Video Essay Research

videoessayresearch.org is an online platform for videographic media studies and video essay practice, founded by Johannes Binotto.

What is a video essay?
Video essays use sound and images not just as illustrations for an argument but as critical devices in themselves. Sound and image in video essays begin to reflect upon their own functions, productions, and implications. Thus, video essays combine the analytical with the aesthetic, and they merge scientific methods with artistic practice. As a form of audiovisual thinking they investigate media phenomena at the intersections of different discourses and disciplines. And in doing so they themselves become new epistemological objects we have to analyse.

This platform developed out of the SNSF research project VideoEssay: Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching which ran from January 2020 until December 2023 and which investigated the potential of video essays and videographic practices in media, cultural, science, and technology studies as

The project was part of the «Visual Narrative Research Group» at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, in collaboration with the University of Zurich, and was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).