Traveling Music Videos

Traveling Music Videos offers a new interdisciplinary perspective on how contemporary music videos travel across, shape, and transform various media, online platforms, art institutions, and cultural industries worldwide. With the onset of digital technologies and the proliferation of global video-sharing websites at the beginning of the 21st century, music video migrated from TV screens to turn instead to the internet, galleries, concert stages, and social media. As a result, its aesthetics, technological groundings, and politics have been radically transformed.

From the kinaesthetic experience of TikTok to the recent reimaginations of maps and navigation tools through music video cartographies, from the ecofeminist voices mediated by live-stream concerts to the transmedia logic of video games and VR, from the videos’ role in contemporary art galleries to their political interventions —the chapters map the ways music video is continually reconfiguring itself. The volume tracks music video’s audiovisual itineraries across different geographies, maps its transmedia routes, and tackles the cultural impact that it has on our current media ecosystem.

Tomáš Jirsa is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Palacký University Olomouc, Czechia. Interested in relations between literature and the visual arts, affect theory, and music video studies, his most recent book is Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Mathias Bonde Korsgaard is Associate Professor of Online Video Cultures at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published extensively on music video and audiovisual studies, including the book Music Video After MTV (2017). Korsgaard is the editor-in-chief of the Danish online film journal 16:9.