Pedagogical tools

It is agreed that video art was invented in 1963, by Nam June Paik with his 13 “prepared televisions” (homage to John Cage) at the Parnass gallery in Wuppertal. It was in the air of time, a new “tool”, the television and the magnetic recorders of sound images very quickly attracted the interest of the artists.

Some will add that Wolf Vostell is also the father of the video art with his Dé-coll/ages (Sun in your head, Télévision Dé-coll/age 1963).

Anyway, and whatever the approach of each one, the video art is the art of the new technologies of the Sixties.

Of Nam June Paik who sees there the immense possibilities of repainting the real and especially to diffuse in mass on the televised networks, to the worries if not to the anguishes of Wolf Vostell who denounces – and destroys regularly – the tool of propaganda, of formatting of the spirits that can be the mass television, to pioneers like Ed Emschwiller and his images without cameras (the computer is enough for itself), to the Vasulkas – Steina the violinist and Woody the engineer – creators of the Kitchen in New York and of new images, all of them are enthusiastic and write the first pages of this new art, opening tracks, new spaces to explore.

Following them, a second generation, Bill Viola, Gary Hill, John Sanborn, Robert Cahen, Thierry Kuntzel, Studio Azzurro, Bruce Nauman, Fabrizio Plessi and many others, took hold of these tools that were available at that time in institutions and sometimes in large international companies that entrusted their cameras and especially their post-production resources to artists who would help these same companies to progress.

The end of the seventies and the eighties saw the rise of the interest of cultural institutions for an art form still unknown to the general public.

It is at this time that festivals of electronic art, of video art are created almost everywhere in the world: the International Festival of Video Art in Montbéliard in 1984, Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand in 1986, VideoBrasil in Sao Paulo and Vidéo Arts Plastiques in Hérouville St-Clair in 1987, EMAF in Osnabrück in 1988, …

Access to production tools, although essentially institutional, became easier. But what will really upset the deal, it is the arrival of the powerful personal computers and the “revolution” of the Internet in the Nineties. The artists free themselves for the most part from the institutions and free their speech. The web 2.0 is a fatal blow to the limitation of the distribution of works, in any case of films or monobands. Youtube or even better Vimeo, a quality platform, allow artists to broadcast art videos, performance captures, artistic webdocs, holographic videos … Smartphones and their video creations have their own festivals, animated GIF formats find a new life and a new dimension with some renowned artists who regularly publish on the internet and are rewarded by “awards” as those of Transcultures (Belgium). A truly independent artistic creation is developing and often seeks a form of recognition in the participation in video art or digital art festivals. The flow of images is widening, the creative dimension of sound is increasingly taken into account thanks to new software, generative films without beginning or end programmed or conceived as applications are increasingly proposed to the public.

It seems that all these tools, interactivity, this “extended cinema” offer to everyone the means to communicate these mental images (silent or sound) that previously we could only describe…

Gabriel Soucheyre for Other The Real, October 2016