'Laird's Constraint': Videographic Montage Analysis Special Issue

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).