Taking Measures : Usages of Formats in Film and Video Art

The book’s title — Taking Measures — has a double meaning: as a reference to the practices of measurement and to the political potential of power and resistance. Throughout their history to today, film and video have served as measuring devices for scientific, economic, political, and other purposes, and have been employed in a variety of fields beyond art. In acknowledging these uses also lies the opportunity for art to test its own effectiveness in public space and to uncover potential for resistance in artistic action.

This book — which has evolved from a series of dialogues between artists and researchers as part of the research project Exhibiting Film: Challenges of Format at the University of Zurich — addresses issues of measures and formats in both content and design. In which practices of measurement, of the production of knowledge and evidence in the interest of useful research, are film and video involved? In what way can artistic practice not only make these involvements visible but challenge and test them? How can technologies of measurement in art be used politically and be made operative for the public sector? How can formats themselves, as the measures of art, be exhibited? How can they be put in relation to exhibition spaces and their economies of valorisation, and how can this relationship be assessed? These questions are explored in illuminating and richly illustrated essays.