Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have
also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography,
digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication
and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access.
But digital reproduction has also stoked new anxieties concerning
authenticity and ownership. From this contemporary vantage point, After
Uniqueness traces the ambivalence of reproducibility through the
intersecting histories of experimental cinema and the moving image in
art, examining how artists, filmmakers, and theorists have found in the
copy a utopian promise or a dangerous inauthenticity--or both at once.
From the sale of film in limited editions on the art market to the
downloading of bootlegs, from the singularity of live cinema to video
art broadcast on television, Erika Balsom investigates how the
reproducibility of the moving image has been embraced, rejected, and
negotiated by major figures including Stan Brakhage, Leo Castelli, and
Gregory Markopoulos. Through a comparative analysis of selected
distribution models and key case studies, she demonstrates how the
question of image circulation is central to the history of film and
video art. After Uniqueness shows that distribution channels are more
than neutral pathways; they determine how we encounter, interpret, and
write the history of the moving image as an art form.
