as a whole; however, the diverse and idiosyncratic approaches underlying these unique approaches to desktop filmmaking led me to abandon that idea. Instead, I opted to respond to each of the videos on its own terms, inhabiting its particular mode of desktop subjectivity and mimicking its aesthetic and functioning logic as a form of audiovisual dialogue (a method I have experimented with before, in my own work and as a pedagogical method).[2] The result is a video in four chapters that engages with each video’s unique approach to the desktop documentary as a form that thinks, and moreover as a form that can help us better understand how we as scholars-makers think through our desktops.

Author

Ariel Avissar is a PhD student and Tisch Film School Scholar at Tel Aviv University. He is interested primarily in videographic criticism and television studies. His international videographic collaborations include ‘Once Upon a Screen’ (with Evelyn Kreutzer) and the ‘TV Dictionary’ project. He is an associate editor at [in]Transition: The Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, and has co-edited several of the Sight & Sound ‘Best Video Essays’ polls (2019-2021). Avissar’s video essay work has been published in [in]Transition and The Cine-Files.

References

Mittell, J. ‘Opening Up [in]Transition’s Open Peer-Review Process’, Cinema Journal, 56.4, 2017: 137-141.‏ 

Avissar, A. ‘The Collaborative Potential of Algorithmic Procedures’, presentation delivered at ‘Investigating the Modes of Videographic Criticism’ (online symposium), February 2022a: https://vimeo.com/679979382/b87b07b5d3 

_____. ‘What is Neo-Snyderism?’, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, 9.1, 2022b: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/what-neo-snyderism  

[1]  For more on [in]Transition’s written reviews, see Mittell 2017.

[2] For an example of my own work that employs this method, see, among others, Avissar. 2022b; for an online presentation I gave on its use as a pedagogical tool, with examples of student work, see Avissar 2022a.