Instagram as videographic research laboratory
Keywords: video methods, embodied research, digital identity politics, social media
This Notion page introduces the Instagram feed @cryptojudaica, a digital experiment that I have been developing for the past two years. I first briefly describe how I have come to work with video as a performance practitioner since 2015. Most of my video works have been published as peer reviewed articles in online scholarly journals, whereas @cryptojudaica uses the constrained format of Instagram posts and reels to produce a changing archive of micro-experiments over time. The rest of the Notion page analyses some of my Instagram posts in more detail, considering how my approach to Instagram’s audiovisual form has changed since the experiment began in 2022. The reader is invited to explore the rest of the feed, which contains 232 posts as of this writing, comprising several different phases and still ongoing.
https://www.instagram.com/cryptojudaica/
My background is in experimental theatre — specifically, I have been most influenced by a number of practitioners who worked with Jerzy Grotowski or with his students. Anyone who is familiar with post-Grotowskian practices knows that they can be among the least receptive to video recording as documentation. As Peggy Phelan argued in the 1990s: “Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”
I now associate this approach to performance with the strong connections that European colonial modernity produced between distance, spectatorship, objectivity, and disembodiment. It is from the perspective of the distanced spectator (which is also that of the theatrical director) that performance is ephemeral and unrepresentable. For those of us who claim the positionality of artist-researcher or scholar-practitioner, performance is necessarily repeatable to a certain degree. It is a practice and this is also what allows it to transmit and generate knowledge.
Since 2016, I have been exploring the relationship between embodied (performance) practice and video. I do not think of myself as a filmmaker or video artist, although some of my video works have been shown in those contexts. Instead I feel that I am searching for a different way of producing, editing, and watching video — an interweaving of video with embodied practice in which video is neither documentation nor separate work of art but the work itself. Like a book or an article, a video can produce and transmit knowledge. It can be a form of research.
You can read more about my thinking around videographic embodied research in the texts linked below. Many of my video works are also available online. On this page I offer a brief tour through the ongoing experiment with video that I have been conducting on Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl32Ae7Du4G/
I was standing in a snowy valley in Switzerland when I realised that I need to start experimenting with shorter, simpler video works. For several years I had been producing video essays which I published in online scholarly journals. These could be as long as 30 minutes and took weeks if not months to produce. It might then be several more months before they were published and they would likely only been seen by fellow academics. I had been invited to a symposium on the art of the video essay and my mind was overflowing with ideas. How could I start to produce videos more quickly, so that I could try out more experimental forms of editing?
Instagram. It was never a platform I used — more often I could be found on Facebook and occasionally Twitter. On this day I started to edit shorter videos, influenced by the Instagram format to use a square aspect ratio. Each video is one minute long. The form of the Instagram experiment will be similar to the Songwork Catalogue, which I created with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel in 2017. But these videos will be posted live on social media — and they will take a more playful, aesthetically experimental approach to the underlying material.
In the first Instagram video post, my most basic studio practice of “songwork” is overlaid with a text by Driftpile Cree writer Billy-Ray Belcourt, which I had brought with me on the trip to read. In recent years, critical Black and Indigenous writing from North America has become my primary field of reading. Overlaying such texts on my body, there is always a risk of facile appropriation. Yet these are theoretical texts, meant to reframe bodies and worlds. I constantly ask myself how and what I can learn from them. This video poses that question in audiovisual form.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp5jmeHI3Iv/
This post is one of my favorites. Keeping the square format, I have begun to shift the colour scheme, distort the sound, change the speed. In doing so, I veer intentionally away from the explicitly transparent style of performance documentation and towards video art. The sound of my feet stamping on the floor becomes thicker, echoing. The sound is out of sync with the image.
The rhythm reminds me of the drumbeat from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. But the blue shift pulls the image out of any nostalgia. In my ongoing search for diasporic and decolonial forms of jewishness, I have learned how strong the pull is into the sepia tones of nostalgia. Instead of the a politics of memory, I want to be influenced by afrofuturism and its politics of otherwise futurity.
In this series, the text has been contained within a central box, referencing the form of a page of ancient jewish scholarship called talmud. The words in the box quote Katherine McKittrick, a Canadian scholar of Black studies, on the need for black methods that are radical yet not completely undisciplined. McKittrick writes of “disaporic literacy.” Interpreting the talmudic form, we could read the audiovisual material as a response to or commentary upon her text.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CtHcT_ZOIHY/
Here I play with anthropologist and theatre practitioner Caroline Gatt. The color is still shift but image and sound are back in sync. I recognise this as a kind of performance documentation, except that 1) it is not performance, because we are improvising in a room with a few close colleagues and not attempting to produce any separate “work”; and 2) it is not simply documentation, because the text overlay adds a layer of critical commentary.
The text in this box is my own. In deference again to the talmudic form, I do not attempt to write a coherent sentence. Instead I pick up in the middle of a sentence and end in the middle of one too. This flow of words suggests a much larger text out of which these phrases are plucked, but that text, if it exists, can be found only in my mind. I do not want to make any definitive statement about what the video contains. I want to be in conversation with it: The audiovisual moment from 2017 and the fragmentary text from 2023 sustaining an open-ended dialogue with each other.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzDVSJHoP3f/
After producing more than a hundred short experimental videos using the material from the 2017 Judaica project experiment, I realise that it is time to move on. Since I no longer benefit from the extraordinary circumstances that supported the 2017 lab, I have to start producing new material in a much simpler way — more like conventional social media content.
I point my camera out the window and record a video direct to Instagram. Below, cars pass along the rainy street. This is life, but it also tells us nothing. I write a few lines that have been simmering in my mind: “How to stop being white: essays on the racial moment.” Is this the title of a new Instagram series? Of a book I am still hoping to write? Of the current phase of my life?
The question posted at the start of the experiment is still present: How does one stop being white? We know all the ways in which this question can be answered through deception and twisted into a tool of neocolonial appropriation. Yet, after all that, it cannot stop being asked. The question itself must cease to be spectacular or exceptional and become mundane, constant, ubiquitous. It must be built into the flesh of the earth — like a road, like a streetlamp, like cars.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzE7q1doDvT/
This is another of my favorite posts. A simple Instagram features makes glittering stars appear to sparkle on the cover of a plain blue book. I have been listening to “Ghostwriter” by RJD2 in the car, so I put it on and wait for its fun crescendo. Title card: “toward a planetary decolonial movement.” Finally we zoom out dramatically to discover what the book is: Toward a Global Theory of Race, by Denise Ferreira da Silva, a leading thinking of planetary racial dynamics.
As many times as I watch this video, I find it as exciting as any movie trailer. Music, image, and text work together to create a sense of tension and release. The planetary is invoked explicitly and hinted at through the fall of stars. The blue of the book becomes the blue of the sky, the ocean, the cosmos. This is a difficult book to read in many senses, yet its clarity of insight offers a most radical, rigorous hope. This video shows how I want people to approach critical theory.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CzGIpW0olEG/
“What can I do?” is always the wrong question. It is worlds apart from “how to stop being white.”
In college, a visiting artist presented a powerful solo performance on race in the United States. Afterwards, my girlfriend at the time went up to him and asked what she could do, as a white person, to help. I remember him looking at her absolutely straight-faced, asking: “You’re white?”
This eraser was sitting on the table. My older child loves to draw. His grandmother is a visual artist and she sometimes gives him professional artist supplies. It was only long after I created this video that I read what it says on the label. “Soft art eraser. Gentle and effective.”
To stop being white isn’t a matter of becoming exceptional. Just the opposite: It is about laying down the weapons of exceptionality, the violence of a colonizing heroism, and becoming more honest instead. Again, I find that I can watch this video over and over, letting the music, image, and text swirl into me. This is a very different laboratory than the theatre studio in which I was trained. The “body” is temporarily out of frame. It will need to come back in, but for now all the elements of an experiment seem to be present without it: A question, an encounter, a possibility.
Ben Spatz on Instagram: "Echo, Mohamed Abuelkass, 2022"
I see that I am trying to do something with books. Something with books and bodies. Trying to communicate in a different medium why I don’t believe there is a liveable future without the resources of critical theory. Why everyone should be reading contemporary Black and Indigenous studies right now and why a radical transformation of the meaning of jewishness is vital to the future of the planet. Why we can’t stop talking and thinking about race if we are ever going to get beyond race — and why the institutions of artistic research need to stop describing themselves as universal experiments and start foregrounding the work of healing from whiteness.
I pick up a book and dance with it while a “phonk” tune that’s been trending on TikTok plays. I watch a documentary on Palestine and try to think through this moment in a bigger context, laying two books in front of the screen: Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism. I pick up my own book and explain why I love footnotes. None of these are quite enough. I haven’t found the perfect form. But this is my laboratory.
Articles and books
Video articles
Websites
Ben Spatz (they/he) is a nonbinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are the author of several books, including What a Body Can Do (2015), and Race and the Forms of Knowledge (2024), as well as founding editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research. Ben is currently a Reader in Media and Performance at University of Huddersfield and will be a Visiting Scholar next year at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University.