Video Art

Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and is comprised of video and/or audio data. ((It should not however be confused with television or experimental cinema). Video art saw its heyday during the 1960s and 1970s, but has exerted an influence to the present.

Different artists use different media, but video tape was probably most common in the form's early years, though Hard Disk, CD-ROM, DVD, and solid state have been used;any electronic storage format. However, despite obvious parallels and relationships, video is not film.

One of the key differences between video art and theatrical cinema is that video art does not necessarily rely on many of the conventions that define theatrical cinema. Video art may not employ the use of actors, may contain no dialogue, may have no discernible narrative or plot, or adhere to any of the other conventions that generally define motion pictures as entertainment.

This distinction is important, because it delineates video art not only from cinema but also from the subcategories where those definitions may become muddy (as in the case of avant garde cinema or short films). Perhaps the simplest, most straightforward defining distinction in this respect would then be to say that (perhaps) cinema's ultimate goal is to entertain, whereas video art's intentions are more varied, be they to simply explore the boundaries of the medium itself (e.g., Peter Campus, Double Vision) or to rigorously attack the viewer's expectations of video as shaped by conventional cinema (e.g., Joan Jonas, Organic Honey's Vertical Roll).

Video art is said to have begun when Nam June Paik used his new Sony Portapak to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York City in the autumn of 1965. That same day, across town in a Greenwich Village cafe, Paik played the tapes and (so legend goes) video art was born. This fact is sometimes disputed, however, due to the fact that the first Sony Portapak, the Videorover did not become avaliable until 1967.

Prior to the introduction of the Sony Portapak, "moving image" technology was only available to the consumer (or the artist for that matter) by way of eight or sixteen millimeter film, but did not provide the instant playback that video tape technologies offered. Consequently, many artists found video more appealing than film, even more so when the greater accessibility was coupled technologies which could edit or modify the video image.

The two examples mentioned above both made use of "low tech tricks" to produce seminal video art works. Peter Campus' Double Vision combined the video signals from two Sony Portapaks through an electronic mixer, resulting in a distorted and radically dissonant image. Jonas' Organic Honey's Vertical Roll involved recording previously recorded material as it was played back on a television -- with the vertical hold setting intentionally in error.

Many notable people who used video art emerged more or less simultaneously in Europe with work by Wojciech Bruszewski (Poland), Wolf Kahlen (Germany), Peter Weibel (Austria), David Hall (UK) and others. For key early British work see Video Art: The Early Years.

Although it continues to be produced, it is most frequently combined with other media and is subsumed by the greater whole of an installation or performance. Contemporary contributions are being produced at the crossroads of other disciplines such as installation, architecture, design, theory of sculpture, as well as new forms of non-objective narrative and visual abstractions. Contemporary leading artists working this way are Matthew Barney (USA), Javier March?n (Spain) and Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland).