More Than Illustrated Music: Aesthetics of Hybrid Media between Pop, Art and Video

Description

The genre of the video clip has been established for more than thirty years, mainly served by the sub genres of video art and music video. This book explores processes of hybridization between music video, film, and video art by presenting current theoretical discourses and engaging them through interviews with well-known artists and directors, bringing to the surface the crucial questions of art practice. The collection discusses topics including postcolonialism, posthumanism, gender, race and class and addresses questions regarding the hybrid media structure of video, the diffusion between content and form, art and commerce as well as pop culture and counterculture. Through the diversity of the areas and interviews included, the book builds on and moves beyond earlier aesthetics-driven perspectives on music video.

Kathrin Dreckmann is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf, Germany. Her research focuses on acoustic studies, gender, and media studies. Her recent work includes publications on the aesthetics and the dispositive of music video, performativity in popular music and media theory. Elfi Vomberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf, Germany. Her recent publications focus on music theater with special consideration of Richard Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk. In her current research projects, she explores the interface of acoustic and memory studies and examines pop cultures in connection with methods of oral history.

This much needed collection contextualizes music video squarely within the historical, aesthetic, and institutional discourses of visual art. It treats music video not simply as an industrial product but as a hybrid genre in which artistic practices of film, television, and artists' video enter into dialogue with one another and with everyday practices of consumption and identity formation. This stimulating volume situates music video in an expanded field and offers multiple starting points for new ways of talking about it. * Philip Auslander, Professor of Performance Studies and Popular Musicology, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA *