After Uniqueness

David James, University of Southern California:
Once only mechanically reproducible, all kinds of moving image art are now digitally copied and disseminated in innumerable apparatuses that were unimaginable forty years ago. Ranging in its references from eighteenth-century printmaking to UbuWeb, Balsom's brilliant and beautifully written book is a tour de force of scholarship and critical analysis that investigates the new forms of liberation and of control that ubiquitous copying offers. Its spirited intellection is exhilarating.

Francesco Casetti, Yale University:
If moving images are now consumed on more platforms than ever, what networks do they traverse to reach their audiences? What factors intervene to enable or restrict these passages? In After Uniqueness, Erika Balsom explores strategies that have changed our conceptual framework of how circulation functions today—what we mean by 'copy,' 'reproduction,' 'authenticity,' and 'authorship.' To explore this is to understand what moving images represent in our current world. An original, elegant, and impressively researched work.