Invisible Vortex is a fictional short film produced using Eastern minimalist aesthetic principles. As a Master's dissertation project at Queen's University Belfast, it aims to explore the expression of classical Eastern techniques - the concept of Liubai (blank-leaving) - within cinematic narrative through a minimalist visual style. It also attempts to utilise the concept of slowness and vertical composition to critique contemporary social indifference in the fast-paced digital age.

This video essay was created as part of the 2024 Parametric Summer Series organized by Ariel Avissar, using "Laird's Constraint" inspired by Colleen Laird's 2023 video essay "Eye-Camera-Ninagawa." Drawing from Laird's work, this piece explores the transcultural dimensions of video essay creation and consumption, especially in challenging Western-centric cinephilia traditions and looking at how video essays work as tools for revealing and reclaiming cultural narratives. The work extends the critical examination that Laird began around the complexities of split-screen compositions that contrast Asian media against Western mainstream material. Through this video work, the essay explores the split-screen format itself as a contradictory tool that simultaneously allows academic engagement while possibly hiding built-in cultural assumptions.

Everybody Dreams is a video-essay created within Ariel Avissar’s Parametric Summer Series, specifically responding to “Laird’s Constraint.” It deconstructs the final montage of Vanilla Sky by arranging its 88 shots into a grid, revealing thematic and visual patterns through still and moving imagery. Organized into 16 interpretive clusters, the work explores memory, identity, and dream logic. By pairing this sequence with Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy, the essay exemplifies videographic work as a form that thinks, illuminating unseen connections and offering new ways of seeing and interpreting cinema and audiovisual content.

Drawing Nostalgia – Memory, Displacement and the Cinematic Language of Longing Author: Tasos Giapoutzis Format: Essay Film Duration: 16′ 08″ Published: February 2026 https://doi.org/10.37186/swrks/16.1/7

My audiovisual essay is concerned with the depiction of labor, women at work, and women’s solidarity. I engage with Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a film that famously lionizes the powers of montage: its associative abilities, production of affect, encouragement of experimentation, and even the potential to transform consciousness, as Dziga Vertov, its key architect, believed. I highlight the labor of the editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who is one among many other women workers. In the second half, the juxtaposition of the Soviet film with Marker's Sans soleil reveals generative resonances.

"At All Times" is a videographic analysis of the famous montage sequence from "The Parallax View", structured around “Laird’s Constraint," a parametric method for engaging with montage through procedural editing, based on Colleen Laird's "Eye-Camera-Ninagawa." Rather than offering a singular interpretation, the piece stages a performative interrogation of the sequence by visually deconstructing its shots and placing them in dialogue with "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." This method foregrounds latent patterns of rhythm and repetition, opening space for new affective and analytical insights. The result is not a reading, but a demonstration of constraint-driven videographic thinking.

"Dance With Me" is a product of Ariel Avissar's 2024 Parametric Summer Series, specifically "Laird's Constraint," which is inspired by Colleen Laird's "Eye-Camera-Ninagawa" (2022).

“The Most unCertain Hour” explores constraint-based videographic practice by engaging with “Laird’s Constraint,” a parametric exercise created by Ariel Avissar derived from my earlier work “Eye-Camera-Ninagawa” (2022). Utilizing multi-screen collage, thematic sorting, and split-screen montage, it reflects on the tension between self-imposed rules and creative excess, while staging a meta-conversation about authorship, adaptation, and the cultural persistence of apocalyptic imagination. The video further offers an interrogation of cultural narratives of crisis, heroism, and collective memory via comparative analysis of Marvel Studios’ logo sequences (2002–2017) and the 1963 Astro Boy opening.

This special issue grew out of the 2024 Parametric Summer Series, an online workshop Ariel organized to explore the creative and analytical possibilities of parametric, constraint-based videographic scholarship (Avissar, 2024). Parametric exercises – whose prompts impose specific formal constraints – have long served as a core pedagogical method in videographic scholarship, as established by the influential Middlebury College Scholarship in Sound & Image workshops (Grant et al., 2019). My series invited participants to experiment with a more specific use of constraint, creating their own videos based on parametric prompts derived from existing works of videographic criticism. This follows the example of Alan O’Leary’s explication of 'Payne’s Constraint' (O’Leary, 2020 and 2021) from Matthew Payne's 'Who Ever Heard?...' (Payne, 2020), and other videographic projects that emphasize scholarly dialogue through making, such as the Ways of Doing initiative (Donaldson, Laird, McLeod, and Peirse, 2023).

I explore the life-changing resonances of two films: The Tree of Life (2011) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019). Drawing on the film philosophy of Daniel Frampton, I explain how the films have changed my consciousness, especially as they ‘speak’ to each other within my mind, and especially as they resonate with my memories of my late father.