Video: The Audiovisual Medium

What is film?

Film is a material as well as a medium. Film registers light and shadow and fixes them onto the material of film photochemically. Film generates images as a unit.

How does its materiality influence what it does conceptually? Film is a series of frames of one image after another successively that conveys the impression of continuity and movement. Rays of light are registered on the surface of the film.

What is video? Electronic transfer of signals that are processed and transformed into audio and video. Video can be the optical recording of light not unlike film. Video signal can be be generated by the device itself. Video does not need a place or a fixed sequence for generation, transmission and display.

Examples of processing a video signal Feedback Delayed Feedback Video Synthesizer Recursive Compression The fact that video signal can be transformed by a program or a set of directions and stored as data demonstrates a close relationship between video and computers.

Relationship between video and television Video has transmission and and presence in common with television. Imagery through signal transmission technology

Information carried by light is registered by the cathode ray and translated into video signals that are in turn transmitted to a screen radiating electronic signal. Two processes: registering and reproducing The process of writing video from left to right as a horizontal line across the screen. The organization of electronic information or the formation of these signals creates pictorial forms

Video can be produced and reproduced simultaneously. Film can not do this. The ability to be constructed and reconstructed is based on the idea of processuality as opposed to sequence—a set of instructions as opposed to a flip book.

Again we can separate the idea of video as a transformational process where electronic signal is manipulated from the idea of images ordered or contextualized by the idea of a frame. Think Dan Sandin vs FCP timeline interface. With video, there can be transitions between images. Video can shift forward, backward and be reversed.

Spielmann: Transformation connoted flexible, unstable, non- fixed forms of the image. Because there is not discrete image as in a piece of film where the images are one after the other, Spielmann describes/defines this kind of image as pictoriality.

Spielmann: In herbook, she refers to video images and electronic images. Video images are the manifestations of pictures or pictures formed as a result of a format or algorithm. Film has real live frames. Video is a simulation of frames and images. Electronic images are those that are manipulated by programming. All images in video are manipulated to some extent by programming. What happens before an images is pictorial is programming. It is important to be aware of both of these “states” for lack of a better word.

Spielmann: Because video is a digital electronic signal, it has the ability to not only be recorded let’s say to a DV tape, but also to be placed into a virtual space in the computer. Think YouTube. Yes, we can see film on YouTube, but it has to be digitized first from the film or a video projected in a virtual world like in a game. Again This is unique to the medium of video. “…in computer simulation, it [video] achieves the technical preconditions of multi dimensionality and of omnidirectionally unlimited transformation imagery.

VIDEO IS PROCESS. “Video produces…a dialog between an image type, which originates on one hand, in the fixed inscription into a surface and on the other into a processual image type, which lets the passage from analog to digital emerge in electronic transformativity…

So what does this all mean in terms of contextualizing video with respect to art.

Themes arise in 1960’s and 1970’s Videotapes and installations which address or reflect upon the medium itself. Video that plays with ideas of non-sequential and non-narrative structures (precursor to hypermedia) Video that experiments with technological pictoriality experimenting with virtual-ness

The ability to generate, manipulate and the multiplicity of means of presentation give rise to new aesthetic forms.

Video at its most basic form is noise.

To make work with video is to give form to the noise. Video is noise waiting to be shaped by information. The existence of noise is a form of relation. The information of a in video input can be represented visually and auditively. Information of the image field deviates from the image format; we can see and hear how lines are bent and the spacing between lines is changed.

Video is performative.

Video does not rely on a place like a screen or a theater. Video is tied to its apparatus and that apparatus is varied anything from screen to side of building to wearable.

Video is a specific medium both to technical technological criteria and to cultural semiotic vocabulary.

…video gains access to the emergence of aesthetic forms of expression in digital media, above all in such constructions as mixed reality and augmented reality, where physical reality merges with digital reality in new spatial environments

Video is reflexive