The Blindness Series

Lines of text float against a milky white background, the words hovering just beyond perception and remaining images of text rather than words to be read. The images in turn embody a handful of ideas - about language, metaphor, communication and the ability or inability to see - all of which constitute the 10-minute video by the LA-based video artist Tran T. Kim-Trang called Alexia. The term designates "word blindness," a condition that afflicts stroke victims and prevents them from perceiving individual letters. Rather than explaining the condition, Alexia instead enacts it through its visuals, its sound and its use of text, and the video becomes a means for exploring a nexus of ideas without culminating in a polemic or concise conclusion, and it contributes to Tran's stature as a videomaker who works with care on complex ideas. The video can now finally be found easily - it was just released by Video Data Bank, the great Chicago-based distributor of video art; it's one of the eight videos that constitute Tran's The Blindness Series, which, as a whole, embodies a video genre know as the "essayistic," a term used since the early days of cinema to designate films and videos that follow in the footsteps of the written essay and the work of writers such as Montaigne, who eschewed the careful arrangement of a convincing argument in favor of loosely structured explorations. The cinematic essay boasts a long and venerable history, with some of the most respected filmmakers tackling the genre and crafting extraordinary films. The video essay has enjoyed a shorter lifespan but also claims a significant segment of overall video production and critical attention, especially from 1980 onward with the eruption of autobiographical video pieces offering insight into notions of identity and subjectivity. Tran has played a key role in the evolution of the essayistic, both as a maker who has shown her work extensively at festivals and museums around the world, and as an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Scripps College. The two-DVD boxed set showcases her contributions to the genre, highlighting especially her attention to the role of text-as-image...