Video Essays

Video essays are works of media that use other media to create critical thought. In an ever-expanding range of contexts and an ever-increasing array of audiovisual strategies, video essays reveal startling observations and insights in ways that textual essays cannot.

Video essays are an intersectional space connecting three important contemporary modes of expression:
- social media and internet video,
- film and media criticism and scholarship,
- experimental and essay filmmaking.

Video essays create an arena where quotidian/accessible modes of vernacular expression, experimental impulses and critical thinking and scholarship can engage, clash and commingle. They are an essential way to trace the evolution of human thinking and expression from the textual to the audiovisual—how thoughts are expressed through editing, sound and music as much as text and voice. This connects to another distinction to be made between two kinds of video essays: those where written essays are transposed into an audiovisual format (i.e. your typical YouTube explainer), and a different form of video essay whose meanings and thoughts are expressed distinctly through the arrangement of images and sounds.

In this way, it becomes a means of thinking about media, through media.

This method of appropriating existing media to create new insights is, at its best, a radical disruption to the hierarchy of established media forms. It equips anyone with access to a computer to express themselves through existing interfaces, creating new media expressions in the process.

Video essays can stimulate a greater awareness of how media functions within the social systems that govern our daily existence, necessitating a more critical regard for the embodiments of those systems. It provides a way of revealing and engaging a larger range of factors informing audiovisual media, drawing attention to its cultural, political, technological, economical, and ecological dimensions.

Through their critical engagement with established modes of image making, video essays provide an important means to devise new forms of audiovisual expression.