The book Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008) was edited by the research group Curating Video, founded by Joseph-Lester, Professor Amanda Beech (CalArts, California) and Matthew Poole (independent curator, California). The publication was launched at Tate Britain in 2008 alongside the conference ‘Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media’, and includes a co-written introduction and essay by Joseph-Lester with commissioned essays from Professor Norman Klein and Dr Sharon Kivland. The conference and book launch were publicised and supported by Tate Britain and Artwords Press.
The conference, which was conceived by Joseph-Lester and project partners in the research group Curating Video, brought together an international field of researchers from cultural studies, visual art, psychoanalysis and political philosophy, including Professor Ahuvia Kahane, Dr Uriel Orlow and Dr Graham Harman. The ‘Image-space’ conference panel explored new contexts and issues that are crucial to understanding the experience and meaning of images. Joseph-Lester’s conference panel particularly considered how images are an architectural, physical and embodied constructs and how this experiential and immersive image space produces ideological affects.
Curating Video’s partnership with Tate Britain led to a second conference in 2010, ‘The Contingency of Curation’. This served as an opportunity to test questions about the role of the curator working alongside large-scale urban regeneration programmes. The online publication is hosted by AND Publishing. The recent publication ‘RE-TAKING LA’ (Urbanomic, 2013) explored the image structure and site of LA; this project extended work with Curating Video into the politics, affect and materiality of the moving image.