Report on the “light-typing lecture” by Kevin B. Lee, January 14, 2017, silent green

The “light-typing lecture” by HaFI resident Kevin B. Leeat silent green’s Kuppelhalle in Berlin-Wedding introduced a large and attentive audience to the biographical, methodological, theoretical and legal predicaments of a video essayist’s practice in times of increasing pressure of commercializing and streamlining the video essay’s approach to cinema. A brilliant (and moving) lesson of how to navigate a post-cinema small screen reality where watching films has become a multitask, short attention span, data-mined occupation of dealing with the massive availability of parergonal information and the vertiginious referential depths of the internet while at the same time trying to adapt to continuously changing platforms and demands (and sometimes refusing to be adaptive). Kevin’s performative lecture, in which he didn’t speak himself but rather typed away for everyone to see, letting his work speak for him, made tangible the joys and the pressures provided by the desktop as a laboratory and studio environment. Kevin also shared with us the most recent, disillusioning experience with his long-time employer, the film website Fandor, that overnight took down almost 200 of his video essays, for dubious “copyright” reasons. The work of years – vanished from sight (though some of it, thank god, retrievable at Kevin’s Vimeo presence. During the upcoming months, Kevin will investigate the irregular circulation of digital copies and rips of works by Harun Farocki as well as continue (together with Chloé Galibert-Lâiné) research into Daesh’s visual production and its circulation.

Film stills (c) Melina Pafundi