{"id":5544,"title":"Video: State of the Art","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-state-art","version":"ad65aec8feab029a294432b89e4eee1f5ac287f1ee0eff2ac131d52ea6deaa38","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4373176+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Johanna Gill"}],"authorKeys":["Gill, Johanna"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Working Papers, The Rockefeller Foundation","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0366","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Video: State of the Art.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-state-art.","publication":"Johanna Gill. Video: State of the Art. Working Papers, The Rockefeller Foundation. 1976.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5544.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0366","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":115479},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":418},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":574},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0366","generated":false,"characters":423}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"TABLE OF CONTENTS: Preface Introduction Historical Notes Individuals and Small Groups The Centers-Selected People and Situations Southern California: TVTV and Long Beach The Bay Area: San Francisco, Berkeley, Santa Clara Seattle Dallas Minneapolis Halifax Toronto New York State New York City PREFACE Human beings seem constantly to be hunting for knowledge about their world-- the world without and within the body. Art seems to be the exchanging of information, sometimes specifically referring to food, shelter and protection of self, family and clan, sometimes referring to inner states of consciousness, emotions, attitudes. As the messages are varied, so are the forms. New forms often impart freshness to messages as old as time. There is diversity in human experience and there is a unity throughout it. The tension between the \u0022e pluribus\u0022 and the \u0022unum\u0022 is the spring that presses the pendulum on. Art gives us one way to see ourselves and our world, our unity and our diversity. In the new holism of the 1970\u0027s, a fusion has taken place in the arts that emphasizes the organic or functional relation between parts and the whole. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of the small but growing body of artists working in television who call themselves \u0022video artists.\u0022 Under that banner march conceptual and applied artists whose works combine the fixed, plastic arts with the time-span performing arts in an electronic medium whose space defies limitation: a television screen can contain millions of points of light to etch the picture of a thumb or the world itself from outer space. And it defies gravity as film does in that its laws need not affect the images being presented. The artists use a new form to tell us of ourselves in new ways. The Rockefeller Foundation has been fortunate in being able to help these artists develop this new art form by assisting individuals and, perhaps as importantly, by making places where artists could work at their ideas. The struggle for world domination has been a common theme in our time. One form of domination is cultural, and in that it embodies a world of ideas and concepts that can be influential and threatening to a status quo, it may be the most important form. Such domination of world culture has fallen to the United States whose music, dances and dress are accepted by large populations in addition to their own around the world. Just as popular aspects of culture have spread American values and concepts abroad, so the arts, and especially those forms which are uniquely American, infiltrate foreign lands and minds and produce a spread--for better or worse--of Americanization. This has begun to happen already within the narrow field of video art. The artists, whose work is described in this Working Paper, therefore, constitute a new embassy on behalf of American culture. It is a grass roots elite grown from all regions of America and including expatriots from other countries. Their holistic message to our time is pertinent, moving, and stems from a deep concern with understanding what it is to be human, living in Marshall McLuhan\u0027s global village, looking ahead to an abyss or a new high plateau of civilization. This report \u0022Video: State of the Art\u0022 is an account of some of the things that are under way in video art. Johanna Gill, who recently completed her Ph.D. dissertation in video art at Brown University, and teaches 20th century art history at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, visited and documented the world of video, artist by artist, city by city, in the United States and Canada. -Howard Klein Director for Arts The Rockefeller Foundation June 1976 INTRODUCTION \u0022Video was the most shared, the most democratic art form...Everybody believed deeply that he had invented feedback. Feedback was invented simultaneously not by five people, like electricity, but by five thousand.\u0022-Woody Vasulka When one begins to think about video, it is important to keep in mind its immense flexibility as a medium. It is not only TV, the standard piece of American living room furniture, it is also a material for making electronic graphics, the surveillance system in the neighborhood supermarket, the training tool that shows all too instantly what kind of teacher or tennis player you are, and a means of documenting almost anything from the SLA burnout in Los Angeles to a grandmother\u0027s memories of her childhood. In other words, the video world is much larger than the art world, and people who make video art may have very diverse backgrounds in the medium. Consequently, the term \u0022video art\u0022 does not describe any single unified style; it indicates a shared medium. Most video art-making began in 1968 and 1969. The social and artistic ferment of those years had a great deal to do with the way the medium was first used. Nineteen sixty-eight also marks a technical watershed: it was the year portable, relatively inexpensive television equipment came on the market, thus opening the medium to vast new group of people. Although these people were interested in the equipment for many different reasons, most of them shared an acute dissatisfaction with broadcast television. They were unhappy with the monolithic nature of TV, with the control of three major networks, with the quality of programming--the lack of diverse content and the routine visual sameness of it all. This reaction against broadcast television is usually discernible in much early video. Some experimenters took their new light cameras out into the streets and to the countryside, recording people and social situations broadcast TV never would have bothered with. This group of people was concerned with exploring as rich an array of subjects as possible. They felt broadcast TV had developed bland programming in an effort to offend as few people as possible, attract high ratings, and thus command higher prices for advertising time. The alternative television people were not supported by advertising; they didn\u0027t care about ratings. They were free to focus their cameras on anything, even things that would interest only the people living in a single neighborhood. Others were concerned with electronics research and development. These people considered it ridiculous that the perfect television image was thought to be the smooth, glowing pink face of Walter Cronkite. Some of these experimenters come from a strong twentieth-century graphic tradition of exploration with light imagery going back at least as far as the Futurists and the Bauhaus. Those who had been looking for a medium of moving, colored light were overjoyed to find that television could produce abstract images as easily as it could transmit a newscaster\u0027s face. Some members of this group built new electronic circuitry to produce different imagery. These people are among the real pioneers of the medium; they are fascinated with the role technology plays in our society and are constantly searching for new ways to make this role visually manifest. They feel that the structure of electronic tools reflects as well as informs our thinking, and by using tools that produce visual patterns, they hope to reveal to us our social and technological directions. Still another group was reacting against the one-directional flow of broadcast TV, which streams day after day into the homes of millions of people without providing the means for them to speak back equally directly. They pointed out that we have only receivers in our homes, not transmitters, and sometimes these people set up small, closed-circuit environments that contained both cameras and monitors. Often the earliest such environments held banks of monitors; one could see one\u0027s own image (being picked up by cameras in the room) on monitors next to others showing programs coming off the air. In this manner, a viewer could explore the idea that his or her image was as interesting as that of a quiz-show personality. Many of those who created environments were fundamentally interested in the nature of visual and aural information, in how we receive and digest it, and in how it affects us, both consciously and unconsciously. During the time this reaction against broadcast television was going on (1967-1970), the established art world was facing some challenges of its own. Many artists found that the traditions of painting and, sculpture had arrived at a critical cul-de-sac, and they were searching for other means of expression. In addition, the commercial art world was in the midst of escalating prices and wild buying, a situation further confused by a prevailing indecisiveness about the relative merits of different kinds of art. One result of this atmosphere of some artists against the production of art to work in nonbuyable, nonpossessable media, to free themselves from the art market as it was then functioning. Consequently, there was an explosion of new kinds of art, most of them either variations on performance, theater, and dance, or mechanically reproducible art forms such as photography, film, and video. Video fell into this art world very neatly. It could be used to record all kinds of performances and actions, enabling them to be repeated again and again. It could be either abstract or representative in its imagery (it was not inherently one or the other), and so sidestepped certain critical dilemmas. A few galleries and museums began to collect tapes, hire curators, and organize exhibitions. The following discussion is not a comprehensive history of the first years of interest in video as a creative medium, but is rather an attempt to chart some of the ways the energy has flowed, and to introduce a few of the more interesting people and situations. In general, one might say that art-making has occurred in three areas of video activity--these are arbitrary divisions, but are useful descriptively. One is the aforementioned realm of electronics research and development. Because of its roots in other twentieth century graphic traditions, this is often the work most accessible to people first looking at the medium. Examples include the famous \u0022synthesizer\u0022 tapes and special effects graphics of many kinds. A second area of activity has been documentary, an area that is currently interesting historians and critics of photography and film as well. The third area is probably the most complex. It includes performances, conceptual work, and what may be called information perception pieces. This group includes both video tapes and live video installations that in some way expand the limits of the viewer\u0027s ability to perceive himself or herself in a technologically charged environment. HISTORICAL NOTES Individuals and Small Groups A few rumblings in the early sixties anticipated the general eruption of interest in the medium later in the decade. Nam June Paik is probably the most famous and certainly one of the most interesting members of the movement; his work is a collage of all three divisions of video activity. He was born in Korea and was educated in Japan and Germany where he studied philosophy and music. By his own estimate, he has given over 100 performances, which reflect his interest in avant-garde music (John Cage is a major influence) and the Fluxus movement. His first exhibition of television was in Germany in 1963, in which he showed television sets whose off-the-air images were distorted. By 1965, Paik had moved to New York and was having exhibitions here. His work takes many forms--video performances and video installations as well as video tapes--and shows his interest in process rather than product; the new often has elements carried forward from the old. Paik has always been on the outer fringes of the movement technically. In 1965, he bought one of Sony\u0027s first portable video tape recorders and displayed tapes the same night. He was the co developer, with Shuya Abe, of one of the first video synthesizers. Several people were working on synthesizers in 1968 and 1969 and each machin","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":115479,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}