Ben Spatz
Biographic Data
| ID | 1709485 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Spatz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Spatz |
| SIGNATURE | BEN SPATZ |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Huddersfield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1466-6634 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 18 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Cryptojewish Speculations for a Black Planetary
A movement is growing to reimagine jewishness in a decolonial frame. As zionism loses its grip over white and white-passing jews in the global north, and with increasing momentum after Israel’s genocidal reprisal following the events of October 2023, the geopolitical figuration of jewishness has never been more contested. Yet while profound conversations unfold between black and indigenous studies, and across ethnic and cultural studies more broa…
Race and the Forms of Knowledge
"Crafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge"
Methods Dialogue
To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how …
White Atmospheres
This essay offers a critical introduction to the circulation of racial materialities, and especially whiteness, in North American and European academic contexts. It proposes that we can escape from the dominant epistemology of identity as a fixed attribute of individuals without losing the urgent and much-needed analytics of identity as social and material force. In the gap between “identity politics” and a richer critical politics of identity li…
The Unbearable Whiteness of John Brown
John Brown is a figure so intensely contested as to embody diametrically opposed meanings according to the varied contexts in which his image has been activated. At times hailed as the man who started the US Civil War, Brown has been variously described as a righteous abolitionist, a religious zealot, a gifted orator, a formidable military strategist, a self-appointed white savior, and a madman. Today, Brown is conjured in the name of all manner …
Looking at/for Disappearing John Brown
On the Audiovisual
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 eve…
Postmemory
This photo essay gathers evidence of the video works Postmemory: Fragments and Postmemory: Crypt, which ran from June 27 to August 4, 2022, at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. Included here are photographs from the video works and their installation, as well as the complete exhibition program. In an accompanying statement, Spatz positions this work within the broader Judaica project, an extended invest…
Interpreting the Body
Techniques of Videographic Thought
Film scholar and video essayist Johannes Binotto analyzes several of what he calls "practices of viewing." We might also call them techniques of videographic thought. As performers and practitioners who work with our own bodies in audiovisual form... What can we learn from these developments in videographic scholarship? When we cut our own audiovisual bodies, it can sometimes hurt. We should look for ways to care for these bodies — our bodies — w…
Whiteness
This “illuminated” video essay works through the juxtaposition of textual and audiovisual material to interrogate the cultural and philosophical whiteness of bodies and institutions. It demonstrates a reciprocal and circular relationship between textuality and audiovisuality insofar as the documented practice responds to a textual object — a physical copy of Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Man and Animal — while another layer of critical poetic …
He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World
What can jewishness be — a nation, a race, a religion, a style of humor? A history of diaspora? A relation to whiteness? A commandment to work for justice? Where is jewishness in the body? In this illuminated video essay, 30 minutes of uncut experimental songwork practice are augmented by 50 annotations or “illuminations.” These are embedded into the video, as they would more commonly be embedded in prose, providing a dense critical context for w…
Illuminations
One of the most important questions for videographic research today is the relationship between textuality and audiovisuality. Does textuality always have to frame and contextualize video, in order for it to be research? What if textuality were located topologically within video, instead of the other way around? Is text needed at all? Can’t some audiovisual material “speak” for itself? In 2020, as the Coronavirus pandemic was setting in, I decide…
Ancestors
This video article consists of three repetitions or cycles of a single audiovisual fragment. The underpinning fragment is just longer than three minutes. In the first cycle, the video fragment is presented with only subtitles added to clarify the recorded dialog. The second cycle augments the first by adding a set of textual ‘illuminations’ that provide the basic details of what is happening and begin to reveal the interactive dynamics at play in…
Artistic research and the queer prophetic
This essay examines the intersection of queer, trans, and feminist politics with artistic research. It begins with a discussion of knowledge and form, arguing that we need to reinvent the formal structures of academic knowledge production in light of the digital revolution. I then examine two sets of examples of the scholarly video essay: three from a videographic journal I edit and three from my own practice. Such examples allow us to rethink or…
Earthing the Laboratory
For all the discussion of training in theatre and performance studies, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which future researchers are trained. In this essay I begin from the premise that, for performance studies, the arena of training most crucial to theorize and transform is that of the doctorate. This essay reconsiders the form and structure of PhD programmes in theatre and performance from the perspective of artistic res…
The video way of thinking
This article rethinks the concepts of zoê and bios proposed by Giorgio Agamben in relation to the history of technology. It argues that the relationship between embodiment and the audiovisual is only beginning to be understood alongside the recent and increasing omnipresence of digital audiovisual recording technologies in everyday life. Just as writing completely changed human society’s understanding of speech, the development of audiovisual med…
What a Body Can Do
In What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that viewing technique as both training and research has much to offer current debates over the role of practice in the university, including the debates around "practice as research." Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz…
No prominent works on this page.
What a Body Can Do
In What a Body Can Do, Ben Spatz develops, for the first time, a rigorous theory of embodied technique as knowledge. He argues that viewing technique as both training and research has much to offer current debates over the role of practice in the university, including the debates around "practice as research." Drawing on critical perspectives from the sociology of knowledge, phenomenology, dance studies, enactive cognition, and other areas, Spatz…
The video way of thinking
This article rethinks the concepts of zoê and bios proposed by Giorgio Agamben in relation to the history of technology. It argues that the relationship between embodiment and the audiovisual is only beginning to be understood alongside the recent and increasing omnipresence of digital audiovisual recording technologies in everyday life. Just as writing completely changed human society’s understanding of speech, the development of audiovisual med…
Earthing the Laboratory
For all the discussion of training in theatre and performance studies, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which future researchers are trained. In this essay I begin from the premise that, for performance studies, the arena of training most crucial to theorize and transform is that of the doctorate. This essay reconsiders the form and structure of PhD programmes in theatre and performance from the perspective of artistic res…
He Almost Forgets That There is a Maker of the World
What can jewishness be — a nation, a race, a religion, a style of humor? A history of diaspora? A relation to whiteness? A commandment to work for justice? Where is jewishness in the body? In this illuminated video essay, 30 minutes of uncut experimental songwork practice are augmented by 50 annotations or “illuminations.” These are embedded into the video, as they would more commonly be embedded in prose, providing a dense critical context for w…
Illuminations
One of the most important questions for videographic research today is the relationship between textuality and audiovisuality. Does textuality always have to frame and contextualize video, in order for it to be research? What if textuality were located topologically within video, instead of the other way around? Is text needed at all? Can’t some audiovisual material “speak” for itself? In 2020, as the Coronavirus pandemic was setting in, I decide…
Ancestors
This video article consists of three repetitions or cycles of a single audiovisual fragment. The underpinning fragment is just longer than three minutes. In the first cycle, the video fragment is presented with only subtitles added to clarify the recorded dialog. The second cycle augments the first by adding a set of textual ‘illuminations’ that provide the basic details of what is happening and begin to reveal the interactive dynamics at play in…
Artistic research and the queer prophetic
This essay examines the intersection of queer, trans, and feminist politics with artistic research. It begins with a discussion of knowledge and form, arguing that we need to reinvent the formal structures of academic knowledge production in light of the digital revolution. I then examine two sets of examples of the scholarly video essay: three from a videographic journal I edit and three from my own practice. Such examples allow us to rethink or…
Techniques of Videographic Thought
Film scholar and video essayist Johannes Binotto analyzes several of what he calls "practices of viewing." We might also call them techniques of videographic thought. As performers and practitioners who work with our own bodies in audiovisual form... What can we learn from these developments in videographic scholarship? When we cut our own audiovisual bodies, it can sometimes hurt. We should look for ways to care for these bodies — our bodies — w…
Whiteness
This “illuminated” video essay works through the juxtaposition of textual and audiovisual material to interrogate the cultural and philosophical whiteness of bodies and institutions. It demonstrates a reciprocal and circular relationship between textuality and audiovisuality insofar as the documented practice responds to a textual object — a physical copy of Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Man and Animal — while another layer of critical poetic …
On the Audiovisual
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 eve…
Postmemory
This photo essay gathers evidence of the video works Postmemory: Fragments and Postmemory: Crypt, which ran from June 27 to August 4, 2022, at Holocaust Centre North at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. Included here are photographs from the video works and their installation, as well as the complete exhibition program. In an accompanying statement, Spatz positions this work within the broader Judaica project, an extended invest…
Interpreting the Body
Race and the Forms of Knowledge
"Crafting a fluid yet critical new framework, explored via a series of case studies, including their own practice-as-research, Ben Spatz confronts hegemonic modes of white writing and white institutionality and examines alternative forms of knowledge"
Methods Dialogue
To ask ‘how do you do what you do?’ is both a technical and personal question. Brandi Wilkins Cantanese, Nicola Mārie Hyland, and Ben Spatz complicate the idea that methods are separable from researchers’ lives, while advocating for decolonizing research. Methods implicate both what and when: they are immanent in everything the scholar does. Exploring methods that gather information in relational and communal ways, the conversants reflect on how …
White Atmospheres
This essay offers a critical introduction to the circulation of racial materialities, and especially whiteness, in North American and European academic contexts. It proposes that we can escape from the dominant epistemology of identity as a fixed attribute of individuals without losing the urgent and much-needed analytics of identity as social and material force. In the gap between “identity politics” and a richer critical politics of identity li…
The Unbearable Whiteness of John Brown
John Brown is a figure so intensely contested as to embody diametrically opposed meanings according to the varied contexts in which his image has been activated. At times hailed as the man who started the US Civil War, Brown has been variously described as a righteous abolitionist, a religious zealot, a gifted orator, a formidable military strategist, a self-appointed white savior, and a madman. Today, Brown is conjured in the name of all manner …
Looking at/for Disappearing John Brown
Cryptojewish Speculations for a Black Planetary
A movement is growing to reimagine jewishness in a decolonial frame. As zionism loses its grip over white and white-passing jews in the global north, and with increasing momentum after Israel’s genocidal reprisal following the events of October 2023, the geopolitical figuration of jewishness has never been more contested. Yet while profound conversations unfold between black and indigenous studies, and across ethnic and cultural studies more broa…
Art (11 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (6 works) · Embodied cognition (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (5 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (4 works)