Video Art and Storytelling in the Digital Age

The book explores how artists since the late 1990s and with the wider spread of digital technology use video to develop critical viewpoints on storytelling and its underlying ideologies in relation to post-truth and identity politics, historiography, cultural heritage, structural racism, migration politics and digital culture. Starting from close readings of works by Ryan Trecartin, Sondra Perry, Rania Stephan and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, the book shows how these artists draw from online content and experiment with both narrative and anti-narrative strategies. It defines and examines various artistic approaches that challenge conventional forms of storytelling such as non-linear sequencing, hybridization, spatialization, fragmentation, parody, and excess. The central question the book poses and addresses is how artists working with video reflect on popular and dominant narratives to expose and undermine their conforming, polarizing or normalizing effects. This book is ideal reading for scholars in Art History, Visual Culture and Film and Media Studies.