Affect Studies

Pride is a personally and culturally significant feeling that has received little attention in psychology and has largely been examined as a positive emotional product of self-evaluative cognitions. Even when the self and identity are included in such theories, it is rare for psychologists to engage in reflexive consideration of the complexities that result from the experience and expression of pride within and by collectives. Critical examination of the work that references to pride and occurrences of proud feelings ‘do’ in contemporary moral, political and cultural practices is required. Pride can also be understood in terms of ‘waves of emotion’ and in broad connections with shame, racism, marginalization, patriotism. In this paper, critical connections with cultural and other theories of pride and shame are highlighted, followed by a brief analysis of events in Australia and Germany which manifest contradictions and tensions in the background to proud feelings. An important role for critical psychology is argued for in challenging disciplinary boundaries and exploring new directions in the understanding of emotional feelings.

The Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) genre represents one of the most popular, dynamic and influential spaces of digital play. Since the genres first commercial release in 2009 with the title League of Legends (2009 – present, Riot Games), MOBAs have played an integral role in pioneering ‘fair’ models of free-to-play, live streaming as a ubiquitous spectator activity and e-sports as an increasingly recognised mainstream industry. This thesis posits each of these trends as connected to the influence of MOBAs as a genre with a rich history in grassroots spaces of non-commercial play and participation. Adopting an online ethnographic approach, the thesis describes how the transition of the genre away from its non-commercial and collectivised origins has introduced an influential model of hybrid power relations characteristic of the affective economics that underpin many wider digital platforms.

Central to this thesis is the introduction of playful co-creativity as a conception for describing the productive role that play and closely related participatory activities exert in the vibrant activities of MOBAs. Through framing play as a co-creative practice that informs design, spurs participation, creates professions and sustains vast sums of affective value, the thesis asks how the political economy of playful co-creativity in MOBAs can be critically approached. The research mobilises approaches from game, fan and Internet studies to approach the complex set of relations encompassed by MOBAs.

The online ethnography of this research comprises observations, personal experiences, in-depth case studies and player responses from online open discussions on Reddit. In particular, the research focuses on three influential examples of MOBAs in the original Warcraft III (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003) custom game DotA, League of Legends and Dota 2 (Valve Corporation, 2013 – present). Through grasping the differing modes of governance in each of these games, the aim of this thesis is to exemplify how MOBAs are a genre imbricated with affective forms of playful interaction that both sustain and at times threaten the hybrid power dynamics of this heterogeneous genre.

Purpose – Why and how do cognitive distortions in managerial decision making occur? All organizations are imperfect systems (Katz and Khan, 1966), with wrong decisions often just round the corner. As a consequence, addressing these important questions continues to be particularly lively in the management development area, especially in terms of its intended contribution to the de-biasing activity. Thus, through this critical review article we aim to provide the current scientific dialogue on the topic with updated lenses, which can also be innovative from some aspects. Design/methodology/approach – Our review framework is based on the recent, impactful article on biases in managerial decision making by Kahneman et al. (2011), and on Bazerman and Moore’s (2013) perspective on emanating heuristics, considered as the causes of biases. Accordingly, we derive four intertwined thematic clusters of heuristics, through which we systematically group and critically analyze the management literature mostly published on the topic since 2011. Findings – From the analyzed clusters we propose an integrative framework of emanating heuristics, which focuses on the co-evolving relationships and potentially self-reinforcing processes in and between them. Originality/value – The value of our contribution is threefold: 1) from a methodological perspective, to our knowledge, the studies adopted as the basis of our analysis have not yet been simultaneously used as a comprehensive ground for updated reviews on this topic; 2) from a conceptual perspective, the emerging integrative co-evolutionary framework can help explain the dangerous connections among cognitive traps and emanating heuristics; 3) from a practical perspective, our resulting framework can also be helpful for future de-biasing attempts in the business arena.

Published in Animism in Art and Performance edited by Christopher Braddock (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. pp 91-107). This chapter addresses the work of non-digital text-based art in the age of digital media through a discussion of an installation by Australian artist/writer Lynne Barwick. It highlights the movement of the reader and the animation of space, considering text as simultaneously writing and image. Key to the discussion is the animating power of the word and the ways in which entangled bodies depend on media as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness. Referencing writers such as Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, Gibbs explores the language of text as an assemblage that we cannot stand apart from, operating beyond a necessity for strategic communication. Accordingly, the focus is not about the individual ego but about language itself as a conduit or collaborator.

Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.

Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.

This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.

Ph.d afhandlingens almene anliggende er at undersøge hvordan velfærdsstatens institutioner kan udvikles og organiseres på måder, så de leder og danner borgerne til
at disse kan lede sig selv og udvikle deres liv i mere produktive og foretrukne retninger. Dette undersøges gennem empirisk udforskning af socialt arbejde med unge rusmiddelbrugere.
Her står grundspørgsmål om kulturel dannelse af subjektivitet, forholdet mellem styring og selvledelse, samt paradokser i organisering af velfærdstatens institutioner særligt tydeligt frem.
Afhandlingen bygger på etnografisk udforskning af to kommunale institutioner - u-turn og helsingung -  der  arbejder med unge med et (problematisk) forbrug af rusmidler.  Dette arbejde er ofte
vanskeligt og institutionerne imødegår udfordringerne ved at inddrage og privilegere brugernes perspektiver, og ved at udvikle deres indsatser med inspiration fra systemiske, narrative og løsningsorienterede metoder.
Afhandlingens analytiske tilgang er governmentality studies, der kombineres med metodologiske tilgange fra praksisforskning, med henblik på at foretage produktive og vitalistiske analyser, samt bidrage til at udvikle og kvalificere det sociale arbejde.
Afhandlingen viser gennem prototypiske eksempler og teoretiske analyser hvordan der i det sociale arbejde udvikles produktive former for ledelse af selvledelse, hvor de
unge udvikle egne standarder for deres liv og rusmiddelbrug, og får større indflydelse på deres liv og betingelser. Et væsentligt aspekt af dette er, at interventionen overskrider et individuelt fokus, samt også at de er rettet mod forældre,
professionelle og det bredere samfund.
Afhandlingens væsentligste bidrag er at udvikle teoretiske begreber for, og analyser af, hvordan affektive fænomener som stemning, atmosfære, energi og intensitet
bidrager til ledelse af selvledelse og subjektivering. Afhandlingen bidrager til en udvikling af governmentality studies, socialt arbejde, systemiske, narrative og
løsningsorienterede terapiformer, og til en bredere forståelse af organisering og ledelse af selvledelse i velfærdsstatens institutioner.
Afhandlingen består af en introducerende og analyserende kappe, samt tre artikler:
‘New Standards in Social Work: From Regimes of Visibility to Affective
Subjectification’, ‘Tuning Governmentality studies through Heidegger: Analytical
Strategies for Affective Subjectification’, og ‘Beyond Spaces of Counseling’.

Recently, the smart phone app Kuaishou emerged in China with more than 400 million registered users. An app where users upload pre-recorded videos and a small number of vetted ones live-stream as zhubos, Kuaishou distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack with the unabashed earthiness of its contents. We have two goals in this article.
First, we examine how the app’s performers attract, cultivate and retain their fans to make money off their activities. Second, we treat zhubos as ‘digital housewives’, who produce two use values of alienable user data and inalienable affects like offline houseworkers do. Zhubos can earn money from their work, but they ultimately provide highly exploited labour to Kuaishou under a façade of innocuous play. Indeed, by selling
their supposedly inalienable affects, zhubos embody ‘digital housewife-ness’ even more so than Jarrett’s original formulation.

In recent films emotions/affects are recognized as crucial for creating, recognizing, understanding, and communicating with artificial intelligence (AI) agents. AI is increasingly portrayed as capable of manipulating human affect and as itself subject to affect. The paper discusses romantic relationships between AI agents and humans in "Blade Runner" (1982), "Ex Machina" (2015) and "Uncanny" (2015), situating their portrayal in the context of post-humanism and affect studies. It also discusses the Turing test as a form of testimony.
When the earlier gothic imagination focused on humans falling in love with mechanical dolls, as in E.T.A. Hoffman’s "Erzählungen" and G.B. Shaw’s "Pygmalion", the delusion that these artificial creatures were love-worthy was in the eye of the beholder. The contemporary post-humanist imagination posits the reverse possibility that AI agents may fall in love with people and with other AIs, or at least pretend to love in a convincing manner. By the same token, humans are stripped of their uniqueness and imagined as reducible to a machine-like status. The recent films extend this similarity of humans and machines by focusing on romantic scenarios involving both.
The mechanistic grasp of affects is both implied and thematized in "Ex Machina" and "Uncanny", where a sense of the peculiarly human persists in romantically inflected versions of the Turing test. The notion that machines can be convincing at the game of love shows that affects are increasingly understood as crucial to our understanding of AI. Conversely, this notion also suggests that distinguishing between the peculiarly human and that which machines are capable of imitating is more problematic than ever.

Based on my impressions of the Sufi ritual of zikr in Berlin, my conversations with Sufi followers, and my limited participation in the ritual itself, I write on the notion of intimate religion, which distinct from material religion or religion as matter is in my view a matter of worlding, religiously sutured. On the interface of material and immaterial religion in Berlin, I am interested in how the felt and the intimate of a doubly interiorized performance like zikr—which takes place in mosque interiors and targets mystical interiorities—permeates the urban, more importantly, how a world coheres through affective threads of (religious) feeling. So long as intimacy concerns the affective relation that thrives in the critical distance between close but distinct objects, I argue that saintly companies in the ritual help believers suture the outward world with its inward dimension without necessarily transcending it. The chapter is composed as a diptych. The first section Feeling in Circles features long, direct excerpts from interviews with Sufi followers. Intimate Religion, the subsequent piece turns to researcher’s voice with a mix of ethnographic observations and philosophical deliberations on migrant religion in the urban.

In Paul Bramadat, Mar Griera, Julia Martinez-Ariño and Marian Burchardt (eds.) Urban Religious Events: Public Spirituality in Contested Spaces, pp. 189-202. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

Futuring trans* is a deliberation on the emergence of transgender alongside khwajasara, both newer terms in Pakistan that acquire distinctly temporal agencies insofar as these untether individuals from difficult histories and offer new affective means for future making. Not the same as the identity transgender, trans* in Pakistan, this article proposes, is a baggy and emergent ground where not only locally specific meanings around gender variability are being pushed out and projected anew but where its historical, trans-local, cross-scalar, and open-ended working out is mappable. To outline its futural shapes, this text closely traces a set of affective, representational, and practical strategies as part of an unfinished, contested, and dynamic process of encounters across a variety of allies and actors: individuals, institutions, collectives, spaces, and networks. It illustrates , on the one hand, how trans* in Pakistan kicks off a capacious contact zone, triggers cross-sectional encounters, and generates momentum with implications, which impact but also exceed local conditions. On the other hand, it observes how its horizons might be curtailed by conditions and concerns that privilege some ways of gender nonconforming over certain others.

""In his « little Treatise in English» on Human nature (1640), and, later, in Leviathan (1647 – 1650), Thomas Hobbes examines and redefines the passions. Basing his argument upon the concept of motion, he conceives them as thoughts: passions are nothing but perceptions, which transit through the brain, and then move towards the heart. There they cause various sensations of pleasure or pain, by helping or hindering « vital motion ».
Anger, Hobbes claims, is a break-through in front of a sudden opposition, not the response to an outrage, as the Ancients had erroneously claimed. « Courage, in a large signification, is the absence of fear in the presence of any evil whatsoever; but in a stricter and more common meaning, it is contempt of wounds and death, when they oppose a man in the way to his end. Anger (or sudden courage) is nothing but the appetite or desire of overcoming present opposition. It hath been commonly defined to be grief proceeding from an opinion of contempt; which is confuted by the often experience we have of being moved to anger by things inanimate and without sense, and consequently incapable of contemning us. » (Leviathan, I, 6, 1-2.  Cf. Human Nature, VII, 1-2).
The definition of 'orge', as the grief for an undeserved slight, joined to the wish to retaliate, comes from Aristotle’s 'Rhetoric', a text Hobbes not only knew, but also translated. Anger was, for Aristotle, the political passion par excellence. It is because we are insulted that we revolt, and that our revolt is justified. It is in anger that we commit tyrannicide. Be it a tumultuous explosion or a long lasting grudge, ire is by definition the reasoned answer of a social actor, who suffers in his body as well as in the social image that he has  created for herself, and on behalf of justice: one does not recognize this person for that which he wishes to be considered. The gender mark is intended, given the heroic context. This criticism might appear to be just a minor detail, confined to Hobbes’ typology of the passions.  But since the new description of anger disconnects the emotion from any justification (thus from justice), refuting Aristotle was crucial for the consistency of Hobbes’ theory of the state. Leviathan must have zero tolerance for any form of social violence, from sedition (his sickness) to civil war (his death). Therefore the celebration of the noble killing of a king (conveniently labeled “tyrant”), has no place in modern politics. Those who come to treat a sovereign as an obstacle in their way understand nothing of the nature of the state, which is artificial and vulnerable, always threatened by a return to the state of nature.
    Furthermore, to object to Aristotle on anger was consistent with Hobbes’ profound weariness with classical political theory. One of the most insidious causes of the dangerous misunderstanding of the state, Hobbes argues, was ideological. People learned to cultivate dissent and glamorize discontent from subversive, poisonous political theories: those of the Ancients. « From the reading, I say, of such books, men have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latin writers, in their books and discourses of Policy, make it lawful and laudable, for any man so to do ; provided, before he do it, he call him tyrant. For they say not regicide, that is, killing a king, but tyrannicide, that is, killing of a tyrant is lawful » ('De Corpore Politico', XXVII,  10).  No learning of a language, Hobbes dryly comments, has ever been paid with so much blood, as that of Greek and Latin (Ibidem, 150).
In the transition from a theory of man as a political animal, naturally inclined to sociability (Aristotle), to a vision of human nature, made up of movement and competition, Hobbes rethought the anthropological underpinnings of politics. This required the simplification of the passions, and the rejection of that interlacing of rights, habits and body, which framed the complexity of the emotions in the classical past. The demystification of anger was critical.
 

""

This is a third-year seminar on continental philosophy and affect, organized around the themes of Outrage/Despair/Rage.  The course pairs Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and contemporary affect theorists with "Fleabag," sound studies, and poetry.  Here you'll find the syllabus, the lessons, and the assignments.

In the liner notes to his album Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978), Brian Eno (1948–) defined Ambient music in contradistinction to Muzak’s ‘derivative’ instrumental pop arrangements. Ambient music’s historians and critics have often followed Eno by describing Ambient music as an alternative to conventional ‘background’ or ‘programmed’ music for commercial spaces. Such descriptions can be misleading, however, given that Ambient music’s dominant mode of reception is selective personal consumption, not public administration. This article investigates the aesthetics of Eno’s Airports, and elucidates the organizing role of the Ambient genre, within their primary reception context of personal recorded music listening. A comparison with The Black Dog’s Music for Real Airports (2010) shows how Ambient music then and now reflexively affords atmospheric use by translating a sense of physical dwelling and passage into mixed musical moods. By expressing ambivalence about the reality of airports and air travel, these Ambient records characteristically convey apprehension about the technological administration of human experience – a phenomenon that includes personal recorded music listening.

My essay looks afresh at the South Asian Partition in conjunction with trauma theory to excavate affective histories of the region obscured by “the overpowering emotional experience” of nationalism (Jawaharlal Nehru). Nehru’s exploratory urge to map South Asia as an “ancient palimpsest” to “know if there was any real connection between the past and the present” (Nehru 25) is echoed in Qurratulain Hyder’s feminist novel Sita Betrayed (1960), which, however, casts memorialization in more uncanny, melancholic terms. Hyder constructs a trans-subcontinental trauma sensorium – a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences – to contain the marginalized histories of the Partition dispossessed obscured by the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian nation confidently claimed, or the “newness” of an Islamic birth distanced from the subcontinent’s past, that Pakistan declared. Hyder’s composition of a sensorium of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest allows spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. By exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. Hyder’s mobilization of melancholia and haunting, significantly, offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect-mediated postcolonial trauma theory.

There are certain thoughts - intimations - that will seem corny, or laughable, and therefore dismissed - and only seriously absorbed into the changing mind when felt, in the shelter of the quietly moving music of the soul.
It is the function of art, and of love, to make this music heard . . . 

  It is not the music of depression - it is the way through.

This paper considers the significance of racial shame for the constitution of the black subject and determines its implications for our reading of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. I will argue that the primary expression of black American experience and its determination within the narrow orbit of white narrative is the affective experience of shame. Implicated in the racialized metaphysics of power relations that dominates Ellison’s world, shame both foments the violence of internalized oppression and the violence of self-valorizing racial orthodoxy in black nationalisms. Departing from Foucault’s notion of subjectivization whereby agency is determined by the individualizing strategies of power, the paper, however, plots a different narrative of invisibility in Ellison’s novel that harbors emancipatory possibilities. The totalizing regimes of identification that articulate and structure our social existence will be shown to be effectively undermined by Ellison’s intervention in the racial imaginary, testifying to his ability to look beyond the blockages of his present and anticipate alternate forms of subjectivity that are yet to be realized in the constituencies of our history.

Using illustrative audio clips, this article offers insights into the historical symbiosis between oral history and radio and the relationship between orality, aurality, and affect that makes radio such a powerful medium for the spoken word. It does so through a discussion of the concept of affect as it applies to oral history on radio and through a description and analysis of crafting oral history for the radio documentary form. This article features audio excerpts from radio documentaries produced by the author. Listening to the audio portions of this article requires a means of accessing the audio excerpts through hyperlinks. See “Instructions for Multimedia Reading of the OHR,” which follows the Editor’s Introduction at the front of the journal, for further explanation on how to access this article online.

This article sketches key concerns surrounding the digital reproduction of enslaved and colonized subjects held in cultural heritage collections. It centralizes one photograph of a crying Afro-Caribbean child from St. Croix, housed in the Royal Danish Library, to demonstrate the unresolved ethical matters present in retrospective attempts to visualize colonialism. Working with affect and haunting as research material, the inquiry questions how museums and other cultural heritage institutions are caretaking historical violations, identifying themselves as hosting agents, and navigating issues of trust and accountability as they make their colonial collections available online. Speculating about what an ethics of care in representation could look like, the article draws on reparatory artistic engagements with such imagery and proposes how metadata could be rethought as a cataloging space with the potential to alter historical imbalances of power.

Houser’s essay argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to twenty-first-century environmental consciousness and therefore to ecocriticism, through an analysis of Richard Powers’s novel, The Echo Maker. The essay focuses on wonder, an essential affect for promoting environmental investment and scientific interest. In line with much environmental writing, the novel aspires to increase readers’ awareness of their surroundings as a way to promote ecological protection. However, it also rethinks the trajectories of wonder under the pressures of neurological injury. The novel presents the oscillation between familiarity and strangeness as the mechanism of wonder, both in the brain and in narrative, and performs wonder by taking readers through a series of dialectics that aim to defamiliarize the everyday. The Echo Maker’s narrative complexity uncovers the obverse of wonder—projection and paranoia—and demonstrates how affect can derail ethical energies. Houser’s essay builds a multidisciplinary account of wonder and its stakes for environmental thought by analyzing the novel’s doubled narration, key texts of environmentalism, neuroscientific studies, and affect theory. It argues that Powers’s novel of eco-sickness is a rejoinder to platitudes about connection, awareness, and care that poses the question: Can ethical concern and care for human and nonhuman others take hold without connection?

Stories told through different media forms feel very distinctive from each other, to such an extent that there are stories which can only be told through one media form -- at least, if preserving the distinctive affective quality of the experience is a priority. Is this due to something innate to the story which makes it hard to translate outside of its context, or is it the context itself that sets the experience apart? Phenomenology provides a way of understanding how the media-specific structures of textual storytelling can shape the experience of negotiating that text, through altering the affective processes associated with its navigation. This project argues that it is possible to distinguish amongst storytelling in multiple media forms by analysing how differences in textual structure (and the processes required to engage with them) shape the phenomenological experience of those texts. I apply an analytical framework of affective phenomenology to case-study forms of textual storytelling, including videogames, hypertext fiction, webcomics, and Alternate Reality Games. All of these case studies share a new media context, and so their outward similarities will highlight the differences in the experiences they present. I argue that hypertext fictions provide environments for readers to engage with, either as explorers negotiating unfamiliar territory, or detectives seeking connections between disparate material. The webcomic is distinguished from other forms of mediated storytelling by the amount of time spent engaging with characters within the text, which leads to a perception of intimacy as part of the experience. Videogames are set apart by the sense of responsibility felt by the player for events and their consequences within the Heideggerian world-of-concern established with the text and its characters. Alternate Reality Games are texts which function at the level of the community rather than the individual, are experienced as phenomenologically real, and are further distinguished by their textual boundaries functioning at the level of affective investment rather than the specific processes involved in negotiating the text. I argue that the definition of media texts should include how we engage with their textual structures, rather than focus purely on the textual structures themselves. Affective phenomenology and the process of analytical juxtaposition presented in this project provide the beginnings of a map for negotiating this new conceptual territory, and will become particularly relevant as texts and textual forms migrate across platforms.

When artists first started to engage with the volatile and ephemeral forces of video technology, they were grappling with phenomena that seemed to undermine human concepts of control, design, and memory—a technical corollary to avant-garde ideas of undoing authorial mastery and entering new media reality. But what if the critical question of early video art was no longer that of artistic control? What if the video signal and its microtemporal speeds could be seen to have purposes of their own, powers to unfold within an artistic setting that provided a different set of possibilities and constraints than the realm of TV production and broadcasting? What if video was not simply a technology used by artists, but an agent that deployed artistic frameworks, personnel, and competences in the process of exploring its own technical capacities? In such an account, video would no longer be a standardized operational system subtending a cultural layer of aesthetic, journalistic, or actionist content, but a multiplicity of temporal technical operations forging new associations or alliances with the surrounding world. It could be seen as a form of live memory in action, spurring on new forms of social reflection and organization—in short, new social realities. In this innovative text, Ina Blom traces the autobiography of video as enacted in the field of early analog video art. She documents, among other things, the becoming of video through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. This is a book about technology and social memory in the field of twentieth-century art.