The Tens

The Tens, a collaboration between Alan O’Leary and Barbara Zecchi (2024–2025), contributes to the ongoing experimentation with form and method in the emergent medium of videographic criticism. Comprising three components—a ten-part epistolary videographic exchange, a performative dialogue responding to a fictional negative review, and a written statement—the project traverses a range of formal strategies and multiple modes of scholarly inquiry from practice to performance to text. Each mode brings with it a distinct tonal register—from the provocation and humour of the core video, to the explanatory but ambiguous inflection of the filmed conversation, to the detached, analytic voice of this reflection. This tripartite structure becomes a site for exploring the epistemic affordances of form itself: how knowledge is not only conveyed, but constituted, performed, contested and expended through videographic, dialogic, and textual practices.