Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Video art.So, what’s video art?
A type of art that uses and manipulates the moving image. The work can take the form of installations, sculptures, real-time streams, reworked films; it can feature audio, multiple monitors, is often narrative-free and can include paintings, architecture, or other artistic disciplines. It is distinctive from cinema and its various experimental forms in that it seeks to rally against cinema’s conventions, undermining them and our expectations—lacking staples like dialogue, narrative, and characters, while exploring the boundaries of the medium of film.Where did it come from?
Its genesis was in the early 1960s, following on from cinema’s inception and cultural integration, which in turn allowed for the advent of television and video playback. As the technology to record (via Portapaks) and watch video became cheaper and more accessible to the mainstream consumer, it was explored as a medium by artists. Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik were two artists who experimented with the form early on. Warhol filmed low-rent underground parties as performance art, while Nam June Paik created multi-monitor sculptural installations by stacking TVs atop one another like his TV Cello (above). The relative immediacy with which artists could play back their creations appealed to them, and the form took off growing in complexity and diversity.This week you're really digging…
Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down from 24 frames a second to around 2 frames a second, extending its running time from 109 minutes to 24 hours. Also Hiraki Sawa’s melancholic and comic Dwelling, filmed in his apartment it shows the roaring comings and going of miniaturized airplanes.The shower scene from Psycho in really slow motionNano talk
With even more technologies to record with and greater access to editing equipment (both these things can now be accomplished on a smartphone), the medium is mutating and expanding like never before, aided in large part by video sharing platforms dedicated to streaming video like YouTube and Vimeo. Video art is refracting and adapting to the digital age, and begot a few offspring of its own in the form of VJing, interactive film and the video mashup. Video art now takes place anywhere the moving image can be viewed, which is to say, almost everywhere.Describe yourself as…
Man/woman with a moving camera.Keywords
Video, tape, record, experiment, moving, image, motion, monitor.Difficulty level
Betamax.Age range
Portable.Hiraki Sawa’s DwellingTagline
The camera is your brush, the video monitor your canvas.To recap: Temporal imaging as dynamic art form.Next week: HDR photography.
A type of art that uses and manipulates the moving image. The work can take the form of installations, sculptures, real-time streams, reworked films; it can feature audio, multiple monitors, is often narrative-free and can include paintings, architecture, or other artistic disciplines. It is distinctive from cinema and its various experimental forms in that it seeks to rally against cinema’s conventions, undermining them and our expectations—lacking staples like dialogue, narrative, and characters, while exploring the boundaries of the medium of film.
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Its genesis was in the early 1960s, following on from cinema’s inception and cultural integration, which in turn allowed for the advent of television and video playback. As the technology to record (via Portapaks) and watch video became cheaper and more accessible to the mainstream consumer, it was explored as a medium by artists. Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik were two artists who experimented with the form early on. Warhol filmed low-rent underground parties as performance art, while Nam June Paik created multi-monitor sculptural installations by stacking TVs atop one another like his TV Cello (above). The relative immediacy with which artists could play back their creations appealed to them, and the form took off growing in complexity and diversity.This week you're really digging…
Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, consisting of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho slowed down from 24 frames a second to around 2 frames a second, extending its running time from 109 minutes to 24 hours. Also Hiraki Sawa’s melancholic and comic Dwelling, filmed in his apartment it shows the roaring comings and going of miniaturized airplanes.The shower scene from Psycho in really slow motionNano talk
With even more technologies to record with and greater access to editing equipment (both these things can now be accomplished on a smartphone), the medium is mutating and expanding like never before, aided in large part by video sharing platforms dedicated to streaming video like YouTube and Vimeo. Video art is refracting and adapting to the digital age, and begot a few offspring of its own in the form of VJing, interactive film and the video mashup. Video art now takes place anywhere the moving image can be viewed, which is to say, almost everywhere.
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Man/woman with a moving camera.Keywords
Video, tape, record, experiment, moving, image, motion, monitor.Difficulty level
Betamax.Age range
Portable.Hiraki Sawa’s DwellingTagline
The camera is your brush, the video monitor your canvas.To recap: Temporal imaging as dynamic art form.Next week: HDR photography.