Four prepared pianos, mechanized sound objects, several record-player and audio-tape installations, twelve modified television sets, a freshly slaughtered ox head, etc. form the expansive environment. Although video technology is yet to be employed, Paik’s first-ever presentation of his manipulated televisions, distorting the image of the screened television program, is today thought to mark the birth of video art.

With the film Sun in Your Head, Vostell translates the principle of dé-coll/age to the moving image. Because there is no video technology available in 1963, the cameraman Edo Jansen films distorted television images from a screen. The film is reedited in 1967 and copied onto a video format. The first screening takes place at the Yam Festival, May 19, 1963, held on a farm in South Brunswick, New Jersey, and organized by the Smolin Gallery. The second screening is part of the happening 9 Nein Dé-coll/agen on September 14, 1963, in cooperation with Galerie Parnass.

In Understanding Media, his best-known work, McLuhan proposes that the medium itself needs to be examined and not the subject matter it conveys, encapsulated in the motto: The medium is the message. It is not the content conveyed by a medium that has an impact on society but rather the very characteristics of the medium.

Nam June Paik is regarded as the first buyer of the Sony Portapak, the first portable video recorder. The first video work, which has not survived, is a recording of Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York on October 4, 1965, which is shown on the same evening at Café au GoGo. In 1986, Siegfried Zielinski demonstrated that Paik actually must have used the Sony CV-2000/TCV-2010 video camera, a combination of recorder, camera, and monitor, because the Portapak was in fact first introduced to the US market in 1967.

In 1963, Andy Warhol obtains his first film camera. In 1965, Tape Recording magazine invites Warhol to experiment with some of the first video cameras available on the US market: a Norelco slant-track video recorder, a remote-control television camera with a zoom lens, and a Concord MTC 11 handheld video camera with a zoom lens. With this equipment, he makes two thirty-minute tapes of Edie Sedgwick. He incorporates the tapes of Sedgwick into Outer and Inner Space (1965), his first double-projection film.

This festival of electronic and interactive performances and happenings was developed in cooperation between artists and engineers from Bell Labs and led to the founding of E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology. Initiators are Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver. The main technological element in the performances is the electronic modulation system TEEM, which is made up of transportable electronic units without any cables, which are remote-controlled. The nine evenings of performances feature John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Merce Cunningham, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor, and Robert Whitman.

The “Experimental Television Workshop” KQED-TV is directed by Brice Howard and Paul Kaufman and established with a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. In 1969, it is renamed the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. The program ends in 1976.

WGBH-TV inaugurates an artist-in-residence program with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. “What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?” is an experimental collage/ information series in which several dozen inputs are mixed live and at random.

Ant Farm, founded in San Francisco in 1968, is a group of visionary architects who are also active as video, performance, and installation artists. Founding members are Doug Michels, Chip Lord, and Curtis Schreier. Their role models are avant-garde architects like Richard Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, and the British architect team Archigram. Ant Farm disbands after a serious fire in their studio in 1978.

Cybernetic Serendipity is the first large international exhibition of electronic, cybernetic, and computer art. The principal idea is to examine the role of cybernetics in contemporary arts. The exhibition includes robots, poetry, music, and painting machines, as well as all sorts of works where chance is an important ingredient.

Flyer for Intermedia ’68, 1968, courtesy of BAM Hamm Archiv

The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) funds experimental media artists as part of Intermedia ’68, a theater workshop at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Projects include environmental video performances, film projections, and videotapes by Aldo Tambellini, Nam June Paik, Les Levine, Carolee Schneemann, Terry Riley, Dick Higgins, Ken Dewey, USCO, and others.

The history of video in Japan begins with a 1968 event called Say Something Now, I’m Looking for Something to Say, organized in Tokyo by the critic Yoshiaki Tono with the artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi. Yamaguchi, long interested in new media, covered his paintings in the early 1950s with lenses that turned them into refracted images that shifted as the viewer moved. He applies the same treatment to video monitors.

The television gallery is one of the most important artist projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Underpinning the television exhibitions LAND ART and IDENTIFICATIONS, created in cooperation with Ursula Wevers and broadcast on the West German public television station ARD in 1969 and 1970 respectively, is the idea of moving away from presenting a conventional art program and producing instead artworks conceived and realized especially for showing on television. Because the conception of the television gallery ultimately runs counter to the objective of the mass medium itself, namely to address a wide audience, the cooperation breaks down after just two projects. The gallery is closed in 1970.

Black Gate Cologne is considered to be the first television show realized by visual artists. In a WDR studio (at the invitation of Werner Höfer and Wibke von Bonin), several cameras are used to record a live event with audience participation. The image and sound material is electronically condensed, with a 23-minute version broadcast on WDR on January 26, 1969.

Time Delay Room #7, performed by Dan Graham in the cafeteria of the Antwerp International Cultural Center (ICC) on May 23, 1975, at the opening of the exhibition Dan Graham. V.I.D.E.O. Environments and Actions, © ICC Archive, M HKA Antwerp

The ICC is the first institution of contemporary art in Flanders. It is founded in the afterbirth of museum contestation and closes in 1998 when museums of contemporary art become an established fact. During the seventies and the early eighties, the ICC is an intermediary between a progressive art praxis and the ill-at-ease public, as well as an alternative platform for the production and the presentation of recent conceptual art, installations, video, happening and performance. The I.C.C. in its initial period can be seen as the immediate precursor of M HKA.

This seminal exhibition heralds a burgeoning development that comes to be known as “video art.” The first exhibition in the United States devoted to video, TV as a Creative Medium signals radical changes, inspiring a generation of artists to take up video and provoking commentary that extends well beyond the channels of art discourse. Among the twelve artists in the show are Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman, Paul Ryan, Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette, and Eric Siegel.

Paul Vogt, Dieter Honisch, Gerhard von Graevenitz, and Willfried Litke (director of the video studio) in the video studio at Museum Folkwang, 1975, © Museum Folkwang

By setting up an editing studio, the Folkwang in Essen becomes the first German museum to also be a location for producing video. Equipped with modern technology, the studio is also designed to serve research purposes: Cooperating with artists, scientists, and educators, with tertiary, culture, and research institutions, the studio investigates the possibilities and limits of electromagnetic image recording, or videotape. The idea is to lay the groundwork for introducing video technology into the museum itself. The studio closed in 1994. Today, the productions are digitized and processed. The exhibition Video Vision. Studiojahre 1969–1994 (2012–13) is the first presentation of the collection and recalls the beginnings of the video studio and the media experiments of the 1970s and 80s. The selection shows video works by artists produced in the Folkwang studio. A second presentation follows in 2013, Video Studio II. Licht im Schatten.

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, The Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the US. WGBH commissions artists—Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini—to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explore the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture. Produced by Fred Barzyk, Anne Gresser, and Pat Marx.

The Raindance Foundation is founded in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg, Louis Jaffe, and Marco Vassi. It is a self-described “alternate culture think-tank” that embraces video as an alternative form of cultural communication. Influenced by the communication theories of McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, the collective produces a databank of tapes and writings that explore the relations between cybernetics, media, and ecology. From 1970 to 1974, Raindance publishes Radical Software. In 1976, Raindance members Schneider and Korot edit Video Art: An Anthology. The original Raindance collective disperses in the mid-1970s.

Videofreex, founded in 1969 by David Cort, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, and Parry Teasdale, is a pioneering video collective that uses the Sony Portapak for countercultural video projects from 1969 to 1978. In 1972, they launch the first pirate television station, Lanesville TV, using a transmitter given to them by Abbie Hoffman, to turn television into a more democratic medium. The Videofreex Archive, containing more than 1,500 original tapes, is housed at the Video Data Bank.

Catalogue cover Castelli-Sonnabend Videotapes and Films, ed. by Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, Inc., Volume I, 1974

The unique anthology of American artist films and videotapes made in the 1960s and 70s is assembled for distribution by the pioneering New York art dealers Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend in the early 1970s. Distribution continued until the early 1990s. Some of the videotapes and films are now distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York, and Video Data Bank, Chicago. Since 1998, the Whitney Museum has been re-assembling “Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films” as a special collection within the museum’s permanent collection. This ongoing project includes the conservation of many works that have not been shown since the 1970s.

The Museum begins to formally acquire video works in the late 1970s, led by former MoMA associate curator Barbara London. To date, the Museum has over 1,600 video works—an astounding collection that documents the history of this medium used in artistic practice from its beginning. In 2007, the first media conservator arrives at MoMA. In 2011, the Museum undertakes a large-scale digitization effort focusing on the analogue videos. During the digitization project, each analogue video work in MoMA’s collection is migrated to a digital video file.

People’s Video Theater, founded by Elliot Glass and Ken Marsh in New York, is an alternative video journalism collective emphasizing community video and political issues. PVT’s use of video as social feedback typically involves carrying Portapaks in the streets of New York City, where they conduct video polls and document public actions. People participating in street tapings would be invited to their video “theater” to watch and discuss the tapes, taking advantage of a kind of immediacy impossible with film.

The first international exhibition to feature video installations is the 10th Tokyo Biennale, with the theme “Between Man and Matter,” organized by the art critic Yusuke Nakahara in 1970. It depicts the discursive engagements between Mono-ha artists like Jiro Takamatsu and Kishio Suga and Western artists like Klaus Rinke and Christo.

Russel Connor curates the first video art exhibition at a US museum. The works featured are by Frank Gillette (Amps, Volts and Watts), Ted Kraynik (Video Luminar #4) , Les Levine (The Dealer), Eugene Mattingly (Fred Helix), Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman (TV Bra for Living Sculpture), Nam June Paik (The 9/23 Experiment, Still Life and Embryo for Wall to Wall TV), John Reilly and Rudi Stern (Innertube), Paul Ryan (Yes/No and Ego Me Absolvo), Ira Schneider (Random Interlace), Eric Siegel (Body, Mind and Video), Aldo Tambellini (Some More Beginnings, Black Spiral and Black TV), Jud Yalkut (Electronic Moon No. 2), USCO/Intermedia (Wave Forms and Tube Stills), Videofreex (Freex Out), and Joe Weintraub (AC/TV).

The Anthology Film Archive opens on November 30, 1970, at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater. The archive evolved from roots and visions that go back to the early 1960s, when Jonas Mekas, the director of the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, a showcase for avant-garde films, dreamed of establishing a permanent home where the growing number of new independent/avant-garde films could be shown on a regular basis. The Archive emerges out of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative founded in 1962 with Emile de Antonio, an association of independent experimental filmmakers that the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque is connected to as a forum for screening experimental films since 1964.

The Lijnbaancentrum (1970–1984) is an exhibition space of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation (RKS) in the center of Rotterdam. It presents exhibitions on art, image, and mass culture that are designed to appeal to a large and diverse audience. The moving image is seen as an indispensable medium for this purpose; therefore, the Lijnbaancentrum is equipped at its launch with a special studio with modern video equipment for recording and editing both monochrome and the recently introduced color video.

The historic video magazine Radical Software is started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appears in spring 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment becomes available to artists and other potential video makers. Radical Software is an important voice of the American video community in the early 70s, the only periodical devoted exclusively to independent video and video art at a time when those subjects are still being invented. Eleven issues are published from 1970 to 1974.

Galerie Yellow Now makes closed-circuit TV available to artists during the month of November, putting a working team at their disposal. The gallery invites artists to send proposals for information processes in general or for spreading information using CCTV, or both. Proposals are submitted by artists including Christian Boltanski, Barbara und Michael Leisgen, Jacques-Louis Nyst, Jacques Charlier, and Jacques Lizène.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue Prospect 71, Projection, ed. by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1971

The exhibition sees itself as an international preview of art shown in avant-garde galleries. The media featured are photography, slides, film, and video. With: Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, and Keith Sonnier. Galleries involved include: Art Intermedia (Cologne), Leo Castelli (New York), and Schum (Düsseldorf).

Steina and Woody Vasulka open The Kitchen, an alternative center for video art, music, and performance, located in the former kitchen of the Mercer Art Center in Greenwich Village. The Vasulkas are themselves regarded as pioneers of video art.

The founding of the Video-Forum is the basis for the oldest public video collection in Germany. One of its main missions is to conserve the moving image and keep it accessible for the public by adapting to technical developments. The holdings of the collection are digitized for this purpose and filed, cataloged, and tagged. In 1972, the Videothek n.b.k. is founded, the first video library of its kind in West Germany and West Berlin.

EAI is founded in 1971 as one of the first nonprofit organizations in the United States dedicated to the support of video as an art form. In 1972, EAI opens an editing/post-production facility in response to the need for a creative workspace and equipment access for artists. In 1973, the Artists’ Videotape Distribution Service is founded to answer a need for a new paradigm for the dissemination of artists’ video works, apart from the conventional gallery system. In 1986, the EAI Preservation Program begins to facilitate the restoration and archiving of works in the EAI collection.

Together with Ursula Wevers, Gerry Schum opens a video gallery in Düsseldorf. Up until 1973, they produce and distribute video editions of works by artists from the international avant-garde. The gallery closes in 1973. Undated newsletter put out by the gallery: So far the gallery has transferred films by Beuys, Nauman, Roehr, and Serra into the video system. These tapes are also available in the original film version. Further conversions of films are planned. Some films, for example by Buren, Darboven, Nauman, Rinke, made by the artists without the intention of being converted into the video system, can be screened in the gallery using 16mm, Super 8, and 8mm projectors.

The “New American Filmmakers Series” is curated by David Bienstock with the support of Woody and Steina Vasulka. It is the first major videotape exhibition in a New York City museum. With: Eric Siegl, Dimitri Devyatkin, Richard Felciano, Nam June Paik, and Woody and Steina Vasulka.

1971, the museum director purchases video works by Klaus Rinke and Ulrich Rückriem and from Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers the first two television exhibitions (produced however on 16mm film and later transferred to video). In the late 1970s, further video works are acquired from the Galerie Projektion in Cologne, now operated by Wevers alone. The focus is on works by American artists, including Vito Acconci, Peter Campus, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier. Today the museum has almost the whole palette of works produced and distributed by the two video pioneers Schum and Wevers.

The Artists’ Television Workshop is established through the efforts of Jackie Cassen, Russell Connor, and Nam June Paik, with an initial grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to support experimental projects by independents. New York City mandates public access as part of its cable franchise.

Film class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, photo: Peter Holtfreter

The film class is founded in 1971 as an extension of the theater class, but already becomes an independent group in 1972. The first lecturer is the Danish director Povleson, a Super 8 camera is purchased, and a budget of 7,000 DM is made available. In March 1978, the film class is dissolved per academy senate decree on the grounds that the quality of the artistic works is too low. In the same year, Nam June Paik is appointed chair of sculpture and goes on to teach video for the next seventeen years.

In 1971, David Ross becomes the world’s first video curator at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, and for three years does pioneering curatorial work.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue documenta 5: Befragung der Realität – Bildwelten heute, 1972

Curated by Harald Szeeman, this documenta show is still considered today to have been the most important ever, not least because of the shift in how art is presented. The conventional notion of art is no longer cogent for what is being produced: not only pictures, objects, and spaces are presented as art, but an artwork is now also a performance and a happening, or photographs and videos, circles of stones and discussion spaces. Very few visitors were prepared for what they encountered.

Members of Video Hiroba among them Hakudo Kobayashi (right) and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (left), 1975

In 1972, Michael Goldberg holds his Video Communication Do It Yourself Kit workshop/exhibition in Tokyo. Many of the local artists involved in the show join together and form the group Video Hiroba. A few members jointly purchase a black-and-white consumer video camera. They begin exploring the technical limits of the medium and assist with each other’s projects, which range from formalistic videos to social documentaries. The word “hiroba” means public square, and was chosen to imply public communication or thoroughfare. The original Hiroba members include: Sakumi Hagiwara, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Hakudo Kobayashi, Masao Kamura, Toshio Matsumoto, Shoko Matsushita, Rikuro Miyai, Michitaka Nakahara, Fujiko Nakaya, Yoshiaki Tono, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, and Keigo Yamamoto.

TVTV is a pioneering video collective founded in 1972 by Allen Rucker, Michael Shamberg, Tom Weinberg, Hudson Marquez, and Megan Williams. TVTV pioneers the use of independent video based on wanting to change society and have a good time inventing new and then-revolutionary media, ½” Sony Portapak video equipment, and later embracing the ¾” video format. Shamberg is the author of the video production manual Guerrilla Television (1972). Over the years, more than thirty “guerrilla video” makers participate in TVTV productions.

The establishment of the first video department and continuous video program at any public museum in the United States, in March 1972, comes as a result of James Harithas’s early conversations with Nam June Paik, with Frank Gilette, and later with the museum’s curator of video arts, David Ross. Its basic idea is that of providing artists with access to the form. Ross goes on to develop an exhibition format for video art, a small archive, a community-oriented education program, and an initial plan for promoting the museum’s participation in the cable TV system to be established in Syracuse during the next few years. A substantial donation from the Rosamond Gifford Foundation provides the basic hardware for the department.

From 1972 to 1980, the New York Women’s Video Festival is the primary showcase for work by American woman video makers. This landmark annual event is founded by Steina Vasulka in 1972 to address the dearth of work by women in a video art show she organized at The Kitchen Center for Video and Music in New York earlier that year. The festival is coordinated for the duration of its run by Susan Milano, who travels with it to various national and international venues in Buffalo, San Francisco, Tampa, France, and Belgium.

The exhibition is an overview of current video activity. Fifty-two artists are invited to submit recent tapes for a simultaneous showing on the West Coast, East Coast, and in the Mid-West. The initial exhibition of the 32-hour package is held in spring 1973, followed by exhibitions in Los Angeles and South Carolina. With: Peter Campus, Hermine Freed, and Joan Jonas.

At a conference at Museum Folkwang in Essen held in November 1973, various European culture institutes interested in forming a cooperative for producing videos announce the founding of the VIDEO COOPERATION EUROPÄISCHER KULTURINSTITUTE (VCEK). The goal is to tackle together all the subject-specific, material, and technical problems emerging out of introducing and using video technology in the institutions and their activities, as well as to begin joint production based on the guidelines set out by a program committee. The Folkwang Museum is the initiator, at this point in time already in possession of a fully equipped video studio.

The Western Front is an artist-run center located in Vancouver, Canada. It is founded by eight artists who want to create a space for the exploration and creation of new art forms. It quickly becomes a center for poets, dancers, musicians, and visual artists interested in exploration and interdisciplinary practices. Many of the Western Front’s early works reflect this interdisciplinary ethos, with early influences of Duchampian and Fluxus-based investigations into mail art, telecommunications art, live electronic music, video, and performance art. In 1973, Western Front helps to organize the “Matrix International Video Conference,” the first international video conference.

Catalogue cover The New Television: A Public/Private Art. Essays, Statements, and Videotapes. Based on Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television, ed. by Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, 1977.

This is the first international conference to explore the cultural potential of television and results in the first important book on the video medium as an art form. The concept of the “open circuit” was first articulated in an early manifesto by Nam June Paik. Wolfgang Becker is invited and gives a talk at the first panel discussion.

Cover Video Katalog 1975, Oppenheim Studio Köln, 1974

In October 1974, Ingrid Oppenheim opens a video studio in Cologne with a gallery that develops into the display window and production location of West Germany’s first generation of video artists. Oppenheim focuses her collecting activities on the Cologne-Düsseldorf art scene and its key protagonists: Sigmar Polke, Katharina Sieverding, Ulrike Rosenbach, Imi Knoebel, and Klaus vom Bruch. The collection includes painting, graphic art, photography, objects, and videos by the first generation and every kind of intermediate form imaginable. Today the video collection is located in the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

This is the first comprehensive video art exhibition in Europe, based in part on the exhibition Circuit: A Video Invitational held at the Everson Museum in 1973. The exhibition is accompanied by a 60-minute video catalogue. Along with the thematic complexes of time, perception, logical systems, performance, and film, video makes up a major section of the exhibition. Besides six installations of video spaces and objects by Nam June Paik, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Michael Hayden, Frank Gillette, and Douglas Davis, tapes by ninety-five artists, groups, or institutions from the US and Europe are shown. The third section is given the broad title “Video Activities.”

The Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, Inc., Providence, Rhode Island, USA, c. 1978, pictured from left to right: Alan Powell, Ed Tannenbaum, Dennis Hlynsky, Laurie McDonald, and Robert Jungels. Photo collage by Laurie McDonald.

The Electron Movers is a video artist collective established in 1974 in Providence, Rhode Island, and active through 1979. The group comprises five individuals: Laurie McDonald, Robert and Dorothy Jungels, Alan Powell, and Dennis Hlynsky. Larry Heyl, Philip Palombo, and Ed Tannenbaum later join the group. The Electron Movers explore the intersections of many disciplines, including film/video, music, dance, visual arts, and electrical and optical engineering, challenging established moving image narrative formats in their attempt to explore video as a new language system.

Founded in 1949 by Jacques Ledoux, EXPRMNTL is the first international festival dedicated to experimental film and becomes a meeting place for avant-garde artists. For the fifth and last edition, video art enters the program, with Nam June Paik visiting the Belgian coast to present his installation TV Buddha. With: Peter Campus, Ed Emschwiller, Ernest Gusella, and Steina and Woody Vasulka.

Video Art (exhibition catalogue), 1975, © Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania

ICA exhibits the first international museum survey of video art. The exhibition features work by major luminaries of video art, including Vito Acconci, Peter Campus, Douglas Davis, and Nam June Paik. Among the dozens of artists included in Video Art is a group of young Brazilians who are some of the very first in their country to experiment with video.

ATV is the first pirate station in Cologne, founded by the video artists Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach, and Klaus vom Bruch. The programs they produce are transmitted within a distance of just a few hundred meters. There is scarcely any cooperation with television stations. “The idea was to counter the drab aesthetics and themes of official television with something more demanding than entertainment, that dared to experiment, and was created by artists. It was intended as a critical reply to the output of the German television landscape.” (Ulrike Rosenbach)

First major exhibition dedicated to video art in Belgium, curated by Michel Baudson. It gives an overview of international video production with a selection of more than 140 videotapes. Aside from Belgian artists such as the Group CAP, Leo Copers, and Hubert Van Es, works are presented by Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Fred Forest, Jochen Gerz, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Wolf Vostell, and others.

De Appel is an exhibition center for contemporary art founded in Amsterdam in 1975. It is mainly devoted to art forms that are difficult to present in traditional museum settings, such as performance, installation, film, and video.

VDB is founded in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement. It is a leading resource in the USA for video by and about contemporary artists. VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs.

The volume focuses on the work of primarily American artists who for the most part come to work with video as a natural outgrowth of their work with other media. It presents statements by seventy-three artists related to aspects of their video work, as well as articles by artists, curators, and reviewers regarding the development of different aesthetic approaches to the medium.

The Open Encounters are a meeting place for video artists, curators, and producers. After London (Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974), Paris (Espace Cardin, 1975), Ferrara (Galleria d’arte Moderna, 1975), and Buenos Aires (Centre of Art and Communication, 1975), the 5th International Open Encounter on Video is organized by Florent Bex at the ICC in Antwerp, in collaboration with Jorge Glusberg, director of the CAYC, Buenos Aires. Twenty-seven countries are represented, with more than 260 participants: Chris Burden, Michael Druks, Jacques-Louis Nyst, Gina Pane, Sosno, Wolf Vostell, and others. Alongside the exhibition, colloquia are devoted to “Video and Communication” and “Video and Art.”

The public radio-television station of the French Community of Belgium (RTBF) founds “Videographie,” the first European broadcast to focus exclusively on video art. In 1979, “Videographie” also opens its studio to media artists, becoming one of the major production centers in Belgium. The broadcast funds projects including performances by Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, an intervention by Fred Forest, videotapes by Antoni Muntadas, Barbara and Michael Leisgen, and others. The program ends in 1986. In 2003, it becomes Videographies, an International Video Art Association based in Liège that promotes both historical and current productions in media art.

Cover of the exhibition catalogue documenta 6, 1977

Curated by Manfred Schneckenburger, documenta 6 is the largest German art exhibition ever held. It pursues the “idea of the media-critical 1970s”: a critically minded attitude that focuses on the increasing power exerted by the media and its reality-distorting factors. Video art is one of the focal points, and works are featured by Ulrike Rosenbach, Vito Acconci, and Joan Jonas. As part of the documenta 6 program, video tapes are broadcast on television on nine evenings.

The Centre Pompidou is a public art and culture center that is home to the Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM, Museum of Modern Art, in premises redesigned by Gae Aulenti in 1982–85), with key works of the twentieth century, to which a center for industrial design is also affiliated, along with a library, the IRCAM, a music research center (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a children’s workshop, cinemas, theaters, and lecture auditoriums.

Catalogue cover Video & Film Manifestatie. kijken en doen, ed. by Alexander van Grevenstein and Ton Quik, 1977

The Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) also collects video artworks recorded at significant exhibitions about video art, including works from the Video & Film Event in 1977. The Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht arranged this exhibition as a means of integrating video art into the museum. The event lasted five weeks and was divided into multiple parts, such as a video studio to create or view video artwork, an exhibition on technical reproduction and art, video artworks made by artists from five countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, United States, France, and Great Britain), films about art history, a special evening program for Fridays, and artists’ projects. Using this combination of multiple elements that complement each other, the Bonnefantenmuseum hoped to make people more interested in video art as an expressive and educational tool. The catalogue states that there is a need for an institution that makes video equipment available to artists and museums, so that videotapes can be produced for both artistic and educational purposes. In order to be able to manage such a diverse event, the Bonnefantenmuseum needed the cooperation of many other institutions and people. Several video institutions, such as the Agora Studio at the De Appel Arts Center, as well as  the Netherlands Ministry of Culture, Education and Science are mentioned on the partner list. Brandsteder Electronics BV delivered the technical equipment, as it would again for MonteVideo a year later.

The Netherlands Media Art Institute is founded in 1978. The distribution collection comprises more than 2,000 works at present, varying from the earliest experiments through recent productions by well-known Dutch and international artists and rising talents. Apart from these media artworks, the Institute’s online archive contains over thirty years of media art: 1,000 media artworks and unique documentation of events and projects realized and presented by NIMk. Additionally, an important reference collection of more than 6,500 titles can be consulted in the mediatheque. In addition to its own collection, the Institute also manages the video collections of the De Appel Foundation, the Lijnbaan Center in Rotterdam, and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN).

Founded in 1978, the JVC-sponsored Tokyo Video Festival (TVF) is now the largest international video competition in Japan, gathering 40,000 works from ninety countries worldwide. The festival is open to amateurs and professionals making short and feature films, documentaries, and fiction.

Nam June Paik is appointed professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1978. Officially he is chair of sculpture, but in practice he teaches video for seventeen years. The video workshop set up in 1976 by Ursula Wevers is still technologically in its early stage in 1978.

The exhibition consists of sixteen videotapes by sixteen Japanese artists whose work is representative of video art currently being produced in Japan. The artists represented utilize the medium for its portability, immediacy of image, and plasticity. Most work with the small-format (one-half- or three-quarter-inch) portable video camera and recording deck, which are easily transported from location to location and are ideal for spontaneous documentation. The show goes on to twelve other museums in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. With: Nobuhiro Kawanaka and Hakudo Kobayashi.

The Kunsthaus Zürich has continuously collected video art since 1979. Video is understood here as an independent, creative medium, meaning that documentary and commercial productions are only seldom considered. When dealing with the area of modern art, however, documentary tapes are collected by the library. From the medium’s pioneer years in the 1960s through to the current video boom, the museum has works by internationally renowned artists as well as a cross-section of Swiss video productions.

The Sammlung Goetz is an internationally important collection of contemporary art located in Munich that has developed since the mid-1980s thanks to structured collection activities. It is generally seen as one of the world’s largest film and video collections. In 2003–04, it hosted the exhibition fast forward. Media Art Sammlung Goetz in cooperation with the ZKM, featuring a comprehensive selection of media works. In 2010, there followed fast forward 2. The Power of Motion. Media Art Sammlung Goetz, with a representative selection of the Sammlung’s recent acquisitions of video and media works since 2000.

1980s. The Andy Warhol Film Project begins in the 1980s when the Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art agree to collaborate on the largest archival research project in the history of American avant-garde cinema: to catalogue Warhol’s massive film collection, investigate its history, and preserve and re-release all the films in conjunction with a program of scholarly research and publication. Warhol himself gives his approval to the Whitney’s project and hands over his original films to MoMA for cataloguing and storage in 1984. The joint project is launched publicly in 1988 with the Whitney’s exhibition The Films of Andy Warhol and with MoMA’s release of thirteen newly preserved titles.

The Kramlichs begin collecting film and video-based art in the late 1980s. With more than 200 pieces, they have one of the world’s largest private collections of video and new media arts. Their collection includes works by such historical figures as Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Marcel Broodthaers, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman, as well as by leading contemporary artists including Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Mariko Mori, Keith Tyson, and Jeff Wall. In 1997, the Kramlichs establish the New Art Trust to advance the media arts through the support of research and scholarship in the field. This foundation also collects and maintains new media art installations.

In 1980, Ingrid Oppenheim gives her video collection to the Kunstmuseum Bonn on permanent loan: some 400 works by pioneers of video art, among them Joan Jonas, Alan Kaprow, Dennis Oppenheim, Peter Campus, Les Levine, Klaus vom Bruch, Marcel Odenbach, and Ulrike Rosenbach. The Kunstmuseum’s video collection is now one of the most important of its kind in Germany. Since 2006, the collection has been presented in the installation Odeon, an expansive and traversable architectural sculpture by the Munich artist Stefan Eberstadt. Here, two stations enable visitors to view the works.

Since its founding, 235 MEDIA has been involved in placing media art and acts as an agency for media artists. It also has an extensive archive of video art, artist documentary films, etc. that has over 3,000 works, which are gradually being digitized, restored, and made accessible to the public. In 2003, the pilot project “MedienKunstArchiv,” which preserves and digitally catalogues tapes of video art, initiated by 235 MEDIA, was launched in Germany. The non-profit foundation imai was formed out of the project in 2006. For the Aachen exhibition Video et Cogito. Wiederhergestellte Künstlervideos der Sammlung (2004), thirty exemplary video works were digitally preserved.

The exhibition is announced as “the largest exhibition ever devoted to a single video artist.” This exhibition and publication exemplify the Whitney Museum’s commitment to presenting the achievements of artists working in video, a commitment that began eleven years ago, in 1971, with the first major videotape exhibition in a New York City museum, A Special Videotape Show.

The exhibition of eighteen videotapes by many of video art’s most active practitioners examines the broadcast television medium through the perception of independent video makers. The tapes in this show all refer to and comment on conventional TV, by parody, analysis, or formal revision. With: Ant Farm, Nam June Paik, Chris Burden, and Dara Birnbaum.

Catalogue cover Videokunst in Deutschland 1963–1982. Videobänder, Videoinstallationen, Video-Objekte, Videoperformances, Fotografien, ed. by Wulf Herzogenrath, 1983

The exhibition sees itself as an attempt to provide the first extensive survey of twenty years of video art in Germany. Emphasis is placed on the diversity of the works, with less attention given to the aesthetic categories of video art. Some of the themes attracting interest are the beginnings of Fluxus, the role played by Gerry Schum, the first WDR experiments, and the areas in which the medium can be used, for example in performances. A video library is set up in the exhibition.

Catalogue cover Videonale 1, photo: Achim Duchow, © Videonale e.V., Bonn

The Bonn Videonale e.V. begins its work in 1984 by organizing a biannual international festival and competition for video. Today, the Videonale is one of the oldest and most renowned festivals for video art in Germany and Europe, seeing itself as a platform for both young up-and-coming as well as established artists. Since 2016, the organizers have called not only for video entries but explicitly for video installations, performance, and virtual reality works.

From 1986 to 1996, the American Film Institute (AFI) presents the annual Maya Deren Independent Film and Video Artists Award to celebrate achievements in underground and non-commercial independent filmmaking. Each year, between two and four filmmakers are honored, mostly individually, but some filmmaking teams receive the award together. The inaugural recipients are video artist Nam June Paik, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, and animator Sally Cruikshank. The award includes a $5,000 grant.

In 1986, the Museum Ludwig establishes its video collection, emphasizing the independent status of artistic work using moving images. The first 16mm films were acquired by the predecessor institution, the Walraff-Richartz-Museum, in 1974, the first U-matic cassettes at around the same time: among them are films by Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Bruce Connor. Today, all films, videos, sound installations, media art, and performances are collected and exhibited as part of contemporary art.

The exhibition presents a selection of installations and sculptures that employ the medium of video as the central element. The works on view represent sculpture and installation, one part of the video art form. They explore the expressive potential that resides within the material and properties of the medium. With: Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, and Joan Jonas.

Transmediale is founded as the VideoFilmFest in 1988. In the course of its thirty-year history, the festival shifts its focus from video to multimedia-based art forms and evolves into an international platform for digital art and culture. By gathering works, program brochures, publications, and documentation material from each festival edition, the transmediale/archive documents a substantial portion of the history of media and digital art and contributes to the archiving of experimental media culture in Berlin and internationally.

Audiovisual archive of Argos, Centre for Art and Media © Argos, 2014

Argos is founded for the purpose of stimulating and promoting audiovisual art; at present, it is the country’s main reference source for this type of artistic practice. During the first period, the organization focused on showing a wide variety of works within Belgium. In 1997, the first Argos Information Days are held, with great success, offering an annual preview of Belgian artist films and videos. In 2000, the video conservation program starts up. The first project includes more than 100 titles representing an important body of Belgian works from the 1970s. It is the beginning of a conservation effort that, to date, comprises more than 2,000 titles.

The ZKM combines research and production, exhibitions and events, archive and collection. Operating at the interface between art and science, it takes up new knowledge in the field of media technology with a view to further development. In 1997, the ZKM relocated to a restored industrial building that was once part of a munitions factory. It is now home to a media museum and museum for contemporary art, as well as a series of institutes specializing in image media and music and acoustics, a media library, and a media theater and cube.

The exhibition marks a key turning point in both the exhibition of moving images in a gallery setting and the reconfiguration of the relationship between art and cinema that has taken place in the last twenty-five years. Comprising a gallery exhibition, an extensive film program, and a viewing room for “synthetic images,” Passages de l’image defies traditional museological practice to stage an investigation of the intermedia “passages” across cinema, photography, video, and digital images.

Catalogue cover Video im Kunstmuseum Bonn. Die Sammlung, ed. by Kunstmuseum Bonn, 1992

The publication Videokunst im Kunstmuseum Bonn is a catalogue of Ingrid Oppenheim’s video collection and a survey of the special video events held at the Kunstmuseum from 1986 to 1991. Starting with a symposium at the 1986 Videonale, artists are regularly invited to Bonn to present and discuss their works. Between 1986 and 1991, fifty such evenings take place. With the opening of the museum’s new building, the video collection gains its first-ever own space reserved exclusively for new media, which is simultaneously integrated into the collection.

Catalogue cover Video-Skulptur in Deutschland seit 1963, ed. by Wulf Herzogenrath/ Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 1994

The exhibition features eighteen video sculptures and installations as well as forty-two works on paper from between 1963 and 1994. The focus is on contemporary works, some of which are specially created for the exhibition. Four generations are represented, as it were: the fathers of video art (Paik, Vostell), the middle generation (vom Bruch, Kahlen, Odenbach, Rosenbach), the younger generation (Günther, Megert, Staehle), and the most recent generation (Anders, Brenner).

Catalogue cover How Durable is Video Art? Contributions to Preservation and Restoration of the Audiovisual Works of Art, symposium at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, ed. by Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1997

During the Nam June Paik exhibition High-Tech Allergy at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, a symposium is held where art historians, media theorists, technicians, conservators, lawyers, and philosophers discuss the following questions: Given its transitory and fragile nature, what can be done to save the picture medium of video as an expression of our television age in the twenty-first century? Is the authenticity of the artwork preserved when re-recorded on a new data carrier?

Catalogue cover Being & Time. The Emergence of Video Projection, ed. by Karen Lee Spaulding, 1996

Including five room-sized installations and a projected video in the form of a free-standing sculpture, this provocative exhibition provides an aesthetic experience as close to mural painting and film as to video proper. These projected video installations take video art out of the screening room and place it in a museum setting with the fine arts of painting and sculpture. With: Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, Willie Doherty, Tony Oursler, and Diana Thater.

Since its establishment, Galerie Anita Beckers has been promoting young artists, with a special emphasis on video art. The Galerie communicates between traditional and new media art, established and young artists, performance and video art. In collaboration with Julia Sökeland, Anita Beckers initiated www.blinkvideo.de, a professional website for research into video art, performance, and multimedia installations. The web platform connects galleries worldwide and gives them a way to present their artists online.

Catalogue cover video cult/ures. multimediale Installationen der 90er Jahre, ed. by Ursula Frohne, 1999

Video has developed into a universal and integrative language that, in the form of large-screen projections, monitor images, or interactive systems, allows artists to link space and time, fiction and reality, theory and everyday life. This show presents a broad selection of international works by contemporary artists whose creativity in the field of video has lastingly enlivened and inspired contemporary art. Interculturality and a sensibility for socially mediated constructions of identity emerge as the centers of gravity around which video art has revolved in the preceding years.

In 1999, the Film and Video Committee is established to develop the acquisition of film and video for the Whitney’s collection. The Whitney’s holdings of film and video now form one of the major collections in the field and have become an important locus for art historical scholarship. Highlights of the collection include a large number of film installations and artist films from the 1960s and 70s. The Whitney holds the “Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films Collection.” Among the earliest works in the Museum’s collection are Nam June Paik’s video sculpture Magnet TV (1965) and Bruce Conner’s three-screen projection EVE-RAY-FOREVER (1965/2006), one of the first film installations ever made. Another pillar of the Museum’s film and video program is “The Andy Warhol Film Project.”

Exhibition Nam June Paik Award 2004, photo: Sascha Dressler

Since 2002, the Kunststiftung NRW has been acknowledging outstanding electronic and digital works of art with the renowned Nam June Paik Award. The criteria for the biannual award reflect the pioneering spirit of Paik: a daringness to experiment, bridging cultural gaps, and a transdisciplinary approach. The prize is awarded in two categories, the International and the National Nam June Paik Award.

LOOP is a platform dedicated to the study and promotion of the moving image. It offers a specialized audience a curated selection of video-related contents from challenging perspectives. While teaming up with an international community of artists, curators, gallerists, collectors, and institution directors to develop projects that aim at exploring the capacities of video and film in today’s contemporary art discourses, it also annually hosts LOOP Barcelona, a special meeting point that unfolds into three main sections.

2003-2004. The exhibition X-Screen (Expanded Screen) features film installations and documentary material (films, photographs, texts, drawings, and posters) by thirty-six Austrian and international artists. It shows how artists and filmmakers of the 1960s/70s transformed the traditional projection arrangement in cinemas by staging actions, multimedia shows, multiple projections, happenings, environments, and installations, and how they thus contributed to a new perception of media imagery, physical space, and the human body. With: VALIE EXPORT, Dan Graham, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Bruce Nauman.

The exhibition Video takes the video back to the monitor and makes it possible for the visitor to compare the new aesthetic visual language, irrespective of whether it is an art video, an advertising video, or a music clip. The exhibition begins with the 1980s, the decade when there is the first generation of “TV children,” private television is launched (in Germany), and in America (and later in Europe) the first station devoted solely to music begins broadcasting: MTV. With: Dara Birnbaum, Woody Vasulka, and Bill Viola.

Catalogue cover 40JAHREVIDEOKUNST.DE – Part 1. Digitales Erbe: Videokunst in Deutschland von 1963 bis heute, ed. by Rudolf Frieling and Wulf Herzogenrath, 2006

2004-2006. The initiative aims at saving, caring for, and spreading video art. Five museums are involved: the ZKM Karlsruhe, the K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Lenbachhaus Munich, and the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. In 2004, a jury compiles an exemplary selection of contemporary works as well as fifty-nine historical videotapes from 1963 through to the present day, which are then exhibited at the five participating museums as an archive in 2006. Each museum additionally sets its own focus for complementing and contextualizing the videotapes. A catalogue is published that provides excerpts on DVD-ROM, along with a DVD study edition with all the works in full.

2004-2005. Dear ICC sets out to be an “informative exhibition.” Not only because the exhibitions at the ICC as such were always called that, but particularly because there is so much to tell. In the past few years, Johan Pas had sifted through the ICC archives for his doctoral thesis, and the MuHKA invited him to compose this exhibition on the basis of his findings. The title Dear ICC was taken from a letter from the performance artist Laurie Anderson that was found in the archives. With works and/or documents by Laurie Anderson, Jacques Charlier, Leo Copers, Michael Druks, and others.

Catalogue cover Ready to Shoot. Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum. videogalerie schum, ed. by Ulrike Groos, Barbara Hess, and Ursula Wevers, 2003

The first retrospective on one of the most important and complex artistic projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with the first two “television exhibitions,” Land Art and Identifications, it collects and presents earlier documentary television productions by Schum as well as short television interventions and all the productions of the “videogalerie schum.”

View into the ZKM / Labor für antiquierte Videosysteme, photo: Andreas Friedrich

Founded in 2004, the Labor für antiquierte Videosysteme takes on the difficult task of preserving video art from the ZKM’s archives and its running projects and exhibitions. Possessing a large array of functioning historical equipment, coupled with state-of-the-art digital technology, the laboratory has been able to bring to life over fifty obsolete video formats from the 1960s through to the 1980s, to digitize them in high quality, and thus preserve them for posterity.

2006-2010. RECORD > AGAIN! is the follow-up project to 40jahrevideokunst.de – Teil 1. The institutions involved are the ZKM Medienmuseum, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, the Kunsthaus Dresden – Städtische Galerie für Gegenwartskunst, and the Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg. The focus is on the early years of German video art. Because numerous works have not been shown for more than twenty-five years, older equipment has disappeared, and the videos were mostly unloadable, the works—totaling over twenty-five hours running time—were digitized at the Labor für antiquierte Videosysteme at the ZKM. Accompanying the exhibition is a publication with DVD as well as a DVD study edition with more than fifty video works from the last forty years.

In 2006, the non-profit foundation imai, intermedia art institute, is established for the purpose of recording the extensive collection of video art of the Cologne media agency 235 Media. The archive contains some 3,000 works of artistic and documentary value, which provide a broad overview of the development of video art from the pioneer years in the 1960s through to the present day. Since its founding, imai has conserved and appraised the works and organized distribution.

Catalogue cover Talking Pictures. Theatricality in Contemporary Film and Video Art, ed. by Doris Krystof and Barbara J. Scheuermann, 2007

The exhibition presents contemporary film and video works devoted to theater and its staging practices. They are often expansive and room-filling, almost arranged like stage settings, whereby other artistic materials such as sculptures, photos, or paper are integrated into the installations. With: Victor Alimpiev, Catherine Sullivan, and Ana Torfs.

The Julia Stoschek Collection is an international private collection of contemporary art with a focus on time-based media art. The collection opens in 2007 and comprises installations, videos, photographs, paintings, and sculptures. Each year a different exhibition presents, documents, and makes available to the public different aspects of the collection. Expanding the collection, as well as restoration and conservation work, are also central to the collection’s ongoing activities.

To date, the Museum has over 1,600 video works—an astounding collection that documents the history of this medium used in artistic practice from its beginning. In 2007, the first media conservator arrived at MoMA. In 2011, the Museum undertook a large-scale digitization effort focusing on the analogue videos. During the digitization project, each analogue video work in MoMA’s collection was migrated to a digital video file.

Catalogue cover Schweizer Videokunst der 1970er und 1980er Jahre. Eine Rekonstruktion, ed. by Irene Schubiger, 2009

The exhibition presents the beginnings of video art in Switzerland and how the various strands developed further until the end of the 1980s. Twenty video installations are shown that originally had often only featured for a few days in exhibition rooms, at trade fairs, or during festivals, as well as thirty videotapes. The exhibition is based on a collaboration with the research project AktiveArchive. A thoroughly researched history of Swiss video art has yet to be undertaken.

Catalogue cover video déjà vu? Die Anfänge der Videokunst im Spiegel der Sammlung, ed. by Sylvia Martin on behalf of Kunstmuseen Krefeld, 2008

The exhibition shows the results of the cleaning, restoration, and conservation project for video works from the collection, some of which have not been shown in thirty years. In the 1970s, the Krefeld museums were among the first in Germany to recognize the potential of video art and give it a platform. The collection was compiled by the pioneers Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers. The Kunstmuseum possesses an extensive collection of video and film art on Super 8, 16mm, half-inch open-reel tapes, U-matic, VHS cassettes, and DVDs. A selection of twenty-five German and American works are shown, by Vito Acconi, Peter Campus, Gilbert & George, and others.

Catalogue cover RECORD > AGAIN! 40JAHREVIDEOKUNST.DE – Part 2, ed. by Christoph Blase and Peter Weibel, 2010

September 19 to November 15, 2009. The ZKM exhibition continues the project initiated in 2006 on the technological updating and scholarly appraisal of video art. More than sixty video works from the early years of video art are restored, reconstructed, and digitized, before being presented in the large exhibition using original equipment. Thirty-two works from the Ludwig Forum’s video collection are part of the project, some of which are then shown in the exhibition.

Catalogue cover Transitland. Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989–2009, ed. by Edit András, 2009

The collaborative archiving project “Transitland,” realized on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, launches with a comprehensive website and a series of discussions and screenings in Sofia, followed by events in Budapest and Berlin. It presents a selection of 100 single-channel video works, produced in the period 1989–2009 and reflecting the transformations in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. The selection of works was made by an international jury from 350 videos, proposed by 40 nominators—curators, art critics, and artists.

Catalogue cover Bilder in Bewegung – Künstler & Video/Film 1958–2010, ed. by Barbara Engelbach, 2010

A presentation from the collection of artist films and videos as well as installations from the Museum Ludwig, Cologne: ranging from films acquired as early as 1974, including works by Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Ed Ruscha, and videos by Nam June Paik and Gerry Schum’s television gallery, through to installations by Aernout Mik and Guy Ben-Ner, the exhibition traces the history of the moving image in contemporary art.

Catalogue cover Big Picture (Locations/Projections). Twelve cinematographic installations, ed. by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2011

Big Picture is the title of a work by Jason Rhoades, a Californian artist who died young in 2006. In an ironic reversal of the title, it shows a large garden on a small flat screen. This lavishly illustrated catalogue presents twelve film and video installations by international artists, each of whom takes a different approach to the cinematographic installation as a genre. The focus is on the importance of space to film and video art installations, which as media art have to redefine their performance parameters at each new presentation.

Catalogue cover Images against Darkness – Video Art from the Archive of imai at KIT, ed. by KIT – Kunst im Tunnel, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gGmbH, imai – inter media art institute, No. 2, 2012

The exhibition shows for the first time a representative selection of video art from the imai archive. The imai was founded six years before for the purpose of re-recording and digitizing the extensive video art collection of the Cologne media agency 235 Media. Since then, the archive has preserved the works and complemented existing holdings with new pieces. In cooperation with the KIT, the exhibition provides a glimpse into the imai archive.

Since the 1970s, Belgian video art has been internationally known for its avant-gardism, its eclecticism, and its multiple crossovers with other disciplines. In the past, but incontrovertibly also in the present time, Belgian artists have been pioneers in the use of the medium and the development of multifaceted registers thanks to the video techniques and their personal approaches. Although this selection represents only a small cross-section among thousands of titles archived at Argos, these programs try to illustrate recurrent aspects of the productions released during the 1970s and 80s. With: Jacques Charlier, Filip Francis, and Jacques-Louis Nyst.

Catalogue cover REWIND | British Artists’ Video in the 1970s & 1980s, ed. by Sean Cubitt and Stephen Partridge, 2012

The publication derives from a four-year research project into the history of an art form that has become the hallmark of contemporary art. It is the founding text for the history of British video art; draws on a unique archive of oral history and personal experience; and opens up the archive for contemporary artists, curators, media historians, and archivists.

Catalogue cover Vidéo Vintage 1963–1983. Une selection de vidéos des collections nouveaux médias du Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou, ed. by Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2012

2012-2013. Based on a selection of popular video works, the exhibition shows the evolution of video art from the 1960s through to the 1980s in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou. Attracting particular interest are the three focal points “Performance and Filmic Self-Portrait,” “Television: Research, Experiments, Critique,” and “Attitudes, Forms, Concepts,” which reveal the development phases video has passed through, its artistic applications, “research” character, and critical potential.

Derived from the AHRC-funded research project “REWINDItalia,” the publication aims to bring the seminal Italian early video experimentation back into the international spotlight. Italy was a vibrant center of video art production and exhibition throughout the 1970s and 80s. This early experimentation attracted artists from all over the world and laid the foundation for video art. However, since then, early Italian video art has received only scant international exposure. Its contribution to the history of video as an art form has for too long escaped the recognition that it so unequivocally deserves.