Aby Warburg, “Mnemosyne. Einleitung” (1929), in Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 5.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 231.
Boris Groys, “On the Aesthetics of Video Installations,” in Stan Douglas: le Détroit (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 2001), unpaginated.
This would of course have to entail a rejection of corporate copyright fundamentalism, which led to the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay. But regardless of whether one is an “intellectual property” hardliner or an advocate of Copyleft, it would be folly not to offer one’s moving images via an official channel as well.
For Schum’s initiatives, see the catalog Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, videogalerie schum, ed. Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, and Ursula Wevers, (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2003).
Jean-Luc Godard, undated proposal for Histoire(s) du Cinéma et de la Télévision, in Jean Luc Godard, Documents, ed. Nicole Brenez et al. (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006), 281.
While organizations such as EAI are important, their prices are forbidding and even shocking to those who are accustomed to “normal” DVDs. In this respect e-flux video rental is an interesting alternative, though the emphasis on the selection of the materials by a variety of curators also suggests that this model is still firmly rooted in an art-world economy in which access to moving images is highly regulated and mediated.
Antonio Negri, “The Constitution of Time” (1981), in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York/London: Continuum, 2003), 49.
Negri, “The Constitution of Time”, 34–35.
This text will be the point of departure for a presentation at the James Gallery in the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, as the final part of a three-part exhibition to be curated by the author during the first half of 2010.