Performative Images draws upon the work of video artists and activists in France between the 1970s and the early 2020s and focuses on significant practices with technology. Video art and video activism are analysed together in the book to revaluate key concepts in media studies and foreground a performative approach to the theory of image technology. The book engages works in visual culture, performance studies, digital studies, critical race theory, and feminist methodologies to account for the changes brought about by video technology in social and psychic life. Performative Images is about art and activists’ engagement in video technology—an engagement that unsettles the hegemonic narrative of dominant media, as well as the apparently politically neutral dimension of communication technology. In this book, the author explores how video-image technology shapes our psychic and social environments from an art historiographical perspective. We know media technology is dramatically shaping our political and epistemological landscape: this book foregrounds the emergence of performative video images as a key factor in the revaluation of culture and politics.

Anaïs Nony, PhD is a digital theorist and research associate at the Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Over the last decade, she has published articles in journals such as Philosophy Today, Cultural Critique, Intermédialité, French Review and Parallax as well as book chapters in edited volumes. Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how technology and art shape and affect societies. Her work engages cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and governmental technologies of behavioural surveillance and control to address critical changes in the structure and formation of contemporary societies. She is the founder of The Write Technique.

Introduction: Video: Between Technology and Performance
Chapter 1: The Volume-Image of Video Technology
Chapter 2: Zones of Modulation: Video as a Space-Critical Medium
Chapter 3: Programmed Life and Racialized Technesis
Chapter 4: Video and the Technical Milieu of Desire
Conclusion: Performative Images as Objects of Philosophical Inquiry
Artworks cited
Index
Acknowledgments