Veronika Hanáková

This videographic essay explores the star wipe – a long-dismissed and oft-ridiculed editing transition – as an emblem of marginal and forgotten media artifacts. By examining its historical use across various forms of media, from classic television and feature films to online ephemera, we reveal how this seemingly trivial transition embodies complex intersections of technology, memory, and aesthetic value.

The housewife lives in an endless loop of daily routines of caring for the house and family. These daily routines are captured in the film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) over a period of three days. Similarly, this videographic essay takes the viewer through three stages in the cycle of the extension of the housewife logic into the sphere of the digital. It proceeds from introducing the evolution of reproductive labour, to a playthrough that foregrounds the connections between reproductive and cognitive labour in the datafied society, to a demonstration of how this development of housework turns us all into ‘digital housewives’.