On the Audiovisual

Abstract

We are living through a moment of radical transformation in the audiovisual. Since the beginning of photography, the forging of images has been explored alongside their documentary capacities. For every argument and testimony based on photographic evidence, there was a creative and fictional experiment. Audiovisual recording is always audiovisual creation. The ubiquity of cameras is a defining feature of the present age. Cameras are seemingly everywhere today, in our pockets, in the sky, and yet we are coming no closer to a shared sense of truth or community. Body-worn cameras on police are supposed to prevent excessive violence. But we know that they also capture and make that ongoing violence shareable on a massive, global scale. The work of critical embodied research directly explores such matters of trust, power, and medium. The video articles in this issue of Journal of Embodied Research explore such matters and relations in careful and sensitive ways. They invite us to pause before rushing into the audiovisual maelstrom of social media feeds and digitally generated images. What might be the transformative power of slower approaches to audiovisuality, grounded in sustained practices of reading and touching, knowing and becoming?