This week, Film Notes publishes an essay by Linda Chiu-han Lai accompanying “A City in Transmission,” an online program of works by five Hong Kong video artists presented on e-flux Film in collaboration with Videotage. Lai approaches video essaying as a form of experimental action, examining how artists develop visual and sonic languages to give form to experiences and histories excluded from dominant narratives. Featuring Lai’s Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009) alongside videos by Ellen Pau, Lee Kai Chung, Serene Hui, and Yan Wai Yin Winnie, the program is available to watch here through September 30, 2026.
“Essay films” or “video essays” have always been part of the story of experimental cinema. Here, I shall “transplant” it to the broader landscape of experimental action1 in the arts, highlighting the very act of articulation and shared affect to argue for the performative contingency of what I will rephrase “essaying through sight and sound.”2 I draw from twentieth-century art and contemporary participatory, socially engaged practices to think of what sight-and-sound experiments may embody: the Lettrist call to bridge the gap between art and everyday life, and Fluxus’s focus to systemize the former by proposing new modes of art as “intermedia events.”
This discussion is also provoked by my direct participant observation in the field as an artist, advocate curator, teacher, juror, and researcher interchangeably. The proposed actions address a milieu where machine practices increasingly parse the space of expression and homogenize the shapes of our thoughts and modes of utterance, imposing standards of legitimacy that often rule out articulations above or below the grid. The moving image (and images in general) must be discriminated for its ubiquitous availability and multiplicity of material forms and functions. Also pertinent is a milieu in which local and regional experiences are also “global”: cultural practitioners are all implicated in the problem of representing “ourselves” to ourselves and to others. On the level of global cultural transaction, what are the organized and implied forces that delimit or liberate the complexity of artistic articulation?
A New Starting Point: Grammatology to Deconstruct Towards Grammatization
One recent encounter took place in Hong Kong between 2019 and 2021, when the effort to signify a crisis produced its own reductive tokenization and typification. In representing ourselves to others, and in answering what others demanded of us, we came to favor images of the conflicts playing out openly on the streets almost to the exclusion of anything else. The result was a “stripped-down” Hong Kong that oversimplified our struggle for agency and ignored the roots and complexity of its people's desire for a better future. The demand for easily recognizable images is understandable, given the “necessity of first-person presence when truths and fabricated ‘truths‘ are competing.” Beyond the fight for direct elections, however, many enduring problems remain to be exposed: an unstated economic logic, the storytelling “traditions” of our entertainment culture, a sense of hope defined by homeownership, the spending logic of local administrations, hidden fractures within the population, images of the ideal Hong Kong person and the techniques of the self that people adopt to hold on to their sanity, the management of everyday psychology, invisible and shifting forms of redlining, geopolitics, a blindness to how irrationality shapes both politics and the quotidian, and more. It comes down to one question: how can artists move beyond convenient narratives and give our struggles and experiences a renewed material presence in forms, voices, appearances, and sight-and-sound structures? The question also concerns how we live and how we understand our experiences, individually and intersubjectively.3
Stretched cognition and expanded vocabulary are questions of grammatology—understanding how the formal conventions are formed and by what standard—and the call for grammatization, that is, the artists’ and stakeholders’ day-to-day effort in keeping norms and conventions revisable in response to new historical contexts.
A second, more inspiring, encounter to cite is the vastly expanded language and diverse sight-and-sound sources that exceed what established film language beholds in many moving image events I have been part of.4 “Essaying” is far more than forming a coherent whole with a designated conclusion, and its function extends beyond the realm of avant-garde cinema.
Essaying is a craft for moving image artists, and yet it has become a general right for everyone who has access to sight-and-sound tools. Essaying is often felt as an act of discontent of varied impulses—uncertainty, a sense of urgency, or existential crises abound in many works I saw. Rather than being strictly expository, these works show a stronger tendency toward the present-tense process of unfolding a thought; essaying meanders, showing us step by step how someone puts sounds and images together to see if they work. Some demonstrate their proper training in film/video production, whereas many more are writing diaries with images. “Framing” is visual composition with a returning emphasis on its indicative functions, reminding one of Early Cinema (of Attraction): “Look! This is…” Editing serves more than illusionary continuity and may better be described as juxtaposition, collating, composing, and compositing. The sources of sight-and-sound material exceed what “found footage” prescribes. Many works are eclectic assemblages of several contemporary media genres: documentaries, PowerPoint presentations, smartphone recordings, social media messaging interfaces, animated pictures, screen captures, glitches, signal interferences, 3D visualizations, podcasts, music videos, explicit citations of AI-generated data, and more. With more imaging technology made available to the everyday user, the extreme scale variations afford everyday users the ability to shuttle between the micro and the cosmic. We could be looking at the molecular structure of skin, and in the next second a view of Earth from outer space.
We need a fresh account of videography that addresses the sources and tendencies of emerging practices. Not only essayists but also jurors and curators are inevitably part of grammatization as an activist response to reconsider assessment standards with a new vocabulary. The discussion here is an attempt to conceptualize what has emerged as “surplus” practices not yet addressed in historical discourses, rather than simply substantiating established philosophical concepts.
Involved in experimental action via sight-and-sound essaying is the shift of emphasis from deconstructing grammatology (Derrida)5—the formation of a language highlighting legitimacy—to grammatization (Stiegler),6 the activity of revitalizing an established language as a techno-political call. Artists are involved in the stewardship of a language.
Thought-as-(a)-Practice and Essaying as Narrative Experiments
In the following, I shall discuss grammatization as experimental action via the notion of “thought as practice,” and, on an operational level, the crafting of “thought paths.”78 Thinking is not just logical reasoning; it is active, productive, and interventionist—a tool for living and transforming realities. Thinking as a practice is nomadic, materialist, and posthuman—always seeking to reach new horizons. Thinking is embedded in action, which embodies ethical accountability and, therefore, the space for resistance.
“Thought path” is the phenomenology of thought-as-practice, and of sight-and-sound essaying, highlighting the activity’s narrative core: the step-by-step sequential ordering of fragments towards the conclusion.9 The “journey” metaphor suggests how different essayists may arrive at the same objective truth but via totally different narrative processes.10 This is why the discontent of the street protest must be reopened for more diverse articulation. “Thought path” is the process of navigating truth, of dynamic, ever-ongoing discovery.11 An essayist enacts her “thought as practice,” highlighting her journey of thinking of/about/through the raw material she gathers. She may not already have her insight or conclusion, but she finds it as she starts essaying.
Irreducible Remainder, Indigestible Residue
Essaying through sight and sound is a form of protest, the essayist’s gathering the momentum of her commitment to ethical integrity. Many essayists “protest” with their own versions of a possible history of everyday life. Walter Benjamin describes what mainstream historical narratives reject as “irreducible (historical) remainder” or “indigestible residue,” as if those deliberately suppressed or thoughtlessly neglected realities would not just rest.12 Benjamin responded with his diligent flânerie to gather “rags” and “refuse,” which he recorded in the colossal Arcades Project. Benjamin’s practice invites us to be critical of current frameworks of freedom and rationality; it is also an invitation to openness for the heterogeneous and the “new.”13 In this light, video essays are soundings born of the construction of a unique language system. Renewed grammatization is integral to presencing the remainder and the residue as thoughts must be materialized through language.
Essaying is closely connected to historiographic experiment. I have committed myself to “micro narrativity” to highlight works of thought paths that shift attention away from dominant stories to everyday miniatures, embodying textures of lived moments and our sense of time by constantly stretching our perceptual trajectory through intermedia and interdisciplinary descriptions.14 My video essays Non-place, Other Space (2009) and Voices Seen, Images Heard (2009) are two instances of my micro history injection, at the same time asking how images work and what kind of knowledge they produce. In the former, I make “disappeared” places reappear with an augmented aura. The latter shows the essayist constantly confronted by inexhaustible and diverse sources of sight and sound. Artists are part of traditions, but we do not labor for traditions; and yet the vastness of the past, tapped or unknown, is our infinite, unfathomable resource. We sit at the crossroads of many art, media, and cultural histories. Many essayists, like me, have directed an intense gaze at the irreducible remainders, ceaselessly mobilizing resources available to make them enter the viewer’s consciousness. Their appearance may be tentative, and the unfamiliar grammatical measures may be deemed “indigestible” by many, but sustaining irreducibility is our job.
Grammatization is proactively bringing back those thoughts, realities, and experiments left out of dominant discourses, trendy practices, and institutional jurisdiction. Grammatization is deconstructive, but also an open creative activity to enlarge an art practice’s glossary, expanding the vocabulary of emotions and stretching our range of perception-cognition.
A Specific Performance of Thought Paths: Essaying with Sight and Sound
Essaying with sight-and-sound points to specific questions of truth methods and knowledge claims. As lens-based creativity remains vibrant, these questions remain basic: What is in a shot, how does it function, and what kind of knowledge is produced?
A key aspect is the “cut” that defines a shot. A well-known experimental response is to dethrone continuity editing via the method of “montage,” highlighting the rich potentials of individual shots. Ellen Pau’s Diversion (1990) shows how she radicalizes sight-and-sound narratives via her “cutting” game. In this work, the fragments of cross-harbor swimmers move through four phases of communication.15 In the beginning, such shots indicate the actual sports event as if it were once again happening in front of the viewer (the illusion and transparency theses); but as these shots repeat with manipulation, they become codes of emotions (code thesis); and as they repeat with variations, they become the token of the inexpressible emotions (recognition thesis) that motivate the work. This takes us back to the Chinese title of the work, which means “You can't reach the shore at both ends,” uttered in a moment of anticipation of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule. Curiously, did the footage of the swimming event (from the 1960s) provoke Pau’s felt anxiety? Or did Pau “find” a perfect match for her feeling of not getting anywhere, with these images made available to her in a video workshop she joined?
Montage is liberating. This is as true of images as of sounds. The idea of the “sound image”16 concerns sound liberated from a supporting role and forming a world of its own. We might call such arrangements of visual and sonic fragments “concrete video,” a materialist approach derived from musique concrète.17
Even “montage” needs to be re-grammatized.
As early as 1990, Zbigniew Rybczynski’s The Orchestra (1990) made it almost irrelevant to ask, “How many shots are there in the work?” An image discourse of apparently a single take with an obvious progression of events, the work totally collapses the conventional shot system. Early critics and historians focused on the use of animation and electronic skills to achieve such effects with the cumbersome green screen and heavy shooting equipment. The attempt to turn a video work into one single take/shot, freed from the shot-scene-sequence logic, has now become self-evident, made possible by contemporary digital technology.
A lot of contemporary videography shows proliferations of the montage ethos into many acts, including that of deeming the shot system invalid, and towards a new kind of “interval” between sight and sound units. Layering, dissolving, morphing, decoloring, transformation, modularity, morphogenesis, pixel patterning, single tableau shots, etc., are only some of the new emphases to achieve (internal) montage and a different kind of coherence that highlights an evolving trajectory of sight and sound.
Lifting essaying out of a lens-based vocabulary is also driven by the need to get as close as possible to unusual sensations and experiences that have no language, as the above work examples suggest. Grammatization is premised on such a quest.
How Do We Make and Use Images?
The multiple image-source phenomenon yet suggests the question of “what is an image” must not be dismissed too soon. In proper film study, the “photographic image” is a composed image, born out of the camera, upholding a kind of “there-ness,” a distance inscribed between the viewer and what is being captured.18 Contemporary essaying, evidently an eclectic practice, asks, “Are images we see a reliable source of knowledge? What is the place of sense-perception in knowing about the world?” Sense-perception challenges “certainty”: the moving image is a unique way to counteract doubts derived from overt dependence on logical reasoning. Sight-and-sound replaces doubt with openness, embraces ambiguity as an existential fact with many possibilities, and regards raising questions as important as answers.
“Image as imagery” could refer to totally different image events, each purporting different pictures of reality through technical means. The photographic image is one kind of art (or aesthetic) image, embodying imagination and perceptual insights. Daniel Dennett, citing Wilfrid Sellars, differentiates between the “scientific image” and the “manifest image.”19 The “manifest image” is that of humanness, rooted in everyday life, addressing our common sense and experiences; but it could change over time, from one milieu to the next. The “scientific image” is an abstraction of the conclusions of many tests and procedures. It pertains to something verifiably true and takes much longer to change, though change will occur sooner or later as existing scientific theorems are revised. Dennett’s call is that to be part of contemporary society, we cannot afford to be ignorant of the scientific image as it indicates change and will carry us over many thresholds, such as more-than-human ontologies and the mutual implications of the humanities and sciences.
The aesthetic image mediates through artistic languages. And yet I am particularly interested in the eclectic crossed usage often found in independent moving image works—how scientific images are often presented as aesthetic images that persuade, and how art images are used as the stand-in for scientific images that inform, and the many occasions in which a combination of different image-types functions as manifest images to assert commonsense realities. (One only needs to recall how COVID-19 was circulated through images as scientific facts, public announcements, and articulations of fear.) The discrimination of how different image-types function is a matter of truth claims and how we often “learn” through video essays. This is important to essayists whose work is working through all sorts of scientific images (expert knowledge), manifest images (commonsense sentiments), and aesthetic images to advance what they share. On a positive note, essaying could be celebrated as a specific location of interdisciplinarity—an image is at once symbolic, representational, technical, poetic, performative, functional, and archival.
Harun Farocki uses the term “operative image” (or “operational image,” later “phantom image”) to describe images that do not represent an object, entertain, or inform.20 Such images, often drawn from surveillance devices or military-operational manuals, are increasingly frequent in video essays to function as scientific images and manifest images. Hito Steyerl applies the term “poor image” to what is up-and-downloadable, recyclable, and ever in the process of being impoverished in material construct, and yet such images could be read as both liberating and a crisis.21
Thinking through image as data, many works focus on a sight-and-sound fragment’s material expandability and connective potential with a much larger world. In Voices Seen, Images Heard, a single found image fragment (and they were so difficult to obtain at the time the work was made) is stretched in many ways to acquire different “countenances” to raise questions of knowledge based on visual evidence. Images as data imply their readiness for generative assemblage through classification, conjugation, juxtaposition, recursion, and repeated iterations.22 An image is not singular as a material fact—it is folded, foldable, unfoldable, and re-foldable material with infinite generative forms. An image as such is an “objectile.”23
“Images show, reveal and expose as much as conceal and enigmatize, on the spot, as a process and as real-time performance.”24 To a sight-and-sound essayist, every work is a multiple play with a range of image events, and she works through the hidden relations to fix our attentiveness.
Documentary Impulse: Making Present What Is Not Yet in Our Perceptual Realm: Energies and Phantoms from the Void
How do artists act upon their documentary impulse? How do they record an experience? There are yet essayists who remember by negation. A case in point is the work Localized Blindness by Winnie Yan, included in my Manifestos project and in e-flux’s September 2026 streaming program. Though the work has an instructional voiceover throughout, Yan erases expressiveness. I would describe the work’s sound image as “mute speech”—a self-conscious strategy of “not speaking,” the result of which is the presencing of personal moments and private thoughts in a deliberately marked-out narrative space, amounting to the very act of “enigmatization.”25 Yan’s work in question configures the limits of what can be seen. Her videography is a test for the/our eyes, motivated by the right to speak rather than the desire to be understood.26 Li Kai-chung’s voice in The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea, in the same streaming program, is set up as an invitation to a taletelling event; and yet its image method encourages us to doubt. Between selective facts, fiction, and fictionalization, we may choose where to stand. Or is the work itself signifying a space of potential censorship? To me, it certainly points to significant absence. These two works also take us into another essaying performance: to let objects speak on their behalf.
All sight-and-sound essaying carries a narratorial self, whether or not “I” is explicit in the work. The narratorial agent is in action through essaying; the narratorial selves are the performative selves, by speaking as much as by affirmatively looking elsewhere. Essaying embodies both voluntary remembering and purposeful forgetting.
In the video manifestos I collected in 2021 (from sixty-nine artists), I read: videography slows me down; it is survival tactics; it makes me see more and better; it is a form of mental escape in the face of diminishing speech freedom; it is a way to find new relations to oneself and one’s tools; it is a way and a space to hide, and more. Being part of the project around 2019-2022, all artists respond to the same question, “How do we connect with on-going social political unrest? In what ways had our general sentiments as a social being found way into our creative/artistic practices?”27
Conjoining Experiences: Performative Essaying
Videography is soundings for the eyes; it is to interrogate “voices (un)seen, images (un)heard”, the title I gave to my video essay.28 Essaying unfolds and generates spectacles of dynamic pitches and velocities to revitalize the attention economy of contemporary society.
Essaying is about connecting one’s experiences with others’ through the media forms we deploy: it is nomadic, materialist, against universal accounts of agency, and neither purely linguistic nor purely aesthetic. Whitehead gave the name “superject” to experiences that dwell in the shuttling space between subjectivity and objectivity.29
As the “I” and the “we” co-individuate through tools and technics, re-grammatizing an art form implies antagonistic conjoining. We could then start asking similar grammatological questions: In what ways is the short film a unique open space of mnemonic technics as opposed to feature-length works? What is the limitation of the term “found footage” in works full of sight-and-sound citation-quotation?
Essaying as protest implies utopic proclivities. The call for art to be experimental could be summarized as acts of presencing the irreducible remainder or indigestible residue—of art methods and our grasp of experiences—to escape totalization.30 Experimental action must be considered medium-specifically and transdisciplinarily.
Sight-and-sound essaying needs to be understood as a tentacular practice. It crosses genres, connects the essayist with other communities and more-than-human domains of life.
This discussion addresses sight-and-sound makers as much as those who interpret, advocate, and publish the makers’ works. If art is the production of alternative infrastructure,31 what are the accompanying arrangements to highlight the power of essaying? There is a vast space for writing/essaying between high-end film/video production and what Hito Steyerl calls “poor image.” What are the curatorial acts to dwell in this space?
I use the term “experimental action” the same way it is understood as the pillar of Fluxus, also dating back to the Lettrist movement in the 1950s. Lettrist experiments called for minimizing the gap between art and life, with dérive (drift, and later on Situationist International’s détournement or diversion) as a point of departure, which was then systemized by Fluxus with lessened weight on the (Marxist) political character, particularly through the rebirth of art as “events.” The term targets art in a state of stagnancy and decomposition.
This essay synchronizes thoughts from several pieces of the author’s published writings, with revisions based on field encounters from the past few years. Some of the writings are included in the list of cited works. Others include curatorial statements and her various artist’s narratives.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “In the Name of Protest…What Critical Thinking Could Do to Preserve the Space of Visual Articulation (for Hong Kong),” Photoworks Annual 2021 (UK), 204–210.
My discussion of grammatization as experimental action is the result of my sustained visual ethnography and participant observation, covering, to name a few, the 2026 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen’s International Competition programs, the seven issues of an online video zine for video essays titled D-Normal/V-Essay, various Hong Kong video showcases I have curated and participated in, and a video manifestos open call with eighty-eight artists from around the world.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 40th anniversary ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).
Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, vol. 1: The Hyperindustrial Age, trans. Barnaby Norman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014).
By “thought as practice,” I refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea that thinking is active, productive intervention, and thus a practice or tool for living and transforming realities rather than passive contemplation (see Cinema II and A Thousand Plateaus). Rosi Braidotti expanded the concept via nomadic practices of materialist feminism and posthumanism, highlighting action as integral to intellectual work; “thought as practice”—inseparable from being social, bodily affect, and ethical accountability—seeks to construct sustainable beings as a mode of resistance. Rosi Braidotti, “Out of Bounds: Philosophy in an Age of Transition,” in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 7, ed. Rosi Braidotti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 315.
In Lai’s essay “Documenting Sentiments” (2015), she traces the idea of “thought path” further back to Hegel, who formalized the notion that consciousness is not static but always traversing through a historical and developmental passageway (die Bahn, “highway of despair”) to reach truth, to which Heidegger’s Denkweg (thought path) is affinitive, and yet the latter highlights the open-endedness of the journey.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Documenting Sentiments in Video Diaries around 1997: Archaeology of Forgotten Screen Practices,” in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 462–488.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Documenting Sentiments in Video Diaries around 1997: Archaeology of Forgotten Screen Practices,” in A Companion to Hong Kong Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 472.
Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1-15; Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 69-82.
“Irreducible remainder,” a term from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, was further conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in Convolute N (“On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”) in The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), a methodological blueprint for the entire work, illustrated by his actual practice of gathering historical remainder to dismantle mainstream historical narratives. In entry {N2, 6}, he characterizes his method as a form of literary montage, activating “rags” and “refuse.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 406. Saitya Brata Das also expounds on Schelling’s concept to critique modern frameworks of rationality and human freedom. Saitya Brata Das, “The Irreducible Remainder: Towards the Idea of a Finite Politics,” Journal for Cultural Research 16, no. 4 (2012): 418-422.
“Micro Narratives” is an umbrella term the author has coined to articulate her pedagogic and research experiments of the moving image (creation) since 2003, originally as a course title. The cinema-history-based project asks what experimental actions mean in art, including videography as direct action, the nature of the video essay and, more recently, an examination of imaging from phenomenological and materialist approaches for a data-driven milieu. “Micro Narratives,” an ongoing research agenda, has evolved with shifting emphases, rewritten many times at various phases of Lai’s work, documentable in her artist’s and curatorial notes.
Noël Carroll’s definition of an image unit (= shot) has four theses: the illusion thesis (shots are illusions of what becomes the picture’s content), the transparency thesis (a shot giving us indirect perceptual access), the code thesis (an image as a part of a coded system), and the recognition thesis. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 80-81.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 1-18, 225-261.
“Concrete video” is a term Stéphane Audeguy uses to describe the video art of Robert Cahen, referring to the latter’s training in the musique concrète tradition. For Linda Lai’s discussion of Cahen’s work as experimental videography, see ➝.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, ed. Our Manifestos II: Videography, Documentary Impulse (Floating Projects, Hong Kong, 2021), 335-338.
Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W. W. Norton, 2017), chap. 4.
Farocki’s “Phantom Images” (2004) was originally a lecture presentation in 2003 at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. Prior to the lecture, the idea of operative image was introduced in his multi-part sight-and-sound installation Eye/Machine (2000-2003). Harun Farocki, “Phantom Images,” trans. Brian Poole, Public, no. 29 (2004): 12-22.
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009), ➝.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Folds, Wrinkles and Crevices of the Everyday (Artist’s conceptual narrative for a site-specific solo show),” in proceedings for Linda Chiu-han Lai's solo show Folds, Wrinkles and Crevices of the Everyday (Hong Kong: LSK Creative College Gallery, 2025), 10-16, ➝; Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Mining the ‘Datafied World’: Beyond the Social Dystopic-Utopic Split View through Art,” in proceedings for Gyung-jin Shin’s solo show Unmining (Hong Kong: Current Plans, September-October 2026), ➝.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “In the Name of Protest…What Critical Thinking Could Do to Preserve the Space of Visual Articulation (for Hong Kong),” Photoworks Annual 2021 (UK), 206.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, “Film and Enigmatization: Nostalgia, Nonsense, and Remembering,” in At Full Speed: Cinema in a Borderless World, ed. Esther Yau (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 232.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, ed. Our Manifestos II: Videography, Documentary Impulse (Floating Projects, Hong Kong, 2021), 36.
Linda Chiu-han Lai, ed. Our Manifestos II: Videography, Documentary Impulse (Floating Projects, Hong Kong, 2021), 6-35.
Editor’s note: Lai’s Voices Seen, Images Heard is part of the City in Transmission video art program presented on e-flux Film.
Alfred North Whitehead uses the term “the superject” to describe the state whereby a subjective experience completes in a fixed, objective fact that is shareable and felt by other subjects. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978).
All works published in the Our Manifestoes II project are part of Videotage’s VMAC collection in Hong Kong.
Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Melville House, 2015), chap. 3.
