Abstract

The present article derived from my interest in oral narratives, particularly those that refer to events that their narrator has experienced. It is this reason that led me to actualize a project based on oral narratives of this kind, which is termed “diegesis.” Among the ways that were familiar or known to me, I choose the medium of video to explore certain levels of diegesis. My destination is to approach the semiotics of video-diegesis as a form of unlocking narrative video-art projects. Hence, by the end of my theoretic endeavor to systematize the semiotics of video-diegesis, I realize that the diegetic story sustains a correspondence with the stories we taught and the stories we live by. The text aims to define the diegetic study and practice in respect to the temporal and spatial arrangement of its elements. The relationships it advances in “praesentia” are so rich that they render a strict organization in “absentia” relationships, a fact on which the forthcoming textual elaboration is based. In narrative terms, such an elaboration allows, and even necessitates, a certain amount of segmentation and synthesis to be imposed upon the constituents of any videotic diegesis. Its case includes the video recording, manipulation, and representation of a narrative; the camera registers each narrator and projects her/him in the space of another. The compelling characteristic of video is that cognition develops from the visuality of the instance. Most of the time, the representation offers no settings; it uses simple camera work and editing applications. The possibility for the speaking person to perform is just as fictional as the possibility for language to ascertain. For this reason, an approach to diegesis in this text departs from the local difficulties of the videotic diegesis, namely, the process of dislocation, disarticulation, fragmentation, and structuration that function self-reflexively, like a “mise-en-abyme” of a recounting of a personal narrative. With regard to the narrative potentialities that appear, the videotic works that are inscribed to the particular filed are more interesting in their narrative results than their causes. The relevant topological elaboration is inspired from the tactics of remembrance.