If you’re not familiar with the world of video essays and videographic criticism, I hope these two pieces piqued your interest! You can continue on to Kai after Kai and Ella’s channels to see more of their work. There is a lively and sophisticated field developing between the academy (such as the SCMS Digital Humanities and Videographic Criticism Scholarly Interest Group) and popular intellectual creators (such as the essayist community The Essay Library) that we hope to feature more on this blog.
Biographies
I’m Kai After Kai (A.K.A James Makepeace), a video essayist, actor, music artist and overthinker. I make videos about whatever I happen to find interesting at that particular moment, be it film, music, anime, games or just general philosophy, often companied by my own ambient, electronic compositions. I’m currently working on an album, a short film and a variety of intermittent videos.
Ella Wright is a doctoral candidate at the University of Birmingham, undertaking an audio-visual PhD. Their research explores what is termed as ‘the video essay’, face to face with notions of embodiment, materiality, logocentrism and epistemology regarding video making research-by-practice. Ella is also a documentary filmmaker and editor, having recently completed editorial work on their first feature length film ‘Children of the Wicker Man’, directed by Justin Hardy, and directorial work on a documentary short ‘Pushing the Boundary’, examining the inclusion of people with learning disabilites in the workplace.
Samantha Close earned her PhD in Communication at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include digital media, theory-practice, fan studies, gender, race, and Japanese media. She focuses particularly on labor and transforming models of creative industries and capitalism. Her documentary, I Am Handmade: Crafting in the Age of Computers, based on her most recent research project, is hosted online by Vice Media’s Motherboard channel. Her writing appears in edited volumes and academic journals, such as Feminist Media Studies, Transformative Works and Cultures and Anthropology Now.
