Digital Relations

When thinking about the relationship between the camera and the monitor, the camera and the screen, the screen and the projection, the performance and the camera, the performance and the screen. Videos like the one by Peter Campus where he reaches behind his back and goes through the screen or Joan Jonas with the mirror saying left side/right side.

From one day, video not being video or different from video as we know it when placed in an immersive environment such as a game. Video, the role of movement?  Think about my experience of games or animated feature films, we see video in either of these genre’s, how is it used? Is it different than the video we watch as an art form?

The author of the book "Video, a reflexive medium", Yvonne Spielmann believes that video games and animations are some format of video but not being video. I think the reason is that she thinks the main purpose of video art is expressing an idea/opinion/understanding through the use of audiovisual language rather than providing an immersive environment for viewers to get entertained. As my experience of playing video games or watching an animated feature movie, it always uses the first-personal perspective to describe/represent the movement. Especially with the 3D techniques, it’s easy to forget the fact that I’m watching a video made by someone else. However, the videos we watch on a television or in the classroom are not purposely made for us to get into the scenarios. We still feel the position or the role of the artist who made it, even if he/she is not on the screen. We do not feel we are in the control of the story going on, which is the biggest difference from playing a video game.

----- “In contrast to references to video by other media in interconnections between media, this application of video technology is accompanied by the interest in investigating the forms of presenting pictorial progress in the electronic medium itself and in analyzing them in the context of how analog-digital media formats are configuring themselves as they develop in parallel with each other.”

My understanding is that, compared to the use of video art as a format to assist another art expression with visual/audio or audiovisual enhancements. The “not video” videos are trying to explore the potentials happen within the video format itself. Like by doing multiple angle/perspective recording, the visual medium can expand the possibility of video to accomplish a “live” picture. Along with the development of multiple levels of recording sounds, the context of analog-digital media format will be practiced by different aims. Images and sounds are in parallel position in real life. The possibility of technical controls of those parallel elements can produce new options in configuring the media format itself.