Seminar: Video Walls

The expression video walls has recently gained prominence in discussions about art and the media. It refers first and foremost to a form—the verticality of a wall covered with a multitude of images of various types and media: postcards, posters, reproductions, personal photographs, and documents of all kinds. 

Yet all researchers today emphasize the meaning-generating effects of this form: walls of images, like the Warburgian atlas studied by Georges Didi-Huberman, offer free navigation and numerous associations that arise on formal or iconographic grounds; in short, they broaden the horizon of the individual image by producing meaning in the interstices between the collected images. 

This is undoubtedly why this form of exhibition has become prevalent at various levels of our engagement with visual culture: the private level—the collages of images on teenagers’ bedroom walls—the creative level of writers who draw on disparate images to craft a literary narrative, and the public level, which manifests itself as a political act or a desire to communicate.

↘︎ Credits: Seminar organized by Christian Joschke at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in partnership with the Institut pour la photographie and with the support of the Neuflize Foundation