{"id":5616,"title":"Processing Trauma: The Media Art of Daniel Reeves","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/processing-trauma-media-art-daniel-reeves","version":"1ee717ed798a9aeeb78c47edc4c67523a88396ca35c9d5551460c356cacc88e2","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4420608+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Patricia R. Zimmermann"}],"authorKeys":["Patricia Zimmermann"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"September/October 1998","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"26","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"2","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1010","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Processing Trauma: The Media Art of Daniel Reeves.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/processing-trauma-media-art-daniel-reeves.","publication":"Patricia R. Zimmermann. Processing Trauma: The Media Art of Daniel Reeves. Afterimage. vol. 26, no. 2. Visual Studies Workshop. September/October 1998.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5616.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1010","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":38526},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":812}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Obsessive Becoming by Daniel Reeves Distributed by Video Data Bank The Hand That Holds Up All This Falling: The Works of Daniel Reeves October 7- December 14, 1998 Handwerker Gallery Ithaca College Ithaca, New York Daniel Reeves, an expatriate American currently residing in Scotland and France, is best-known in the United States for his contributions over the last two decades to the evolution of the personal, poetic, experimental video documentary with signature pieces such as Smothering Dreams (1981), Sabda (1984), Sombra A Sombra (1988), Ganapati: Spirit of the Bush (1986), and his epic masterwork, Obsessive Becoming (1995). (1) Historically, these works contributed to the legitimation of video as an art form, and helped to chart the genre of a personal documentary that melded subjectivity with public histories and political agenda. Reeves\u0027s work also carved out a space for a magical realist documentary practice distinct from the postmodern video counterhistories of the 1980s and early 1990s. (2) Since the production of Smothering Dreams-a visceral reenactment and psychic restaging of his brutal ambush experiences during the Vietnam War-Reeves has produced a stunning and evocative range of work in video, installation, photography and performance. However, his mystical and subjectively encoded single-channel work has somewhat eclipsed his prolific work in other media, such as installation and photography (to be discussed later), which suggest more public territories in their disposition and reception. Incorporating multiple media formations and constructions, these various projects navigate a complex terrain between the political nightmares of war, the necessity of spiritual renewal and the urgency of appropriating new technologies to create new collective rituals. All of the work suggests the imperative to constantly invent new formal languages for visual/psychic exploration, deploying technology not as a fetish but as an exorcism to recover fractured memories, warped political sensibilities and misplaced collectivities. The artist transforms into the shaman. Reeves\u0027s strategy merges art-making as a spiritual practice with art-reception as a historiographic methodology, an embodiment and inscription of history upon both the body and the eye. Both the single-channel and installation/multi-media works share an obsession with reworking trauma (Vietnam, the Spanish Civil War, child abuse, family violence, the Gulf War, nuclear war, environmental destruction of plants and animals) through a reclamation of the curative powers latent in the reprocessed image. In trauma, the image emerges as the psychic pivot point, the place where precise repetition elides memory and prevents the moving forward that is inscribed in a narrativizing history. (3) The traumatic event, larger than life because it annihilates life and summons death, continually returns and cannot be controlled or tamed or extinguished; it can only be integrated within a historically dialogic practice. In the content of Reeves\u0027s work, trauma is engraved with death, figured in wars, environmental destruction, psychic deaths. According to literary theorist Cathy Caruth, \u0022To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.\u0022 (4) As cultural theorist Stuart Hall has observed in his analysis of Frantz Fanon\u0027s theorization of the inscription of colonialism and race, it is necessary to move beyond facticity and fixity into \u0022the practices of trans-coding and re-signing . . . to disturb, unsettle, and to re-inscribe.\u0022 (5) The anthropologist Michael Taussig has written about indigenous rituals that produce a \u0022healing through images,\u0022 a collective transformation of terror into historical memory. For Taussig, the image holds possibilities beyond itself-it is a form of ritual in and of itself, a site for performativity rather than fixed meaning or a stunted facticity. However, the image is not bound by solipsism and individualism but is instead collective and nomadic, creating social networks that sustain resistance to the silencing state terror produces. (6) Reeves\u0027s body of work stages this healing, where processed and digitized video images partake in this trans-coding that media technologies and war suppress. This reinscription attempts to release pain and move toward a new collective reclamation of memory and history with imagery as a magical conduit to the psychic and political realms, not as an identical index and referent for these realms. In other words, the images shed their facticity and fixity, functioning more as hypertextual links to larger, more layered narratives that generate meaning production through juxtaposition. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has described how trauma requires that repetition be disengaged; he writes \u0022The insight begins with the shattering of prior forms. Because forms have to be shattered for there to be new insight. In that sense, it is a shattering of form but it is also a new dimension of experience.\u0022 (7) This shattering of images and forms is exemplified in the design structure of Obsessive Becoming -- a tour de force epic invoking the tropes of melodrama that connects Reeves\u0027s family dysfunctionality with the history of the representation of war and technology in twentieth-century modernity. This single-channel video moves from repressed memories of family violence and sexual abuse, to the need to witness larger political events like the Vietnam War and genocide, eventually arriving at a spiritual renewal and reconnection between family and collective politics. It doubles the sites of trauma: it moves both into psychic space and out to war and genocide by means of digital layering, superimpositions and dissolves. In Obsessive Becoming, a multitude of discordant images taken from home movies, archival footage of war, family snapshots and science films are digitized and morphed, condensing fragmented images into water and fluidity. The layering of these disparate images and their manipulation, releases them from their symptomatic repetition and indexicality. This layering strategy simultaneously problematizes the sign as fixed referent and re-sites personal/historical imagery as mobile formations. As a body of work, Reeves\u0027s single-channel videos push the possibilities of camera-vision to unfold transcendence by both seeing anew and re-visioning again, often in slow-motion images, layering of images, or associative montage connected through dissolves that function almost like metaphorical bandages to the traumas within war-torn psychic states. Sombra a Sombra, a poetic evocation of the Spanish Civil through the poetry of Cesar Vallejo (read by video artist Juan Downey), consists of live action imagery of various ruins and sites in Spain, where the emptiness of the compositions, devoid of humans, suggests death as an absence, as a void diagrammed by graphic compositional elements. The act of shooting functions as an exorcism of personal trauma that settles into spiritual resolution by transferring the Zen Buddhist notion of the present moment to the production process, an action that counters postmodernism\u0027s severance of the sign from the referent to create new meaning. Reeves\u0027s work forages for signification itself, an archaeology of the visual as a space where trauma is scripted into memory. (8) For Reeves, the production of new referents as well as new signs drives the single-channel work-it refuses to accept imagery disconnected from the realms of the real. In Reeves\u0027s work, images and the imaginary function as processes through rather than as memorialized nostalgia. (9) Rejecting the veracity and verisimilitude of the image as essentially a conservative practice that reflects repetition, the images in Reeves\u0027s work operate as multi-layered dialogic exchanges with other images, each enfolding a testimony of the visual trace into the other. His is a virtuoso manipulation of a wide range of technologies (video, film, computers, analog and digital editing, original and archival footage, installation and photography, single-channel and multiple channel) to shred, layer and decompose images ranging from archival war images, to excavate the psychic traumas entangled within their formal designs. (10) For example, nearly every one of Reeves\u0027s single-channel pieces discards the straight cut-a hallmark of discontinuous montage-opting for image processing, dissolves, digital layering or superimpositions. These strategies imply that images are sedimentary layers of a geology of the self that is composed of public life, histories, subjectivities, traumas, recovered and repressed virtual/psychic imagery. This shredding and image-composting is evidenced in Reeves\u0027s late 1970s image-processing techniques, his incessant use of dissolves, rotoscoping, his digitized composite imaging and digital morphing. In its deployment of technology to refashion vision as a way to repeal its mimetic realist function, Reeves\u0027s work extends the epistemology of the radical political modernists of the early twentieth century like Dziga Vertov, who positioned technology as a facilitator of a new vision. Vertov\u0027s concepts of the kino-eye and montage would dislodge the passivity of the fiction film, \u0022the opiate of the people,\u0022 through the construction of new intervals and gaps between the image-writing that would push the spectator to labor on the signification of new revolutionary meanings. (11) Additionally, Reeves\u0027s single-channel work often utilizes either poetry or poetic narration as yet another layer of memory complementing the video images, restoring imagination to the image. Combined, the layered imagery and the poetic writing invert the relationship between text and image: images detonate denotations, while spoken texts suggests textuality as infinitely associative and deferred. For example, Ganapati/A Spirit in the Bush, a tape that situates the killing of elephants within a cultural death drive to destroy the earth, is composed of continuously scrolling script that dislodges the slowed down images of elephants from their animality, linking them into a larger psychic symbolic structure about death, destruction and land. In these works, Reeves fashions a writing through images densely layering imagery and language to create new ways of thinking and perceiving. (12) These videos demonstrate that both text and image serve as discursive relations, infinitely sedimentary, equally visual, equally mystical, always evocative. (13) They exhibit a tension between the production of the text reverting to the mysticism of individual vision, a nineteenth-century cultural/historical trope situating the artist in a privileged outsider position often marked by a retreat from public accountability, while the text\u0027s meaning production and reception extends out to a more spiritual collectivity based on an ephemeral affinity between images and the imaginary. This strategy relies on an individual vision to situate the pro-filmic, the world out there, as a laboratory where trauma can infuse the real with death; it occupies a countermovement to much of contemporary political film and video practice that is more explicitly and deliberately situated within more overtly political realms of identity politics or political struggles over difference that in turn situate themselves as acts of resistance to a normalizing hegemony. In Reeves\u0027s video work, resistance is not so reductively a rejection of hegemony but is instead a resistance to traumatic repetition that, despite technological exorcisms, continually repeats and encircles itself. His work continually pulls away from the real, positioning itself within a series of inscriptions, ciphers, repressions, displacements and condensations. (14) This non-linear structure anticipates digital multi-media architectures that rely less on linear distribution of content and more on the multiple routes and paths to navigate the content as a subject comprised of many multiplicities. (","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":38526,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}