This Ph.D. dissertation/book excerpt was a conference paper for a talk held in Amsterdam in March 2008, and it was published for participants. The book Operation Video has been published in German only, and is available by request.

This excerpt rebuts Jean Baudrillard's claim that the circulation of electronic images causes external reality and the subject to vanish. Adorf uses the work of video artist Lisa Steele to show how artists, rather than foregrounding a "dissolving or vanishing subject" may instead feature a subject that "discovers itself." Exploring Steele's video Birthday Suit and Lynn Hershman's Roberta Breitmore, the author suggests video may become the site for the identification of selfhood and identity rather than the victim of obfuscation through its telecommunicative omnipresence.