ABSTRACT
Jody Berland's hesitation in definitively naming such video practices is certainly a strategy of preserving this active potentiality of video to deploy the photographic as a means of making visible the disappeared and displaced self. This chapter focuses on video in this discussion because, despite its many similarities to both still photography and film, it also has some important differences that Kubota's work explores, namely, video's ability to engage with notions of presence in a unique way through the concept of simulation through playback. Although no longer alive, her father is nevertheless present, suspended in time, but also somehow "disappeared" somewhere between his image, Kubota's mourning, and the present moment of viewing. Thus, Kubota's act of crying, sandwiched between different time signatures, between video screens and spaces, creates a particular context that modulates presence through the visual and the aural that is not solely "mimetic.".
