After uniqueness : a history of film and video art in circulation / Erika Balsom.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity--or both at once.

From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the question of image circulation is central to the history of film and video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and write the history of the moving image as an art form.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

After Uniqueness centers around a basic fact of film production: films can be reproduced and copied, and indeed were made to be, from an original master negative (or positive), and thus are unlike paintings, sculptures, and other forms of essentially irreproducible art. Balsom (King's College London, UK) outlines a key dilemma for the experimental filmmaker--how to retain control of one's work in a world full of copies. That she has done her homework is evident in her examination of distribution patterns in art galleries in the 1950s and 1960s; the foundation of the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1961, as a distribution center for experimental filmmakers; and independent filmmakers such as Gregory Markopoulos, who pulled all of his films from circulation in the cooperative to set up his own dedicated exhibition site in Greece. Balsom examines numerous other filmmakers frustrated by conventional distribution systems, including Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, et al., and she also looks at the establishment of the online forum UbuWeb, which offers rough video copies of experimental films for free to online viewers. Informed, detailed, and passionate, this volume is required reading in this digital era. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. --Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska--Lincoln