Introduction to Video Art by Lea Collet
My reaction to this piece is that Collet produced a summation of video art that is thorough and concise. This is a challenging undertaking; presenting an art form that is both in its infancy and infinite in its application. I like that she covered a huge variety of the types of art that can be created utilizing video, with examples and links to check out the video art referenced in her writing. I was most drawn to the Auto Italia Live channel and their format for presenting video art.Â
However, she is also missing out on the opportunity to discuss the widespread use of video on social media platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram and their role as art. Many of the artists covered in her writing may have been enlisted to create forms of art for marketing or promotional purposes. I believe this article would be more interesting if she delved into the realm of publicly available and commercial video content and its role as art, as well as the role of social media as a vehicle for the poor image or poorman’s video art - and how that impacts our relationship with video art outside of institutional contexts.Â
Projection: Vanishing and Becoming by Sean Cubitt
Cubitt’s article brings to mind the idea that video art inserts itself into our attention and forces audience engagement. The human mind wants to comprehend moving images and narratives because if they were recorded in the past for us to witness, they must be worth our attention.Â
As Cubitt describes in his statement that “The world we see is but a reflection of a reality that escapes its reflections” I think the fascination of video comes from human desire to understand our world and to interact with the past. A video recording is merely a moving image until we give it life and purpose. Video artists take unique action in depicting a world that can never be fully captured and represented as it is experienced in real time. Through video, we are presenting a taste or glimpse of the actual thing. All of the sensory factors in a recorded moment such as smell, temperature, mood, or introspection cannot be represented through video - and so artists are given the task to create an understanding through editing, collaging, animating, altering, and using any other video art devises at their fingertips to inform our experience through video. To enliven the senses in interaction with a nonliving, moving image. In this way, humans are allowed to understand an existence beyond our reality, in its own dimension, and therefore creates wonder and a connective tissue between viewers, video, and creators.
Destino - Disney Studios & Salvador Dali (2003)
This animation is fascinating as a post-humous collaboration between Disney Studios and surrealist Salvador Dali. Dali began working on the sketches for this animation near the end of his life and the project was lost once he died. The project was resurfaced by Disney animation studios in the early 2000s, and was developed from Dali’s sketches. It’s fascinating to see how Dali and Disney’s vision was interpreted several decades later with modern illustration animation technologies - blending the visual languages of Disney Studios and Dali.
Human Vectors by Dov Jacobsen used as a music video for Art Dimension by Soma Holiday (1984)
Another nostalgic example from the 80s of early 4d digital design.This video shows you almost where we started at a base level with coding animated graphics (this animation was created on a child’s computer in 1984). At the time I’ve loved this video for a long time, and I used to think the song was about an atm machine. Now, I believe the song is about coding and digital animation as a new art dimension, which makes more sense paired with the animation Human Vectors. I also love how this song and video pairing offers the question about what is art? And do we like their art?
Doris Totten Chase - Circles II (1971)
Doris Totten Chase - Variation Two (1978)
Through the late 60s to early 80s, artist Doris Totten Chase studied movement and dance through video art as part of her larger body of work in sculpture. She paired digital synth soundtracks with altered video footage. Chase used a mixer to loop her footage creating video feedback, which was a fairly new technique for artistic video design when she began experimenting with this process in the late 60s.
ROSALĂŤA - MOTOMAMI (ROSALĂŤA TikTok LIVE Performance) (2022)
Filmed and directed by the creative agency CANADA as a live music video performance for the album MOTOMAMI by Rosalia. I think the creative direction of this music video by CANADA is more important than the pop culture significance of the artist Rosalia. They appropriated mobile phone video format to produce a longform music video that is engaging and groundbreaking. I think this is a clever innovation - since the video needs to be watched on a mobile device for viewers to be able to rotate their device to keep up with the video as the angles and proportions of the video change with each song.
