Essay film dissidents presents next generation essay film makers that develop the practice of essay film against itself. Two European film makers, Anna Zett and Josh Crowle both come up with an impressive formula for their narrative structures – Zetts film is a gif-file that has to be read while scrolling, spreading her historic research of dinosaur representation in movies as a bitter-fascinating critique on archaeology, animation and pop-culture at the same time. Crowles video-vertigo is a post structuralist pantheon of the consequences that digitization has on the analog world in media representation.

In the silent video essay DINOSAUR.GIF the image objects of digital media meet the ghostly theater of early cinema. As animated GIF are scrolled down in a text editor, a critique of US-American imperial mythology starts to unfold. It turns out that revealing and concealing are inseparably connected when the dinosaur, the spirit animal of technological progress, appears on screen.

JACK AND DEBBIE draws parallel stories between Debbie Harry becoming digitized by Andy Warhol on July 23rd 1985 and Jack a video game character becoming materialized on August 16th 2013, Minecraft, Video Drome and the computer chronicles. A theoretical stabilization effect sets in as the different stories are combined to a profound suggestion about the effect of the digital.