Manifesto
Our Definitions
- ‘Fragment’ – what you submit for inclusion in the journal via our online submission form
- ‘Collection’ – a monthly editorial gathering and reflecting on the Fragments submitted.
Want to guest edit a collection? Email us at editorial@fragments.video
Fragments Manifesto V2 ( June 2025)
An archive of previous versions of this manifesto is available here
Fragments are not completed video essays or ongoing works in progress.
A Fragment is a thought, an excerpt, something unfinished, abandoned, that may never have been exported before now.
To paraphrase Mark Sample (see below) “The Fragment is the end, not the means to the end”.
The Journal
This journal/database has been created to collect Fragments of making. Videographic explorations of process, method, and experimentation (true, with no clear thought or care for the end product).
Fragments is not peer-reviewed.
Fragments aims to adapt and evolve in the spirit of the work it features.
Fragments is a way to capture and celebrate the videographic experimentation that might otherwise never see the light of day because:
- What do/can we do with such experiments?
- We would rather not clutter the feed of our video hosting platform with ‘unfinished’ explorations.
- If we upload them as unlisted or hidden links, no one can find them.
Submitting to Fragments is about “letting go” (see our first editorial here). It is a contribution to an ever expanding field of videographic enquiry that focuses on process over output, celebrating that which might otherwise go unseen. And we hope to repay your contribution at some future point, when perhaps you find some inspiration for your own work amongst the submitted Fragments.
Where inspiration is found, we encourage appropriate acknowledgement be given to the original maker and the original Fragment so the value of these experiments might be truly appreciated.aker and the original Fragment so the value of these experiments might be truly appreciated.
Inspiration
Fragments owes a significant debt to a number of practitioners who have advocated for and engaged in experimental work as an integral part of their creative practice research. The following selected writings continue to inspire us in our work and our goals for this journal and are highly recommended reading.
“We use the tools at hand and use them in unplanned ways.”
“Completeness is not the goal and intactness is not the start – we aim for multiplicity and inexhaustibility.”
“Seek process, not outcome!”
“Embrace mistakes, accidents, glitches, and chance!”
“But research and its associated methodologies are not limited to the final product of scholarship: rather, the processes of discovery and experimentation are often the more exciting and insightful parts of scholarly endeavors, and it is in such processes where methodologies are used and developed.”
“OuScholPo names a creative erotics of videographic practice, a pataphysics that is playful and wilfully banal, experimental and performative but non-productive, even wasteful.”
Proctor, J., 2019. Teaching avant-garde practice as videographic research. Screen, 60(3)
“While, perhaps, a scholar’s first impulse in constructing a video essay might involve something like a direct translation from the printed word to the moving image, complete with an explanatory voiceover directing our understanding of the underlying audiovisual passages, the revolutionary potential of a developing form lies in its ability to push boundaries and establish (or refuse to establish) new conventions.”
Sample, M, 2012. Notes Towards a Deformed Humanities
“The deformed work is the end, not the means to the end.“