ABSTRACT
Nonlinear digital editing software programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro have unleashed a new kind of editorial labor. Using Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022) as his case study, Kartik Nair explores the editorial labor of choice that supports virtual images. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a multiverse narrative about a day in the life of an ordinary, middle-aged, Asian American woman who must learn to jump across universes (or “verse jump”) in order to save her family and the world. Nair argues that the film’s montage is the aesthetic expression of digital editing’s capacities for selection, intervention, and assemblage – and that “verse jumping” is an allegorical performance of the materiality of choice labor.
