Mudmap is a magazine focused on images and video, understood in a broad sense. We work mainly with moving images, but our interests extend far beyond cinema or contemporary art. We look at medieval illustrations, television archives, video games, TikTok videos, architectural spaces, news broadcasts, and everyday screens.
One of our main formats is the explorative video essay. Rather than explaining concepts step by step, these works use montage to let images speak to each other. Meaning emerges from their encounters, frictions, and repetitions. A medieval drawing can dialogue with a video game crowd. A news broadcast can echo a fictional scene. The goal is not to illustrate ideas, but to think through images.
We are also interested in formats that are usually not considered artistic or critical. Gameplays, ASMR videos, walking tours, live streams. We approach these formats as tools that can be reworked, slowed down, or displaced from their usual function, allowing other kinds of attention and interpretation to appear.
Another central line of work in Mudmap is video letters and correspondences. We continue to develop this format and to expand it beyond its classical definition. These exchanges question the standardized ways in which platforms tell us how to communicate. Instead of fast responses and optimized visibility, we are interested in other rhythms: delayed replies, asymmetric dialogues, and spaces where images and people can think together without the pressure of constant production or consumption.
Mudmap moves between popular culture and the art world without privileging one over the other. We look at blockbusters and viral phenomena as carefully as we look at experimental films or gallery installations. What matters to us is not hierarchy, but what images do: how they circulate, how they affect perception, and how they participate in larger cultural and political processes.
This also includes a focus on political imagery. In projects such as Screen Regimes, we examine how figures of power appear on screens: press conferences, televised speeches, social media clips. We are interested not only in what these figures say, but in how they are staged, framed, and distributed, and in the often invisible visual designs that support authority and legitimacy.
Mudmap is made by people close to cinema and video, and video is our main playground. But our understanding of images is wide, and our formats remain open. This is a space for looking, testing, and thinking with images, without rushing toward conclusions. This is the map we are drawing. You are welcome to walk through it.
image: 6lursed