The Relationship between Video Art and Space:

The Relationship between Video Art and Space: Examining Video Art through Spatial Elements of the Exhibition Spaces. Youngsun Park, Post Doc.

Yonsei Communication Research Institute

Video Art, once considered as an alternative art medium, has become a dominant art form. The first video art exhibition was by Nam June Paik in 1963. The exhibition was titled Exposition of Music – Electronic Television. In his exhibition, television was used as an artistic medium which turned against television itself. Edith Decker, who wrote a doctoral thesis on Nam June Paik in 1985, explained the significance of television emerging as an experimental art medium in the 1960s.^[i]Since the beginning of 1970s, television which showed images became a media of artistic expression occupying a part of modern art. The video art is expressed as artistic possibility of technology or to be the extension of art and movie. As the scope of video art gradually enlarged, the electronic technology and space composition became important elements of video art. Recently, many video art exhibitions are held in Korean galleries, but many people are still unfamiliar with video art. As the works and exhibition of Nam June Paik have been introduced through broadcasting, most people understand that only the works like Nam June Paik’s are of video art. If so, what is the definition of video art in the general dictionary? A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art defines Video Art as follows. Video Art: a broad term applied to works created by visual artists in which video and television equipment and technology is used in any of various ways.[ii] This definition reflects a vagueness and broadness in understanding video artworks. A more concrete and narrower definition of Video Art is given in the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Video Art: The pioneer here is Nam June Paik, who realized early in the 1960s that magnets applied to points outside a live TV screen could distort its kinetic image. Paik later placed an electrified wire across a reel of recorded videotapes, thereby causing erasure every few seconds; he was among the first to assemble several monitors into unified objects called Video Sculptures. Once the cost of portable cameras decreased, video became a popular art medium, much like photography before it, so that one measure of artistry became the creation of work different from the very common run. Some used video to document live performances; others, such as Amy Greenfield, exploited its different scale to ‘film’ performances that were never meant to be seen live. Stephen Beck eschewed the camera completely for synthesizers that could create images never seen before; Bill Viola and Bucky Schwartz, among others, realized perceptual incongruities unique to the new medium, while David Gigliotti and Mary Lucier used several monitors to portray a continuous image that ran from screen to screen.[iii] The Dictionary of Art provides other categories of Video Art recognizing many forms and diversities. Video Art: term used to describe art that uses both the apparatus and processes of television and video. It can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast, viewed in galleries or other venues, or distributed as tape or discs; sculptural installations, which may incorporate one or more television receivers or monitors, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sound; and performances in which video representations are included.[iv] Video art defined from these dictionaries deliver just fundamental and literal knowledge. Sean Cubitt expressed a more negative view of the origins of Video Art, where he said, “It’s impossible to see Video Art history, both because the evidence is fading, and because it was never a single history in any case.”[v]These different views indicate that video art history tends to mythologize individual artists or to record individual events separately. It also demonstrates how the term Video Art is over-simplified and there remains a need to offer categories or define forms. <The relationship between video art and exhibition space> Though video art drew attentions since the first half of 1970s, it was not easy to exhibit works of video art in the existing mainstream galleries. They could attract young artists by exhibiting non-commercial art works such as performance and video installation art in exhibition spaces run by artists. Therefore, now it is possible to exhibit video art in various new spaces as well as art museum and gallery. We can examine various works of video art through spatial elements of various exhibition spaces. Single channel video and the gallery spaceSingle channel video is screened on TV Monitor in exhibition space such as a gallery rather than movie theater, or screened on a wall of exhibition place by using a video projector. Single channel video screening by using video projector can be done in movie theater, but the reason why it’s screened in gallery’s exhibition space is that it’s important where to exhibit single channel video. That is, the relationship between video and exhibition place takes very important role. Like single channel video, the harmony with exhibition place is very important for multi-channel video too. In addition, different to single channel video, many spatial languages have to be calculated such as arrangement of video images in order, showing location for spectators, space between screens, and size of various images. Steve McQueen, Deadpan, 1997
16mm black and white film, video transfer, silent. 4min. 30 secs. Steve McQueen’s artwork, Deadpan, was exhibited by projecting single channel video in dark space within four-sided wall. This single channel video was made as a silent, black and white film and it was transformed to video format in order to exhibit at the gallery space. In the video image of the work, McQueen is standing stationary and a house is seen behind. Suddenly, the house is slowly falling down over McQueen. Stationary McQueen doesn’t move in such a situation, and fortunately, the window of the house is open and McQueen is standing at the right position through the window and safe when the house falls down. This scene is repeatedly shown in different angles and the speed of collapse varies making spectators interested and tensed. The work was screened by using a projector, and the image was on the floor of exhibition space. And so it feels like a side of the house falls down into actual exhibition place out of the video image.If screened in a movie theater, such a connection of image and space cannot be experienced. In his own words, Steve McQueen explained as follows: “Because the film is projected on the back wall of the gallery, completely covering it from ceiling to floor and from one side to the other, it has a kind of all encompassing effect. You get pulled into the event… It’s supposed to be a silent experience, because when people enter the room, they become more aware of themselves, their own breath… I’d like to put people in a situation where they are aware of themselves while they watch the piece.”^[vi] In this way, Steve McQueen accomplishes his own video art through the connection of image and gallery space other than showing only the image of his single channel video in a cinema setting.
Video art with sculptural space The scope of using television is enlarged too in media art. Television set can be used as a dimensional fixture with 3D spatial language from a simple tool showing video image. Meanwhile, it takes the role of television machine too as a 3D fixture with the size and location of television set. Acting like a statue through the combination of television in 3D space and its image, it is also called as ‘moving electronic sculpture’ or ‘video sculpture.’ Bill Viola, Heaven and Earth, (1992) In Heaven and Earth, a column like structure is enclosed in a small alcove. Two wood columns extend from floor to ceiling, separated by a gap of several inches. In this gap, the exposed tubes of two black and white video monitors are positioned facing each other but not touching. The upper monitor shows an image of an old woman’s face on the verge of death, and the lower monitor shows the face of a new baby only days old. The images are silent and the entire structure is enclosed in a small room. Curators David Ross and Peter Sellars state, “Since the surface of each monitor screen is glass, the reflection of the image on the opposing screen can be seen through the surface of each image, with the birth-face and death-face reflecting and containing each other.”[vii] Heaven and Earth is a full round sculpture with a video element in it. At eye level, the viewers are drawn into the spaces between the two monitors. The reflections and the lights between them attract the viewers to imagine the authenticity of spaces formed by two pieces. The personal space of sculpture is highlighted by the intimacy between the two monitors between death and birth. Heaven and Earth has strong sculpture space elements. Video art and outside space Dan Graham, Video Piece for Two Glass Office Buildings, 1976. Dan Graham’s artwork Video Piece for Two Glass Office Buildings takes place over an urban space with a live feedback system rather than a gallery space. Graham shows video installation using urban space in two identical office buildings lying across from each other. In each building, a mirror wall is installed to reflect at each other with the glass window. And the monitor and camera are installed in front of the glass window. The installed walls reflect the space between the mirror and the outside of the opposite building. In addition, installed video camera takes the mirror wall and it is screened on the monitor. The camera image on the left building is seen on the monitor of right building. This image on the monitor of right building is shown delayed about 8 seconds.
This work shows the inside and outside images of different places from different views. It shows different views of image on actual situation in actual place. It shows people working in opposite buildings at different views through mirror, camera and monitor. Also, scenes in a building are shown in another building’s monitor as scenes of 8 seconds past. In order to show the different views including the private space of those people working in public places, Graham uses office building space rather than gallery space. Although Graham showed such live-feedback video installation in a gallery setting too, public space exhibitions delivered much stronger messages. Future of Video Art As arts and cultures evolve over time, video art has also expanded its forms. The elements that compose video art have extended greatly which defines video art today. This paper discussed few art works centered in spatial element among many other elements. As the role of expressive art media is enlarged, the use of space became an important factor in video art. Video Art no longer exists only in the space of television monitor. The exhibition space of video art is not restricted only to the gallery space. It is now found in dedicated exhibition spaces and even in open public spaces. Emancipated from the fixed space, every space now serves as an open canvas for video artist. The scope of video art is expanding as the artists’ space usage gets diversified. From the examples discussed here, we can see that video art is an expanded form of film, sculpture, and installation art. Just by examining the spatial elements of video art, we can see that video art is an expanded medium of other arts. The future of video art in the 21st century will be characterized as an art form that can take place in all art mediums.

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[i] See Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, Barrytown, New York, 1998, pp.33-40. [ii] Ian Chilvers, ed. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University Press, London, 1998, p.637.

[iii] Richard Kostelanetz, ed. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Schirmer, New York, 1993, p.644.

[iv] Jane Turner, ed. The Dictionary of Art, Grove’s, New York, 1996, p.419.

[v] Sean Cubitt, Timeshift on Video Culture, Routledge, London, 1991 , p.86-67.

[vi] Patricia Bickers. “Let’s Get Physical: Steve McQueen interviewed by Patricia Bickers,” Art Monthly, No. 202, Dec 1996-Jan1997, p.2.

[vii] David Ross & Peter Sellars, eds. Bill Viola, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992.

first meeting paper_071109

Video Art Archive Network Forum

• Date: Friday, Nov 9, 2007 (11 am ~ 2 pm)
• Venue: Gallery LOOP 3rd floor, LOOP Media Center
• Participant:
Abina Manning: Interim Director, Video Data Bank, U.S.
Heiner Holtappels: General Director, Montevideo, Netherlands
Tomiyama Katsue: Producer, Image Forum, Japan
David Cranswick: Director, d/Lux/Media/Arts, Australia
Ross Harley: Program Coordinator, Media School of English Media Performing Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia
Hyun-Suk Seo: Professor, Yonsei Univ. Graduate School of Communication & Arts, Korea
Jinsuk Suh: Director, Gallery LOOP, Korea

Purpose
• To reconstruct the 21st century identity of Video Art in the age of globalism
• To provide the new discussion on social responsibility and possibility of video art
• To discuss the process of archiving, preservation and distribution of video art
• To share the necessity of archive networks and professional system

Agenda
1. Archiving Networks and its subject
1) How to share?
First of all, we have to formalize our network. To practice this, we started blog for artists, researchers, and organizations interested in linking and sharing information and media relating to video art in the past present and future on 9 November 2007 ay Gallery Loop in Seoul, Korea.
Also, we can broaden our network to invite people from other institutes which are already existed. To activate blog, we all have to update information as often as we can.
www.videoartnetwork.wordpress.com
Password: vaan07/ Name: videoartnetwork
2) How many or how much? To be decided
3) How to share the profit To be decided
4) License problem To be decided

2. Screening program
1) Co-curating program
There are 2 kinds of co-curating programs. One is that all of us will be able to make exhibition together and the other is that we will be able to exchange the screening only. For example, Gallery Loop presents emerging Asian artists’ work in Seoul, Korea and at the same time Gallery Loop allows you to present this show over the Internet in real-time.
2) Traveling exhibition
In the case of Move on Asia, 15 curators from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea and Singapore participate in this show. They recommend one or two domestic artists to the committee, AAF(Asia Art Forum), and each gallery which get involved in committee will take in charge of Move on Asia in turn which means supervising gallery make all the progress for the show. In the end, this show travels to the participating curator’s country.
Video Art Network also can make the traveling exhibition like this way.
3) Competition for emerging artists To be decided
4) Annual awards To be decided

3. Collective Archiving Center
1) Building media sever (web based) To be decided
2) Making a media gallery To be decided
3) Making discourse and publishing a book
Through the traveling exhibition, we will be able to exchange our opinion. And also
each of us will be able to make discourse for the show in different point of view. When all the documents are gathered, we can publish a book.

4. Next meeting
• Date/Venue/ agenda To be decided

 

VIDEO DATA BANK – BUILDING STABILITY, MAKING ROOM FOR FLUX

Paper by Abina Manning/ Interim Director/ Video Data Bank   The Video Data Bank was established in 1976 by two graduate students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. The two women were first hired by the school to restructure and re-catalog a small collection of work by students and faculty, a tape collection that had become known as the “Video Data Bank.”  I think it is fair to say that they did not realize then that they were laying the foundations of an organization that would go on to house one of the most important historical archives of video art in the world. In 2006 Video Data Bank celebrated thirty years of video art distribution. The early beginnings of the art form had already been established when Lyn and Kate first borrowed a camera kit from the school’s video department.  Early video pioneers were using the Sony Portapak to record street action, studio experiments, and their own bodies in performance.  Armed with this equipment, Lyn and Kate began a series of interviews with artists, often seeking out female artists, who were underrepresented and overlooked by the art world.  Aside from that, as young artists unsure about what to do with their lives, they were interested in the power of the artist: curious as to what inspired these artists to make work, the techniques they used, and the lives they led.  These early interviews, with artists and cultural figures such as Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Murray, Buckminster Fuller, and Lucy Lippard went on to become the foundation of one of the VDB’s three major collections, On Art and Artists.  Originally intended as an educational resource for students and scholars, this collection of interviews has grown to number over 400 titles, and has become a significant art history resource.  The VDB continues to record interviews with artists, most recently adding Miranda July, Raymond Pettibon and DJ Spooky to the collection. In 1980, in response to the demands of the growing media arts field, VDB began to additionally distribute the work of U.S. video artists. The acquisition of the famous Castelli-Sonnabend collection of early video art in 1985, including works by artists such as Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman, provided the original impetus for the VDB to begin an ongoing preservation program, enhancing the image quality of the tapes and ensuring their continued availability. VDB continues to promote the growth of video-based art, acquiring the work of emerging and established contemporary artists who have gone on to achieve considerable prominence, including Sadie Benning, Mona Hatoum, Paul Chan, Jem Cohen, Coco Fusco and Walid Raad.  The total holdings of the VDB now number more than 5,000 titles, some sixty per cent of which are in active distribution. The main criteria when acquiring titles to the collection is that they be primarily experimental in nature, whether that is addressed through formal, technical, theoretical, or aesthetic means, or in the subject matter.  At this point, the VDB collection is particularly strong in certain areas: performance, feminism, alternative media, and identity politics. 

Distribution: the Archive Lives

 Video Data Bank distributes the collection nationally and internationally, to festivals, cinemas, microcinemas, museums, galleries, universities, broadcasters, media centers, and libraries, throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, and beyond, generating sales and rentals of the work on various formats, and collecting royalties for artists. The VDB has established strong relationships with international festivals and curators, and new titles are often shown on the art fair and festival circuit.  As a title gains attention from critics and programmers, educational institutions and librarians will often purchase them for their collection.  We work closely with museums, seeking to inform curators in the particularities of the art form and the importance of including video art in their collections.  This is something of an ongoing battle, as we find ourselves up against the very nature of video: its immateriality, its non-exclusivity, and its capacity to be infinitely duplicated.  And as soon as we are able to convince one curator that these artists and works have an important place in their collection, they move on, leave the institution, and we have to start all over again!  Due in part to these efforts, works from the Video Data Bank are in the collections of most major art museums, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museo de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Generali Foundation (Vienna), and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne). Unlike many western European countries, there is little government subsidy in the U.S. for distribution activities, or for video artists themselves. Fortunately, through the efforts of VDB, many art schools, universities and libraries have established strong collections of video art for use by their faculty and students. U.S. distributors have through necessity developed strong marketing skills and have been able to generate enough revenue to stay buoyant during several lean periods in arts funding that have occurred since their inception. The VDB staff team is constantly looking to find ways to continue to engage our clients, and to offer them insight into the history of video art and the work of the artists we represent.  Whether or not we like to admit it, we have developed a strong entrepreneurial spirit that has enabled us to produce several important projects that have provided increased insight into the art form for audiences, arts professionals and educators. 

Exhibition and Programming: Content and Context

 VDB provides audiences with curated programs and packages of work that are conceived either by staff or by experts from within the field.  There are several reasons why we are committed to this type of programming:  first, this is a method by which to provide context and an historical background to the works in question, often supported through the commissioning of written texts; second, it allows for collaboration and the representation of a broader point-of-view and artistic sensibility; third, it gives us the opportunity to introduce lesser known works alongside more familiar titles, thus broadening the video art cannon; and lastly, it allows us to offer a financial benefit to our clients, whose budgets are often stretched, as the packages usually give savings over purchasing the included titles singly.  One such example is Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States, a comprehensive package on the history of experimental and independent media totaling 19 hours of full length and excerpted videos from the 1970s, and including 68 titles by 50-plus artists.  Released in 1996 on nine VHS tapes, the package is now in the collections of many art schools, universities and libraries around the world, and has introduced a new generation to the diverse work of video artists.  Curated by independent scholar Chris Hill, and produced by the Video Data Bank, the anthology is accompanied by a 200-page study book that includes essays, program notes, tape descriptions, artist biographies, and more.  We are currently working on the production of a DVD version of Surveying the First Decade, which has involved going back to each artist to request an extension of the original contracts which did not include rights to distribute on digital formats; these were simply not envisaged when the project was first conceived. Other VDB programs examine the video work of performance artists (Endurance), collaborations between artists and scientists (Soft Science), and the work of Rockefeller Media Arts Fellows from the U.S. and Latin America (Frames of Reference: Reflections on Media) A recent initiative is the development of a number of artists’ compilations, published on DVD with an accompanying book.  Working with the artist, we curate their works into a comprehensive program and package them alongside biographical texts and specially commissioned essays. As we seek to encourage more critical writing on video art, and in order to better contextualize the work, efforts are taken to include essays by younger writers. To date, we have published box sets featuring the work of Yvonne Rainer, Peggy Ahwesh, George Kuchar, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Paul Chan; upcoming publications will highlight single channel work by artists Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jem Cohen, and Ximena Cuevas.   Video Data Bank regularly participates in screening programs, festivals, art fairs and exhibitions both in the U.S. and internationally, presenting work from the collections to a wide range of audiences.  A major initiative in the early 1980s was the Video Drive-In, a play on the drive-in movie houses which combined America’s love affair with both cars and Hollywood cinema.  Video Data Bank produced a spectacular walk-in version that took place in Grant Park, Chicago in 1984.  The purpose of the project was to make experimental and independent video available to a broad-based audience who might not be familiar with contemporary art events.  The Video Drive-In was a huge success, playing for two nights in Chicago to more than 10,000 people before touring to New York’s Central Park, and then on to Portugal and Spain. 

Archiving and preservation: Safeguarding the future of video art

 At VDB we catalog and archive every tape that is acquired for the collection, following standard practices as supported by AMIA (the Association of Moving Image Archivists), and protocols established through ongoing discussions with fellow distribution organizations from the U.S. and abroad.  Duplication sub-masters are dubbed from the artists’ original Betacam SP or Digital Betacam master tapes, which are then shelved as part of the archive. This has proven to be of real benefit to artists (and to the history of video art) especially when original copies become lost, or at times when the artist is seeking to preserve their videos and desires to work with the best possible quality copies, which might well be the copy we have archived.  There is an ongoing issue of preservation.  While a small number of individual artists are preserving their own work, many are unable to do so, and it would be very difficult for any one organization to preserve such an enormous archive without support. Many questions need to be asked: how are the resources to be found to undertake the mammoth project of ensuring that all artists and works in the collection are treated equally?  How do we decide which works receive the most urgent attention?  Which are saved in perpetuity to become part of video art’s historical canon, and which titles might be lost forever?  While we seek to spread the message to anybody who will listen that videotapes degrade and that the video signal can be lost for eternity, it is an ongoing struggle to engage the funding institutions to the extent that is necessary in order to safeguard the entirety of any collection.  So what do we do when a thirty year-old tape is in need of attention?  We talk to artists and ask them for their best possible masters for us to make a duplicate from.  We encourage them to preserve their videos, to keep back-up copies off-site, and to store them in optimum conditions.  And when necessary, we work with the artist to restore their titles, consulting experts in the field to advise us on best remedies. Not only is this a problem for the VDB distribution archive, but there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of video archives out there, be they records of sporting events, university visiting artist programs, performance programs, etc, etc., often at risk of being lost forever unless some urgent remedial action is taken.  One such archive that recently came to the attention of the VDB is that of the Videofreex, an early video collective operating out of New York state, that produced a pioneering range of programming including artists’ tapes, performances, happenings, and behind-the-scenes coverage of national politics and alternate culture. In the 1970s, the Videofreex operated the first pirate TV station in the U.S., and interviewed major political figures such as the Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton and Yippie Abbie Hoffman.  The Videofreex archive numbers some 1,700 tapes, mostly on the 1/2 inch open reel format.  These were scattered in various attics and basements until VDB staff physically went and packed them up in a truck and bought them back to Chicago, cataloged and archived them, and shelved them in a clean and safe environment. Much work remains to be done on this unique collection of videos: we have been working with San Francisco based BAVC (the Bay Area Video Coalition), who have the necessary equipment to clean and restore the tapes, and we recently released 25 of the Videofreex titles into distribution: we hope to preserve a further 25 this year.  We are producing interviews with former members of the collective, and we plan to produce a DVD compilation of the work; we will use the VDB percentage of royalty income from sales to preserve further titles.  Recent screenings featuring Videofreex titles have proven there is an audience eager to see the work, many in their teens and twenties.   

Future trends: threat or promise?

 One thing that we can be certain of is that nothing stays the same.  To quote Arthur Schopenhaur, “Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.”  For organizations like ours, keeping up with constant transformations in the field, be they of a technological or cultural nature, audience-led, or fluctuations in the art market, can be challenging. For instance, difficult as it is to imagine, even as recently as three or four years ago, most of our sales were on the VHS format!  Dealing with the ever-increasing demand for DVDs, and the virtual death of VHS is not easy when you are a small not-for-profit with limited resources. Over the last four years, we have been working to digitize our collection of 5,000 titles.  This mammoth task moves slowly, and despite our initial moves to prioritize works that also needed preservation, the pace of progress is in fact often dictated by client orders: if a library or museum orders a certain title on DVD, then that title moves up the digitization list.  As well as single titles, we are striving to make all of our existing compilations and anthologies available on DVD. Independent of that, we are addressing the fact that many of the early On Art and Artists interview tapes need restoration or editing: when they were first recorded in the 1970s and 80s, there were seldom the funds to do more than make them available, unedited, for educational research purposes.  Over the years, these interviews have taken on a special significance: artists who were just emerging at the time of the sitting have oftentimes become well-established in their fields, and the intimate conversations in informal settings can reveal the seeds of their oeuvre.  In recent years, we have been working to edit all of the interviews, and have established a procedure that includes preserving the master tapes, and utilizing written transcripts in order to focus on the key points of each artist interview.  We are seeing a new audience for these insightful documents: earlier this year the Museum of Modern Art, New York, programmed a wonderful retrospective series consisting of eleven screenings of artist interviews and single channel works from the Video Data Bank archive, Feedback: The Video Data Bank, Video Art, and Artist Interviews. During its thirty-one years of existence, Video Data Bank has experienced many shifts and changes.  We are now seeing a growing demand for download and streaming delivery of our distribution collection, and the need for digital lossless video archiving.  We are currently researching the best methodologies so that we can fulfill these demands, bearing in mind that our limited resources often mean that we need to exercise patience until the technology is less experimental and more established, and that equipment prices are at a level that we can buy into.  In addition, we will be looking for support for these endeavors from funding bodies and supporters of the media arts. Other current “trends” worth mentioning as we look to build the future capacity of the organization are: second wave start-ups seeking access to our “content”; the bootlegging of artists’ titles, which often then show up on sites such as YouTube and UbuWeb; and the emergence of a younger generation of video artists producing limited editions for the gallery system. In the constantly shifting media arts environment, keeping abreast of developments in the field and responding to the challenges are all part of the territory.   In the meantime, there is a growing demand for the work of video artists from universities, libraries, museums and galleries, collectors and events organizers, and a growing acknowledgement of the significance of the field. The Video Data Bank will continue to work to fulfill these demands, using its expertise to ensure the wellbeing of the archive, and its ongoing programs to ensure the historical legacy of the art form. Chicago, October 2007

Remapping the Boundaries of Genres and Formats

paper by Tomiyama Katsue/ Producer / Image Forum 

  

1.  From Tape to File, from Cinema to Motion Graphic  There is a difference in taste between today’s “artistic single-channel video” works and works of so-called “video art” from ‘60s and ‘70s. This must be a worldwide trend. Connecting digital video with computer is a technique well established since around 2000. This technical progress has made movie making a lot easier and the budget much lower. And ironically, it has also emancipated us from the act of filming. Images made through computers are easily mixed with and overwritten by other visual materials, and they are made into something new and different. One of the most prominent examples of this trend is, I think, the enormous evolution of “digital animation.” Now there are new　filmmakers who have skipped the stage of learning filming skills. Sadly enough, these artists are not necessarily be inspired by a certain cinema. They are mainly interested in making motion graphics.  Naturally, their works tend to more like animation. Since 1990’s, programs consist of digital animation made by young Japanese directors have been very popular at film festivals overseas, such as International Film Festival Rotterdam, Vancouver International Film Festival, Holland Animation Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival and London Film Festival. In Japan, a TV program called “Digital Stadium” started, which invites public participants for digital contents. And fine artists such as Tomoko Konoike, Tomoyasu Murata, and Tabaimo) have been adopting animations into their work. Also, a lot of galleries now exhibit moving images which are repeated endlessly. And now film festivals have to search for those installations more actively.  At the first Yokohama Triennale in 2002, they showed video works projected on white cubes. I clearly remember the scene where a lot of people wondering and looking for works of “moving images,” while ignoring hundreds of other works of fine arts.  How does audience access to works? In Japan, most people reach them at galleries or film festivals. In Japan a lot of exciting independent galleries have opened, which is making the situation active. Image Forum has been holding the Experimental Film Festival (1973-85) and Image Forum Film Festival (1987-) in several cities in Japan annually, screening the works of video art, installations, performances and internet art from both Japan and overseas. The works screened at the festival are put into our archive at Image Forum. Our archive consists mainly of film works. We distribute and package them into sell DVDs. The works we distribute are rented in order to be screened and exhibited at festivals, museums and galleries. There is no open list of the archive at the moment, only the catalogue of the festival. Or, a program we made for overseas film festival circuit around. Though we feel the need to make an open list of our archive, there still remain problems of media format and security of copyrights.  We have to mention now the particularity of the Japanese copyright system regarding moving images. Unlike other forms of art, “director” does not own a copyright for a film which he/she directed, but a producer does. Film directors haven’t had copyrights since 1970.  This is so serious a problem that even a film has made on this theme titled “Eiga kantokutte nannda!” In other words, ownership of copyrights shifts depending on what form you define your work is. But if you are an independent filmmaker, you are very likely to be a producer AND a director at the same time. 1. No Fixed Genres or FormatsI am afraid that defining video art as something “recorded by a camera and screened with single channel” will possibly narrow the range of expression. It is duty of hardware product companies to fix a format in order to make it useful for more people. In contrast, artists may constantly shift formats in order to widen the range of expression. Although it is not easy to re-define video art today, the definition will be something like this: digital images not film media and without an element of interaction (like that of media art or internet art), which include “traditional” single channel videos, motion graphics made with computers, installations and performances using images. It is quite broad a definition, but it is, in short,  “digital images in general that we can look at.” I think we can regard works by the following artists as a kind of video art:  Bokudeath (Fusion of animations, art objects and dance) EXONEMO (Lively bug visions made by violently taking over hardware) Doravideo (Enormous number of pictures quickly switched on and off along with drum sounds) And I think of my dear friends Nam-June Paik and Kubota Shigeko as true pioneers of all time. Kubota’s personal exhibition, opened on September 5^th 2006 was called “My Life with Nam-June Paik.” It was a grant memorial show completed with Paik-style video sculptures and images shown throw a spinning projector.  2. Function as an Index We surely have received benefit by instant search results we got through YOUTUBE and Google. We are now able not only to search for the titles of visual works, but also actually to watch them online. On the other hand, we are now losing the joy of imagining before we actually get to see the work, or talking about the work with other people right after we saw it together. And the information we can get online is very limited and there are often many mistakes in it. We have to be aware of these problems. Archival network can be used as an index we all can share- an index to which we can refer in order to screen or exhibit the works in original format. It is getting more and more important to share not only the information, but also the rich experiences and better ways of communication with more people.  We are now preparing to publish an anthology of Japanese experimental films in DVD.  Though it won’t be possible for us to include entire piece of every work, but some are excerpted. Instead, we will attach a booklet which will contain commentaries and explanations by the artists and critics and also reprinted materials of published pieces on the works. We would like to suggest using this book like an index in a dictionary, i.e. look up about a work in it and then rent an original film or video to screen.     There is no “correct ” way of expression in art, nor “ideal” way to make an archive.  There are always works which are truly exciting but troublesome for curators and hardware product companies.  We are somehow attracted to those kind of works.

The Relationship between Video Art and Space

The Relationship between Video Art and Space: Examining Video Art through Spatial Elements of the Exhibition Spaces.

 Paper by Youngsun Park,Post Doc.Yonsei Communication Research Institute 

Video Art, once considered as an alternative art medium, has become a dominant art form.  The first video art exhibition was by Nam June Paik in 1963.  The exhibition was titled Exposition of Music – Electronic Television.  In his exhibition, television was used as an artistic medium which turned against television itself.  Edith Decker, who wrote a doctoral thesis on Nam June Paik in 1985, explained the significance of television emerging as an experimental art medium in the 1960s.^[i]Since the beginning of 1970s, television which showed images became a media of artistic expression occupying a part of modern art.  The video art is expressed as artistic possibility of technology or to be the extension of art and movie.  As the scope of video art gradually enlarged, the electronic technology and space composition became important elements of video art. Recently, many video art exhibitions are held in Korean galleries, but many people are still unfamiliar with video art.  As the works and exhibition of Nam June Paik have been introduced through broadcasting, most people understand that only the works like Nam June Paik’s are of video art.  If so, what is the definition of video art in the general dictionary? A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art defines Video Art as follows. Video Art: a broad term applied to works created by visual artists in which video and television equipment and technology is used in any of various ways.[ii] This definition reflects a vagueness and broadness in understanding video artworks.  A more concrete and narrower definition of Video Art is given in the Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. Video Art: The pioneer here is Nam June Paik, who realized early in the 1960s that magnets applied to points outside a live TV screen could distort its kinetic image.  Paik later placed an electrified wire across a reel of recorded videotapes, thereby causing erasure every few seconds; he was among the first to assemble several monitors into unified objects called Video Sculptures.            Once the cost of portable cameras decreased, video became a popular art medium, much like photography before it, so that one measure of artistry became the creation of work different from the very common run.  Some used video to document live performances; others, such as Amy Greenfield, exploited its different scale to ‘film’ performances that were never meant to be seen live. Stephen Beck eschewed the camera completely for synthesizers that could create images never seen before; Bill Viola and Bucky Schwartz, among others, realized perceptual incongruities unique to the new medium, while David Gigliotti and Mary Lucier used several monitors to portray a continuous image that ran from screen to screen.[iii]  The Dictionary of Art provides other categories of Video Art recognizing many forms and diversities. Video Art: term used to describe art that uses both the apparatus and processes of television and video.  It can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast, viewed in galleries or other venues, or distributed as tape or discs; sculptural installations, which may incorporate one or more television receivers or monitors, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sound; and performances in which video representations are included.[iv]   Video art defined from these dictionaries deliver just fundamental and literal knowledge.   Sean Cubitt expressed a more negative view of the origins of Video Art, where he said, “It’s impossible to see Video Art history, both because the evidence is fading, and because it was never a single history in any case.”[v]These different views indicate that video art history tends to mythologize individual artists or to record individual events separately.  It also demonstrates how the term Video Art is over-simplified and there remains a need to offer categories or define forms. <The relationship between video art and exhibition space> Though video art drew attentions since the first half of 1970s, it was not easy to exhibit works of video art in the existing mainstream galleries.  They could attract young artists by exhibiting non-commercial art works such as performance and video installation art in exhibition spaces run by artists.  Therefore, now it is possible to exhibit video art in various new spaces as well as art museum and gallery.  We can examine various works of video art through spatial elements of various exhibition spaces.  Single channel video and the gallery spaceSingle channel video is screened on TV Monitor in exhibition space such as a gallery rather than movie theater, or screened on a wall of exhibition place by using a video projector.  Single channel video screening by using video projector can be done in movie theater, but the reason why it’s screened in gallery’s exhibition space is that it’s important where to exhibit single channel video.  That is, the relationship between video and exhibition place takes very important role.  Like single channel video, the harmony with exhibition place is very important for multi-channel video too.  In addition, different to single channel video, many spatial languages have to be calculated such as arrangement of video images in order, showing location for spectators, space between screens, and size of various images. Steve McQueen, Deadpan, 1997
16mm black and white film, video transfer, silent. 4min. 30 secs. Steve McQueen’s artwork, Deadpan, was exhibited by projecting single channel video in dark space within four-sided wall.  This single channel video was made as a silent, black and white film and it was transformed to video format in order to exhibit at the gallery space.  In the video image of the work, McQueen is standing stationary and a house is seen behind.  Suddenly, the house is slowly falling down over McQueen.  Stationary McQueen doesn’t move in such a situation, and fortunately, the window of the house is open and McQueen is standing at the right position through the window and safe when the house falls down.  This scene is repeatedly shown in different angles and the speed of collapse varies making spectators interested and tensed.  The work was screened by using a projector, and the image was on the floor of exhibition space.  And so it feels like a side of the house falls down into actual exhibition place out of the video image.If screened in a movie theater, such a connection of image and space cannot be experienced.  In his own words, Steve McQueen explained as follows: “Because the film is projected on the back wall of the gallery, completely covering it from ceiling to floor and from one side to the other, it has a kind of all encompassing effect. You get pulled into the event… It’s supposed to be a silent experience, because when people enter the room, they become more aware of themselves, their own breath… I’d like to put people in a situation where they are aware of themselves while they watch the piece.”^[vi]  In this way, Steve McQueen accomplishes his own video art through the connection of image and gallery space other than showing only the image of his single channel video in a cinema setting. 
Video art with sculptural space              The scope of using television is enlarged too in media art.  Television set can be used as a dimensional fixture with 3D spatial language from a simple tool showing video image. Meanwhile, it takes the role of television machine too as a 3D fixture with the size and location of television set. Acting like a statue through the combination of television in 3D space and its image, it is also called as ‘moving electronic sculpture’ or ‘video sculpture.’ Bill Viola, Heaven and Earth, (1992)              In Heaven and Earth, a column like structure is enclosed in a small alcove.  Two wood columns extend from floor to ceiling, separated by a gap of several inches.  In this gap, the exposed tubes of two black and white video monitors are positioned facing each other but not touching.  The upper monitor shows an image of an old woman’s face on the verge of death, and the lower monitor shows the face of a new baby only days old.  The images are silent and the entire structure is enclosed in a small room.  Curators David Ross and Peter Sellars state, “Since the surface of each monitor screen is glass, the reflection of the image on the opposing screen can be seen through the surface of each image, with the birth-face and death-face reflecting and containing each other.”[vii]              Heaven and Earth is a full round sculpture with a video element in it.  At eye level, the viewers are drawn into the spaces between the two monitors.  The reflections and the lights between them attract the viewers to imagine the authenticity of spaces formed by two pieces.  The personal space of sculpture is highlighted by the intimacy between the two monitors between death and birth.  Heaven and Earth has strong sculpture space elements.   Video art and outside space Dan Graham, Video Piece for Two Glass Office Buildings, 1976.              Dan Graham’s artwork Video Piece for Two Glass Office Buildings takes place over an urban space with a live feedback system rather than a gallery space.  Graham shows video installation using urban space in two identical office buildings lying across from each other.  In each building, a mirror wall is installed to reflect at each other with the glass window.  And the monitor and camera are installed in front of the glass window.  The installed walls reflect the space between the mirror and the outside of the opposite building.  In addition, installed video camera takes the mirror wall and it is screened on the monitor.  The camera image on the left building is seen on the monitor of right building.  This image on the monitor of right building is shown delayed about 8 seconds.
             This work shows the inside and outside images of different places from different views.  It shows different views of image on actual situation in actual place.  It shows people working in opposite buildings at different views through mirror, camera and monitor.  Also, scenes in a building are shown in another building’s monitor as scenes of 8 seconds past.  In order to show the different views including the private space of those people working in public places, Graham uses office building space rather than gallery space.  Although Graham showed such live-feedback video installation in a gallery setting too, public space exhibitions delivered much stronger messages.   Future of Video Art              As arts and cultures evolve over time, video art has also expanded its forms.  The elements that compose video art have extended greatly which defines video art today.  This paper discussed few art works centered in spatial element among many other elements.  As the role of expressive art media is enlarged, the use of space became an important factor in video art.  Video Art no longer exists only in the space of television monitor.  The exhibition space of video art is not restricted only to the gallery space.  It is now found in dedicated exhibition spaces and even in open public spaces.  Emancipated from the fixed space, every space now serves as an open canvas for video artist.  The scope of video art is expanding as the artists’ space usage gets diversified.  From the examples discussed here, we can see that video art is an expanded form of film, sculpture, and installation art.  Just by examining the spatial elements of video art, we can see that video art is an expanded medium of other arts.  The future of video art in the 21st century will be characterized as an art form that can take place in all art mediums.   

---

[i] See Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video, Barrytown, New York, 1998, pp.33-40. 

[ii] Ian Chilvers, ed. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford University Press, London, 1998, p.637. 

[iii] Richard Kostelanetz, ed. A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes, Schirmer, New York, 1993, p.644. 

[iv] Jane Turner, ed. The Dictionary of Art, Grove’s, New York, 1996, p.419. 

[v] Sean Cubitt, Timeshift on Video Culture, Routledge, London, 1991 , p.86-67. 

[vi] Patricia Bickers. “Let’s Get Physical: Steve McQueen interviewed by Patricia Bickers,” Art Monthly, No. 202, Dec 1996-Jan1997, p.2. 

[vii] David Ross & Peter Sellars, eds. Bill Viola, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992.

dLux: Future Histories

Future Histories

Paper by David Cranswick Director d/Lux/MediaArts

The question of archiving and the potential for online access to collections of moving image and video is significant and presents unheralded opportunities for us to greatly extend the reach and engagement with much broader audiences, and provides opportunities for a deeper knowledge of the histories and trajectories of video and media culture worldwide.

d/Lux/MediaArts is one of Australia’s longest established screen arts organisation, it began in 1981 as the Sydney Super 8 Film Group who presented the annual Sydney Super 8 Festival.  This festival came about through the community of experimental filmmakers working with Super 8 film who wanted to create a showcase of new works.  The festival wasn’t curated, rather it arose from an active community looking at an alternative forum to established filmmaking eg, narrative based short films that were being produced at the time.  The focus within the group was on experimentation, structure, aesthetics and stood apart from then current filmmaking practices.  By all accounts, this was a very lively and vibrant era.

The Sydney Super 8 Festival ran from 1981 until 1989 when the organisation renamed itself to become the Sydney Intermedia Network, [SIN], in response and to the increasing cross overs with video and film, and the emergence of new types of experimental works on different formats such as such as interactive and net based works.  Continuing to respond to the aesthetic, theoretical and technological evolution and artistic output of the decade, in the late 1990s the organisation again changed its name to became d/Lux/MediaArts, whereupon the focus on digital and media arts grew.  There was still a strong focus on video and screen culture, with the “d “ in the name representing the digital, Lux meaning light.  Programmes presented by SIN over its era includes the annual Matinaze video program which featured video works from Australia and internationally, and a successive annual video and interactive media program called d/Art which d/Lux/MediaArts has presented now for 10 years.  Significant video projects presented by d/Lux/MediaArts also included a major exhibition and publication program on Australian video artist Peter Callas curated by then Director Alessio Cavallaro.  Nowadays the video components of our programs are equally strong but consistent with our commitment to experimentation and innovation in screen and media culture. Current programs include works for mobile and handheld devices such as GPS for locative cinema and the like.

d/Archive: a description
In 2006 we marked the 25th Anniversary of the organisation with the launch of d/Archive: an online catalogue of all the works we have presented since 1981.

One of the key issues facing screen and media arts organisations in Australia and elsewhere, who have had that longevity and a history through these various analogue/digital format trajectories, is not just how to preserve, but also how to document and inform new generations of digital artists and others of the legacy and diversity of practice contained on floppy discs, old zip drives, film, u-matic video tapes etc.

To date, we have documented and put online over 1200 of works, by a significant number of Australian and International artists.  This catalogue of works includes the title, year, author, duration, format, synopsis of all these works as well as still images and other incidental documents where available.  In addition to this information about the works and programs we held, we worked with the Australian Film Commission [AFC] to retrieve additional information, documents and correspondences by searching their records of programs they assisted us with through grant funding since 1984.

Thus over the past two years we have amassed a comprehensive catalogue of works in a simple format which is available publicly for free.  This catalogue is in raw state but it provides us with the foundational information which can be enhanced, gaps filled in, factual information corrected and so on and we are eager to move onto the second phase of the d/Archive project in which we can substantially increase the amount and nature of information which can be accessed and cross referenced by visitors to our d/Archive.

Such precious content includes rare publications produced in-house over the years, for example the Super 8 Readers, a collection of critical writing by leading Australian film commentators and practitioners, including Ted Colless and Adrian Martin.  These important texts need to scanned, texts copied and uploaded.  With such a sizeable amount of information to be gathered, we are building this history in stages, starting from the beginnings of the organisation.  In this undertaking, we are assisted by academic researcher Bob Percival who also works for the AFC, and is currently writing a History of the Sydney Super 8 Film Group.  Percival’s research is to be published by mid 2008 and will constitute the most comprehensive history of that specific era, with recent interviews with key participants in the organisation’s development including Virginia Hilyard, Kate Richard and Mark Titmarsh.  Our aim is for this publication to be integrated into the d/Archive as freely downloadable rich media content.

Phase 1 of the d/Archive development has been concerned with static documentation of our archive.  Phase 2, currently in development, is in turn concerned with making available for viewing the actual digitised films and videos.

The specific issue we’re facing from the Super 8 period is that those works were not copied or collected, being returned to the artist after each screening.  Thus retrieving these works is a challenge and incurs significant costs in copying and digitisation.  What our organisation has access to, relating to that period, are programs, listings, synopsis, stills, etc, but sourcing the original work represents a significant task.  To date we have a small percentage of those works, and have presented some of them as part of our “Super 8 Effect” program which we screened at the launch of the d/Archive in late 2006.

The problem with showing these works in native format is that they are extremely fragile.  While presentation of work in their original form is very important, our role is not that of conservator and we recognise, and are realistic, about what we can and cannot afford to do.

Apart from these reels of super 8 works, we also own two super 8 projectors, which means we can show work in native format but as discussed this is likely to be a rare event as the works are becoming increasingly fragile.  Likewise the works on u-matic tape cannot be presented in original format as we cannot maintain tape players.  The role of conservation of original format works involves, crucially, the conservation and maintenance of the original equipment it was presented on.  This role rightly falls to organisations like the Australian Screen Sound Archive who have the technical and financial resources.  Digitising all of the various formats is our aim, because it’s the most practical and useful way for a small organisation to maintain and promote historical content.

But we do hope that the publicity and awareness generated both from these rare screenings and the archive itself will continue to enrich our content, by encouraging the many artists who presented work in the 80s to bring forward the original works, and that we can secure the resources for ongoing digitising.

Fortunately the programs presented by SIN in the late 80’s and into the 90’s were compiled on u-matic tapes and consequently we have a complete record of signature programs from that era such as ‘Matinaze’, an annual showcase of recent short experimental video works which ran until 1997.  In 2005 we independently undertook to have these tapes digitised for fear that they were degrading.  As a result, we a complete collection of Matinaze works available to us in stored digital format, with the exception of some 16mm works which were screened during that era.

Recognising the limitations of our organisation’s role and resources, our course of action has been simply to secure and create digital versions of all of the works presented.  The format we have elected to use is Digi-beta as we were advised that was the most stable medium to both store and present.

We are still deliberating about the correct format that takes our storage away from ‘tape’ and onto hardware, and will allow us more flexibility in the future.  For our purposes, the limitation with tape means we can’t for example put these works online as yet.  But the next question, which is still being debated, is what is the best codec for storing these works onto hard drives.  The current unstated preferred codec is mpeg2000 but as recently as last week, experts in digital conservation in Australia were still refusing to commit to that format as being the one to go with.  The difficulty for us is that we have a significant backlog of work to digitise, and virtually no resources for this process, and we only want to do it once, and do it right.

Thus it’s vital to us, and the global community of similar organisations, to establish a consensus of what is most practical and affordable, and that we don’t all work in different formats.  Ideally our respective collections need to be compatible and transferable.

Trying to see the Forest for the Trees.
Having amassed the raw information: the who, when and what, to make sense of the online presentation, the next issue is navigation.  How does someone who knows little or nothing about the evolution of experimental screen media in Australia engage with this mass of information?

There are a variety of users who visit the archive.  Some of them are looking for specific information, eg: works produced by Ian Andrews, works shown in the Splash program, which for instance included Marcel Odenbach, works from Japan shown over the years, etc.  Then some users are not looking for anything in particular, a group we refer to as the ‘Browsers’.  They need a ‘trail’, an entry point or a path to follow.

Other visitors to the site might be looking for very specific information about a technique or form of work, such as stop animation, machinima or sampling.

To cater for all these users, the backend of the database must include as much information as possible.  Then the front end must be able to accommodate these various searches.  To this end, having analysed “off the shelf” database packages, we decided fairly early on to customise ours.  d/Archive therefore consists of a my-sql database backend, driven by a sophisticated php front end.  Whilst we are still at “Phase 1” of the development and the possibilities of introducing many forms of search, upgrades, informational storage and retrieval are completely available to us.

The focus of this paper does not include the technical aspect of the design, but rather is looking at the end user experience and the considerations we have, moving into the future and the next phase of the implementation.

The application of meta-tags across all the data in the d/Archive is something we are aware of and need to address.  Very recently, we were contacted by a curator looking for works using a specific animation technique and wanted to know how to identify these works in our database but this type of search and functionality is not as yet available.

Meta-tagging is an incredibly valuable tool, but introduces a whole debate about agreed nomenclature, which seems to rapidly devolve into a very non-productive discussion about inclusion and perceived exclusion.  Also, who is to decide which themes (meta-tags) are relevant to a given work, and where do you stop?

For now, our data mapping is restricted to:

Work: title, year, author(s), synopsis, format, duration, program, media (eg, stills).
Author: Name, country, date of birth, stills.
Program: Title, year, venue, dates, curator, works.
Publications: Title, year, author(s), description, related works, related programs;
Talks: Title, year, author(s), description, program;

While this is a fairly basic framework, the multiple cross referencing and mappings are endless.  This information is the necessary foundation, no matter which path you choose to take.  It is the ‘front end’ that needs to be flexible enough to deal with those paths.

These can be for example:

Timelines: for instance, a tour of the organisation’s programs between 1985 to 1990;
Curated trails: for instance inviting a knowledgeable individual to design a themed excursion through the archive;
Random meanderings: generated by the front end and changing on a regular basis;

The Obsession with the ‘new’
One of the problems we have had to address while working within this history, is that many people ask, “how this is relevant to contemporary audiences”?  An online archive is a dynamic form of exhibition and good exhibitions need curating and need to be attractive to a wide range of people, not just academic researchers.  To address this challenge, and also as part of our strategy of overcoming this current lack of interest in screen history, we set about developing and presenting exhibition projects which drew on the archive and made it more engaging to a non-specialist audience who are interested in contemporary video practice but know nothing about its history, principally because it’s only now starting to be addressed.  To date there are only a small number of publications and resources available in Australia.

In 2006, d/Lux/MediaArts presented SynCity – remixing three generations of sample culture, curated by Mark Titmarsh who was one of the founding members of the Sydney Super 8 Group, and is also a practicing artist and academic.

Syncity including works by around 40 artists from Australia and internationally, with titles dating back to the early 80s through to 2006.  This extraordinary compilation of work spanned three generations of artists and filmmakers working with Sample culture, being the practice of re-mix, cut ups, culture jamming and appropriation.  What this exhibition illustrated so successfully was that even over a period of a quarter of a century, we could link and trace a fairly disparate group of artists around a common theme, which is really popular and relevant today. The fact is this thematic trajectory has been thoroughly worked and investigated since the beginning of experimental film.

Thus, if we were to talk about the idea of meta-tagging, this is a great example of how an idea has been elaborated on. The trajectory of an idea can be readily traced and understood simply because we have drawn together a collection of individual works that can be called upon in the form of our archive.   All credit goes to Mark Titmarsh for his astute and perceptive knowledge of the evolution and history of screen culture through the eras.  And this is largely because he lived, both as an artist and academic, through those three decades, and knows the field intimately.  But how do you translate that ‘lived’ experience into a ‘user’ experience of the same body of work?

SynCity was the first of what we hope is a series of curated exhibitions and publications, based on the contents of the archive.  For us, its purpose was to illustrate the wealth and significance of the work of the artists our organisation has presented over the past 25 years, and make it tangible and accessible to contemporary audiences.  What was very interesting for us was that it did more than introduce younger audiences to historical works, it very successfully introduced the older practitioners to what the younger artists and filmmakers are doing now, and the connectedness of these successive generations.  The role of the curator in this process as the guide, or the pathfinder, or interface is paramount, because of their knowledge.  But for us working with a collection of raw and disparate material, how do you identify a coherent path in an online environment and negotiate a meaningful route through such a complex terrain without having lived through three decades on the leading edge of what is still regarded as fringe or niche practice?

It’s only when you can see the whole and get a sense of the evolution that so much of the work, which at the time seemed obscure or difficult, can be understood as being extremely valuable and influential in shaping contemporary practice and ideas.

If you can imagine an international network of such databases, where curatorial enquiry around themes such as sample culture can be developed within a global collection, the possibilities of new projects are extraordinary.   Ideally, works people search for can be viewed, grouped and selected with the facility that the Internet affords.

Building international databases
Video culture is by nature international and this conference raises the possibility of a deep level of collaboration and the potential to create a network of information, resources and the capability for data retrieval and viewing.  While the Australian scene is relatively small, it’s a necessary component.  But a number of practical challenges we are confronted with we need to collectively addressed.

Intellectual property and the right to present, but not download, these works is a key concern.  Because of the longevity of our organisation, which predates the world wide web, securing permissions to put early works online is not really feasible.  For one, we don’t necessarily have contact with the artists, and the contracts under which the work was originally presented do not include license to put it online.   There are so many issues that require sensitive and deft handling.  We are committed to an ethical treatment of the artists whom we have been privileged to present over the years, and while we believe having a great online database of works is in the public interest, not all the artists, for their own reasons might agree to have their early works presented again in that context.

Another point to be considered is one of revenues to the artists. At d/Lux/MediaArts we have a policy of paying all the artists we present an exhibition fee.  Needless to say in this instance, while tracking the number of views of each works is easy, the costs associated would be prohibitive.  Which leads us to the discussion of the development of legislations around the world dealing with fair use and fees imposed on Internet presentation of original works.  This is a hot issue in online music and Internet radio right now, and has affected small, experimental radio Internet broadcasters who cannot survive with the imposition of commercial regimes, which were aimed at getting revenues to the authors, and unwittingly crush out the most innovative and pioneering content creators.  We know that at some point, we will ourselves have new legislative regimes put in place, which will render what we are doing either illegal or unaffordable.  What we are trying to do is of public benefit, and while we are interested in some revenue returns or at least a cost recovery model, to enable us to continue to maintain and manage a good quality online database and resource, we can foresee difficulties ahead.

Should we be able to engineer structures and practices that make the initiative viable and extract the benefits that online publishing affords, then other possibilities abound, and ought to be pursued.

The value in this grouping of curators at this conference, the sharing of our knowledge, experience and objectives, is a given.  And the initiative Loop has demonstrated in bringing together such an international perspective is impressive and timely.  The pace, ease and accessibility of current online technologies to deliver screen based media to desktops around the world is breathtaking, but a considered approach to how we, as custodians of such a culturally important repository of video works, undertake to chart a future whereby more people can engage and enjoy the whole history of video art is a significant responsibility.

d/Lux/MediaArts is committed to and will realize the second phase and ongoing development of d/Archive, understanding that a part of the future is firmly rooted in the past.  While our contemporary culture insists on and is obsessed with ‘what is new’, we need to counter this cultural amnesia and make relevant our collective histories.

Totally Busted: Do We Need a YouTube for Video Art?

Totally Busted: Do We Need a YouTube for Video Art?

Paper by Ross Rudesch Harley

presented at Video Art Archive Network Forum
Gallery Loop, Yonsei University
Seuol, Korea Nov 8-9, 2007

Ross Rudesch Harley is an artist, writer, and lecturer in the field of new media and popular culture. Publications include New Media Technologies, Aviopolis: A Book About Airports (with Gillian Fuller) and the catalogue An Eccentric Orbit: Electronic Media Art in Australia (with Peter Callas). He is currently working on the history of video art in Sydney with video-artist John Gillies. His own personal archive of videos and writings can be fond at stereopresence.com

“Where can I see more video art like this?” It was an innocent enough question, but the assembled panel of experts looked dumbfounded. Leipzig curator Jeanette Stoschek had just shown hours of “illegal” videos compiled from Germany in the 1980s and 90s; Christian Jankowski had presented an amazing array of his most inventive videos from the past six years; and I had just shown some equally brilliant recent work by Australian remix artists SodaJerk and Ms & Mr. Could they really be asking for more?

Yet this simple question, posed by an inquisitive student during a recent conference entitled “Video Histories and Futures” held at the University of New South Wales’ College of Fine Art in Sydney earlier this year, remained unanswered.

What she was really asking was where she could go to find more work like this after the event. Sure she could wait for the next video forum (whenever that might be) or travel to Documenta, or even New York: but was that the only option she had? Why couldn’t she see more of this work on YouTube?

She has a point. While the history of video art is presently being be re-told in books and journals, and its presentation in museums and art events is more widespread than ever, video art remains something of an oddity in the current networked media world. As interest in the past and present of video art increases, for some it remains almost as difficult to access and view today as it was in the 1970s. If you can’t access a reasonable viewing copy of a work online, what chance is there of tracking down a copy anywhere else?

Of course it’s not going to stay that way for much longer. The efforts of organizations like Montevideo in Amsterdam, the Video Data Bank in Chicago and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York have championed the collection and distribution of artist’s works for decades. It is thanks to their efforts that many video works have any distribution at all, and that more and more artists’ videos find their way into more general circulation. Recent moves to make parts of their collections available online (ie “A Kinetic History: EAI Archives Online” and “REWIND | Artists’ Video Collection” at the Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts and CARTE in central London) point towards a future where archives will become less repositories for dead content and more like a living, expanding database that will link past and future media arts.
Individual mavericks such as Jonas Mekas are also establishing the presentation of their ouevres online, and sites such as UbuWeb provide an ever-expanding assortment of digital files of hard-to-see material by key avant garde film and video makers. UbuWeb insists that the digital videos on the site are presented for educational and non-commercial use only and that copyright of artists is respected. Thought this may not be altogether entirely legal it’s hard to argue against the fact that

“most of us don’t live anywhere near theatres that show this kind of fare and very few of us can afford the hefty rental fees, not to mention the cumbersome equipment, to show these films. Thankfully, there is the internet which allows you to get a whiff of these films regardless of your geographical location. We realize that the films we are presenting are of poor quality. It’s not a bad thing; in fact, the best thing that can happen is that seeing a crummy shockwave file will make you want to make a trip to New York to the Anthology Film Archives or the Lux Cinema in London (or other places around the world showing similar fare). Next best case scenario will be that you will be enticed to purchase a high quality DVD from the noble folks trying to get these works out into the world. Believe me, they’re not doing it for the money. Please support these filmmakers and their distributors by purchasing their films. Please support the presenters of these works by going to see them in theatres whenever you can.” (www.ubu.com/film)

While not everyone is in agreement with this free-wheeling approach to copyright, there is something about the open and expansive spirit of projects like this one that makes it hard to deny the value of ad-hoc online video archives such as this. As Lawrence Lessig would have it, the more you share something the more valuable it becomes. UbuWeb is more than mere promotion for artist’s work: it is indeed a global digital distribution outlet that increases the cultural value of work included on the site.

When artists first took to making video in the 1960s, its radical form and function was often predicated on the ease of access to the means of production. For a couple of thousand dollars anybody could buy a portapak and start making videos. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? As Kate Horsfield recently reminds us in “Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art”, groups such as the Radical Software collective of the 1970s saw beyond this to another immense shift in political and cultural power:

“Power is no longer measured in land, labor, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) are in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed. Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process.” [empahasis added] (Horsfield, p9)

We have to remind ourselves that this was written in 1970, to remember that the radical approach to the emergence of the “information society” has been a long time coming. In the 1970s and 80s, it was the one-way Tube of commercial mainstream television that had to be busted by video art practice. And while the dissemination of video art in alternate information structures has certainly been growing and transforming over the past thirty years, distribution and exhibition have remained the Achilles heel of all video art movements.
Make as many videos as you like, but who was going to keep them and where could you show them? The rise of the video festival circuit and the organizations devoted to the preservation and distribution of video art made perfect sense in this context. But despite all these valiant efforts to distribute alternative videos by alternate means, their impact has been necessarily stunted by the physicality of the networks. The video image may have been wrenched from its commercial televisual framework, but the objects [tapes] and viewing contexts remained. All that is now changing.

Which brings me to my question: Do we need a YouTube for video art? If the old Tube has been totally busted by the spread of do-it-yourself video, is it now time to design and implement an alternative distribution infrastructure for video artists?

By asking this I don’t mean to suggest that we actually use the proprietary service (quite the contrary), but that we respond to the conditions surrounding the rise of YouTube, today’s most popular video service on the web. According to Greg Sterling of the Search Engine Journal, YouTube presently contains 6.1 million videos with 1.73 billion total views taking up an estimated 45 terabytes of storage. Almost 70% of the online population has watched online video and the average consumer watches 73 minutes of online video a month. How many people came to your last video festival screening?

My question is really to ask what would it mean to put this model of user-generated content and distributed viewing, and exhibition networks in the service our institutional and individual video art projects?

What would happen if we could dynamically bring together our geographically distant and fragmentary histories of video art using the participatory and user-centric technologies of the peer-to-peer web? Perhaps the internet can offer new possibilities for stitching these “immaterialities” together into new relations in a rmashable, hyperlinked, electronic universe. Under such conditions, isn’t it possible to create, not a unified giant that takes ownership and control, but a multi-way read-write web of connections, links, videos, writing, biographical data, images, comments, debate and other important documents?

Unlike physical archives that must house objects and place them in a single location (an object can’t be in two places at once), digital archives don’t need physical space. They need server space. They chew bandwidth. Driven by metadata that allows an enormous amount of flexibility for classifying, sorting and browsing, these digital “objects” (ie video) can exist in many places (by way of hyperlinks) and in many categories and subcategories at once (by way of tags and folksonomies). Videotapes and DVDs, along with index cards and library stacks, just can’t do that.

The explosion of video on the web also coincides with a renewed interest in the re-tracing and re-telling of the history of video from different perspectives to the North American-European axis which has tended to have a monopoly on the grand narrative of video art. We are all familiar with the official accounts of well-known global celebrities, founding fathers, protagonists, subcultural groups and influential organisations that form important nodes in the Bigger Story of Video Art. But the problem with these histories is that they’re often monolithic and bounded by national boundaries. They miss the large waves of video art activity happening everywhere all at once all around the world. They leave no room for contestation. Forty odd years after the emergence of video art, it’s only natural that people everywhere would want to account for their own particular local history and to want to relate it to the broader history. As those early video tapes begin to disintegrate, the imperative to collect, preserve and interpret this output becomes more pressing. The need to tell the stories surrounding the making and circulation of these tapes becomes even more compelling.

A number of isolated projects are emerging spontaneously form their own unique conditions of existence. There are groups in Brazil, Australia, Japan, Hungary, Germany, Holland, France, Canada, the US and the UK working on their own local histories, many of which challenge and supplement the dominant histories of video art. And while conferences such as this one (together with the Refresh conference in Banff in 2005 or the Future History of the Moving Image symposium in the UK late 2007) seek to make links across the boundaries of national histories, our projects remain fragmented, disconnected and looking very much like unconnected silos — not because we want them that way, but as a result of our of pre-information society organisational structures and distribution infrastructures.

We are presently witnessing the long process of transition from the world of atoms to the world of bits. Photo agencies are being superseded by flickr; the BBC film and video collection has morphed into BBC online; the Getty Research Institute is adopting the Long Beach Museum video art collection and giving it a home in its archive; the famous Bettman photographic collection is being challenged by the digital management systems of Corbis or GettyImages; and as web pundits are fond of reminding us, Encyclopedia Brittanica is being given more than a run for its money by Wikipedia.

So how might all these things come together in the age of peer-to-peer networks and the sharing of digital files across time and space? Videos circulate and are remixed, mashed up and broadcast over the web at an ever-increasing rate. They are being blown-up, torn apart, ripped, mixed and burned to such an extent that there is no going back. Images and sounds are coming unstuck, opening up a new space for the renegotiation of their associated history, archival context, and critical commentary. And in the process, innovative new ways of making, exhibiting, circulating, annotating and supplementing digital video works are emerging.

If the old televisual models have indeed been totally busted by the movement towards user-generated video inaugurated by video art of the 1960s, then I’m going to propose that we continue this process and hack the archives and the histories we are responsible for. I want to propose a Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) distributed network that allows us to collectively annotate, post, and grow video, new media and electronica cultures.

At the moment, John Gillies are starting out with a small node: “Sydney Video Art From UBU to iSlacks”. We are working with the existing dLux media archive and aiming to transform it by adding newly found historical video materials, and to blend it with the existing collection. dLux is neither an archive or a distributor of videos. They exhibit and promote media arts by regular workshops, screenings and inventive new programs ranging from mobile phones to SecondLife. Our project is to create a searchable database that can grow into a media-rich, taggable, expandable universe. This model is predicated on our initial research and input, but it is also designed to allow for user input and user-generated content to take over the site. From our small node, we want to link outwards and across to The Future Histories of the Moving Image group in the UK, Monash University’s Australian Vide Art Archive, the Perpetual Art machine project, The VDB in Chicago, 253 Media in Cologne, Griffith Artworks in Brisbane, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, the National Archives in Canberra, PICA in Perth, EAF in Adelaide, and other relatively small cultural organizations with an interest in the legacy and continuing transformation of video cultures in the network age.

It is clear from this brief description that we are not talking about replicating YouTube, with its restrictive user agreements and monolithic structure. Whatever the platform is for our new model, we need to link it, open it up, blow it apart — as that’s what is necessary to avoid the creation of yet another proprietary walled garden and individualised silo.

Beyond the restrictions of YouTube, a large number of internet TV models are implementing a wide variety of promising alternatives for a very different approach to the digital networking of video. One of the most important of these is the Participatory Culture Foundation, a non-profit organization whose mission is to enable and support independent, non-corporate creativity and political engagement. Its primary project is a free and open-source internet television platform called Miro (previously known as Democracy Player). On May 29, 2007, the Mozilla Foundation announced that it had awarded PCF a grant to continue their work on its open-source video projects. Miro is the PCF’s core project — a free open-source desktop video application designed to make mass media more open and accessible for everyone. There are a number of obvious links that can be drawn between the aims of those involved with Radical Software in the 1970s:

“Television is the most popular medium in our culture. But broadcast and cable TV has always been controlled by a small number of big corporations. We believe that the internet provides an opportunity to open television in ways that have never been possible before. Miro is designed to eliminate gatekeepers. Viewers can connect to any video provider that they want. This frees creators to use the video hosting setup that works best for them — whether they choose to self-publish or use a service. It’s the kind of openness that the internet allows and that we should all demand.” [emphasis added] (participatoryculture.org)

If just a few companies such as YouTube dominate online video, creativity will be restricted by their corporate terms and conditions of use. If the most popular video tools rely on closed, proprietary distribution systems, creativity and innovation will suffer. Internet video platforms like Miro are specifically designed to give video creators and viewers more freedom in the way they aggregate, browse and distribute video. Because it is open, it works with as many video hosting sites and video search engines as possible. Rather than being forced to use a few monopolistic services, the developers of platforms such as Miro believe that the future of media depends on creators being able to choose the publishing services that work best for them.

A number of other projects are worthy of mention here, including Wikimedia, OurMedia, Archive.org, Joost, BlipTV, Metacafe and OhTV. Another is Videoart.net, which highlights the problem of the intersection between local and international concerns. Founded by video artists and filmmakers based in New York City, Videoart.net provides a searchable online archive and connects artists with curators, producers, and the public. The Videoart.net archive is open to all genres, from short films, video installations to interviews. We could well adopt their mission as our own:

* To establish an international hub of video artists, filmmakers and audiences.

* To expand video arts into public spaces accessible to a wider audience.

* To create an online community of filmmakers and artists.

If we can imagine a growing collection of digitised work with large “metadatabases” and tag clouds associated with the collection, we start to see how we can preserve, distribute and contextualise video art material in a recombinatory history/archive project. Using web interfaces we can sort, aggregate and recombine elements into multiple histories and new relations. In order to achieve this we need to use new tools that help us grasp the power of the growing digital disorder.

Project Gutenberg (a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works) has done something similar to this in the realm of literature. Founded in 1971, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are complete texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. Unlike some other digital library projects, Project Gutenberg does not claim new copyright on titles it publishes. Instead, it encourages their free reproduction and distribution. Since December 2006, Project Gutenberg has more than 20,000 items in its collection, with an average of over fifty new e-books being added each week.

Perhaps a similar distributed network of intelligence can be initiated for international video art. While there is clearly a need to address questions of rights (Creative Commons style), value (originals and copies don’t make any sense in the digital world, but in the artworld they do), and governance, success in other fields of endeavour suggest that these obstacles are surmountable. Indeed, the active negotiation of these issues has led to the most successful and innovative systems of the moment (think no further than Wikipedia and YouTube).

So the answer to my question is clear. Although YouTube has offered us a glimpse into the possibilities of globally distributed user-generated video networks, it also alerts us to the issues that video artists have been challenging for decades. As a loosely connected network of interested curators, researchers and artists, we have a powerful new means of distribution at our disposal.

The Tube has been totally busted by video art and user-generated content. Now we just need to re-make our own.

Sydney October 2008

References

Kate Horsfield, “Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art”, in Horsfield, K and Hilderbrand, L, (eds) Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalogue of Video Art an Artist Interviews, Temple university Press, Philadelphia, 2006.

Video Art Archive Network

Today, 9 November 2007 at the Gallery Loop in Seoul, Korea, we started this blog for artists, researchers, and organisations interested in linking and sharing information and media relating to video art in the past present and future.