{"id":5593,"title":"Video","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video","version":"3ef265366104e9257815a23f6c2c06f3beb7771a49588e610d38f38d85d97003","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4404606+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Alan Sondheim"}],"authorKeys":["Sondheim, Alan"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Perforations 2","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"1991","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0836","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Video.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video.","publication":"Alan Sondheim. Video. Perforations 2. 1991.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5593.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0836","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":13581},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":113},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":613},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0836","generated":false,"characters":113}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Video pastes itself everywhere. It relies on the fabrication of light. It relies on sound and the speed of light. It produces a square or other domain. It produces an activated information substance of equivalent domains, located and addressable, possessing an abstract structure or \u0022algebra\u0022 of discrete operations. The domains are infinitely retrievable; retrievability (or even template matching) may or may not modify them. In any case, everything always seems to be \u0022in evidence.\u0022 Representation occurs across the domains. Nothing represented is true or false; nothing is or remains history. \u0022Across the domains,\u0022 reality is continuously inscribed. The programs \u0022work\u0022 or not. \u0022Working\u0022 is a matter of circuitry; everything works, completes itself, continuous. To measure \u0022working\u0022 is to interfere. Organism interferes, harbors truth. But truth is not the domain of organism. This is the effect of video: the final revolution. *Truth exhausts itself.* What happens to truth? Everything is lost within the neutralization of substance. Temporality defuses through quantum effects; memory is transformable, as if the linearity of an equation of prepositional logic were challenged by the underlying \u0022sheet of assertion\u0022 itself - as if a substratum of chaos underlies every well-defined formula (formulation). Truth loses nothing but meaning; applicable by convention within limited domains, it refers at best to a syntactically proper expression or program that has been constructed (or an expression \u0022beyond\u0022 or \u0022external to\u0022 syntax). The space floods and inundates the screen. The buffer stores the space, operates upon it. One buffer and another: the space carries no memory, no content. Buffering is a radical transformation of the notion of inscription; no longer a demarcation, inscription itself is treated as a token. It is defused through buffering, which is the stuttering or stammering of the real. Buffering holds the real in abeyance until called up. (Everything is both retrievable and irretrievable; to examine the contents of the frame is already a transformation [equivalence]. In fact, any reproduction is a transformation, and any reading is a reinscription [buffering].) Meanwhile, space fissures, sizzles: through the magic of video, you can hear it sizzle. The space is, becomes, the space of video, the space of representation, and there is no other space; epistemology and ontology fuse as the construction of knowledge ascertains the ontology of the representation-domain. Reality reinserts itself into the space of video; reality is continuous buffering. (And further, perhaps: every real is a referent; every referent is real.) This is the speaking of one who perceives, one with the potential of perception. In relation to the real: the real is tested through its perception. The real, this representation or perception, exists within a secondary space, a space of energy within economy. Hence one economy and another: the codification, registration of information within a given discrete bandwidth (but given for how long? and how discrete?) - the libidinal economy of finance and control overarching the first. Each mixes, purely, impurely, with the other; each intercepts the other. Purity is always abject; substance stains. Reality fissures, crumbles: the space of video becomes fractal, abject. You can already see this at work. The space becomes the same as the real, with the same births, same deaths. Nothing is allowed to remain outside the one or the other. Birth and death as well are problematic, replaced by the exhaustion of materials, quantum effects, electromagnetic interferences. Finally the body itself fissures or speaks or is silent within the screen; the drama of the screen is the drama of the body. The parcellation of the body plays itself against the mobility of the screen; the screen is an imaginary against the body\u0027s symbolic. The simulacrum no longer exists since the screen in fact is at one with the real; the referent is continually present, transforming before our eyes. All of this occurs \u0022naturally\u0022 against the horizon of a scarcity economics; within the interiority of screen culture, difference is absorbed, however, as constructed representation. Tension exists primarily at the boundary where everything occurs, works itself out. Everything crumbles, absorbed as abject debris among the hungry, and mitigated representation among the dispossessed. (Video sees us; who owns or controls representation? Scarcity economics represents the real within the (political) body (politic); the body can die in relation to representation. Only in this manner can the \u0022thickness\u0022 and obdurate ontology of the represented be brought to bear. Images and the imaginary kill.) Epitaph The speed of the world is heating up. Death! Don\u0027t bother me! Blood boils at the thought of it! I\u0027ll be around for the final fire! I\u0027ll be around for the first! I\u0027m telling the truth: There\u0027s no time anymore! There\u0027s no time at all! Video ii Think of video in terms of mimetic desire - imitation circumscribed by fantasy and libido - imitation which remains individuated, inviolate. I combine, coagulate with the represented; through fetishization and sympathetic magic, I gain control. Video remains the model upon which my desire operates; I move from representation to representation, and that is my only control: existence or annihilation. Change the channel! I watch, enter into the partnership of the represented. I am detained there through the inertia of the diegesis, holding my place among the constituents of the image. (That is why the television sitcom or drama privileges the audience, who always recognize the situation before the protagonists.) I am bound, opened and closed. Inertia extols me. Nothing is transmitted. Nothing. The fetish itself may be manipulated; I play with representation, invade or penetrate it; the body fills with nails. The fetish is within its own domain, that of the realm of the spirit or equivalence of flesh. The video image as fetish extends the fetish domain across the horizon of representation itself; it depends upon the \u0022correct perception\u0022 (coherent and preconsciously accepted) of the viewer. The fetish coagulates (in relation to the viewer); the fetish transforms into the source, which is forgotten. But the source itself is transformed, no longer existent; we have seen that the truth of the source disappears as its semiotic decomposes into increasingly obscure epistemological domains. So that the fetish inhabits its own inert world. So that this world procures the signifier of an alterity, inert as well, \u0022above\u0022 and \u0022beyond\u0022 the viewer, and mimesis occurs through the act of the viewer\u0027s perception. The return is that of the inert, which would repress or displace viewing, were it not for the seductive aspects of the inert, fueled by desire and capital. Seduction dominates; eroticism becomes mediated auto-eroticism. The body is simultaneously sliced and mediated [sutured] by image: image is the presence of video, the two- dimensional surface of the screen, by which I do not mean to exclude virtual realities. In virtual realities, the body collapses upon its \u0022own\u0022 buffering, its \u0022own\u0022 emanations. These emanations are possessed, mediated by capital, programmed elsewhere than the site of their consumption. Thus through complex processes of mediation and consumption, the viewer is \u0022given\u0022 freedom - a freedom which, as much as anything in this world, is a construct, and hence limited by program parameters. A good program never reveals its horizon; freedom appears as a field of operations in which desire is fulfilled through freely given consumption. The body is returned to itself, and appears to return to itself. Like video, the body occurs. (Such an analysis opens to the psychology and physiology of trance, exorcism, hypnosis, somnambulism, possession, and hysteria. Screen representations are part-objects, tokens exuded from the body, parcels of cut and imaginary flesh - auto-mutilations which reflect the body bring it inwards, \u0022return\u0022 it to itself. The difference between screen representations and \u0022true\u0022 auto-mutilations is the difference between external mediating capital and self-construction. This difference introjects mediation into every level of the political body and definition of the self. Mimetic desire meets the dictionary of images and desire transforms.) Videola Over four hours work in those heady weeks of autumn in which video became continuous production or sight, language remarkably distanced, reduced, displaced, in favor of the swollen, lurid, thick pastels like flesh, viewer sinking into body and interior\u0027s rapture, bloated veins filled with pulses of dark colorations, surfaces throbbed, sloughed, decayed, dropped in camera walking, shuddering, eye delving into crevice and fissure of landscape, resonance and harmonicas of breast, moist nipple, cock sinuously curving in waves of light, cunts opening body in idle conversation\u0027s midst, cliffs and peaks of dark yellowed earth swelling through viewer\u0027s skin transformed into screen\u0027s interior, television\u0027s other, virtual bodies writing themselves in and out of existence, churning, turmoil of news and disasters, cries of cum, dark and bleak caress, manifolds of fear and desire, fissuring of male sight into fragmenting limbs, joins and hollows, curves or darkened hair, illuminated neon cock words, cunt words, opened anus, cleft flesh vortices, granites, limestones, sand and bleak animal memories, penis-tentacle floating, lengthened beyond pales, blues, yellows, whites penetrating, thrust into viewer\u0027s form, every gift\u0027s receiver, showered with liquid bodies, language, cries, stuttering hysterical God-calls, weeping eyes, airwaves\u0027 rumble cutting fragments loose, breast or cock fragments fallen into viewer\u0027s form, swollen cunt or drive-cauldron, burnished walls, brass, bronze dark, intense, figures turning into burnish-fetish, fetish burning, languor of light streaming, silence between God-calls, falling pebble sounds, flickering bodies swelling outward, rhythm, repetition, transfiguration, flesh into dulled light, darkness, after-image glow, ghost-whispers leaving light behind, I spread into you, form-viewer, viewer-form, spread into immersion birth-desire, cunt, into legs, dreams, open body, streamed hair, returned cuts, sutured cuts, orbit parts fluxed in burnished cauldron, swollen image scaled, sloughed into video space, video beyond, sloughed into viewer, ribs detached from breast, cunt cut, stamped out, inserted, cock cut, out, cut out, written, broken, hyphenated into bringing you closer to the language bringing you, breaking the hyphen, inserting Video Embarrassed to proffer explanation of videowork, such explanation parasitic on the \u0022inertness\u0022 of the tape - any tape, but, in particular, my own, remaining present, aroused, sullen. The images unravel, unroll; they stutter and cross-reference; so much information is carried in color, for example! Hues blend into one another; the voice is lost in the grain of the picture. The image melts from the screen. Always something momentary, something disturbing. Never any characters: someone moves, states something; someone recites or improvises. Everything is exact, spills out before, beyond the frame. As if everything were motorized motor-organism. Images devoured, deconstructed, their excessivity always in evidence. I produce them, find them; they constitute the pressure of the image upon the world. The surface constantly changes direction; I move, scuttle across the surface, my eyes averted. The images are not of eyes. They lend themselves, produce, an other discourse, introjected: they produce the interiors of their own discourses. They speak, struggle from the interior. They inhabit secrecies. The images play themselves out by gaining power, withdrawing, from the audience. They absorb the audience. The audience is the witness of the unconscious. Sexuality plays across the surface of","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":13581,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}