Below are ten videos. Please watch them in order and react to them in real time as you watch.

(Note: most of the videos contain rapidly-changing images and occasionally an effect like flashing lights, which might pose a risk to viewers with photosensitivity.)

Each will consist of a deformative intervention on a clip from Hollis Frampton's 1968 experimental short Surface Tension. The deformation will play at first without any explanation. As you watch it, do your best to guess "what it's doing" (in some cases this will be obvious, in others perhaps less so) and offer any reactions as to whether and/or how you find this deformation meaningful, successful, philosophically productive, or otherwise.

At the end of each deformation, there will be an opportunity to pause and offer further reactions. Please do so if you wish.

After you press play again, I will put some text on screen to explain what I thought I was doing or what I "meant" to do, and I will elicit your responses to this.

• Was I successful in communicating this intent or argument?

• How could I have communicated this intent or argument better?

• Was my intent or argument even relevant or desirable (that is, did the piece work better without knowing it, and why)?

Please feel free to pause whenever you need and as often as you need to offer whatever responses you have.

In all cases, the point of this experiment is to reflect on the question:
"What Makes An Act of Criticism Successful?"

As you answer this question, please don't pull any punches or worry about hurting my feelings. I made these deformations precisely to be cannon fodder for this exercise. They aren't meant to be "good" on their own, but to inspire reflection on the practice of deformative/parametric criticism. I seek your responses in order to collaboratively develop some loose set of ideas, guidelines, or best practices for how to make meaningful parametric/deformative criticism (that is, criteria to distinguish "successes" from "failures"), how to communicate or guide the viewer toward that space of meaning effectively without hamstringing the new potentials of videographic criticism, and how to gauge priorities in this expanding field.

Thank you very much for your participation.

By sending me your reactions, you agree that I may edit your responses, along with the responses of other scholars who participate, into a larger project pertaining to the questions outlined above. Though it will be necessary to cut some of your responses for length, I pledge that I will not intentionally misrepresent your arguments or otherwise engage in reality-TV-style shenanigans with your audiovisual likeness and thoughts. If at any point you stumble over your words and would like a "clean take," just stop and restate what you were saying. I'll use the good take. If you say something you don't want used, say so and I won't use it. I deeply appreciate your participation and the trust you're putting in me by participating.

You may submit the video of your reactions in whatever manner you like, but a private Vimeo link set to downloadable seems easiest to me.