[-empyre-] Some muse-threads on video hystories

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Dear Empyre,

When discussing possibilities for discussion on -empyre-, last January, I
wrote joncates this message

>I was struck last week when chatting over drinks with a wonderful young art
>student from uc berkeley by her comment that 'since video has no history..'
>etc. realizing that this is so so important and that it is not necessarily
>an obvious point even to such bright students.
Interestingly, the student said that was why she liked working in video,
because 'it has no history'.  She implied it was free and playful because of
this condition.   What is 'nohistory/knowhistory'....

Sherry Miller Hocking,  again:

> The canons of electronic cinema/media history are few. They are by
> definition limited - in perspective and in information. And because original
> and primary source materials are almost impossible to access,  these few
> texts are adopted by academia and the art worlds as "truth". I believe that
> they are instead A truth, filtered by authors, authorities. One of the goals
> of the Video History Project is to enable people to post personal
> recollections, most of which do not exist in the historical record. Multiple
> authors, authorities.

And joncates wrote to me recently....


>I think there are several strands that are interesting, one is the origins
>issue, and another has to do with digital video as a recombinant technology

One of the matters most crucial to me as an artist, and I think to many who
work across modernist media and methods and the digital, this month, is the
possibility of  recombinant[+/or] hybridized theorypraxis.

Working in dv, I find that the neodada and fluxus streams looping in from
Nam Jun Paik and others many of whom, including Paik, were (are) involved
with Sherry's Experimental Television Center; these flow through my sense of
form and the desire to bring the work into non 'art' environs where it can
be re experienced, maybe even recombinent, like in a live open vj situation
in a club setting --

Perhaps what the Berkeley student may have meant, was that to her way of
thinking, there is no canon of video history in the sense of the white cube/


Criticalartware and the Video History Project stay true to the neoavantgarde
impulse described here by Martha Rosler, just quoted (thanks!) by JWL.

> 
> "Not only a systemic but also a utopian critique was implicit in video's
> early use, for the effort was not to enter the system but to transform
> every aspect it and - legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde project -
> to redefine the system out of existence by merging art with social life
> and making audience and producer interchangeable." - MR

Christina




  Slipstream transmedias : soundart performance cinema installation
architectures network theory


<www.christinamcphee.net>
<www.naxsmash.net>
<www.naxsmash.net/inscapes>