Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826/7

Earliest surviving photograph…

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan...outlined a new utopian vision for
media...that electronic communications were an extension of the human nervous
system and operated in a binary kind of progression—as technology advances, so
does the human sensory perception needed to receive it...McLuhan’s ideas placed
technology at the center of human transformation and emphasized that the emerging
technology not only would transform consciousness but also provide a very powerful
path to social change.’ (2)
Could Marshall McLuhan
be correct?

Has electronic media

become an extension of our
nervous system?
VPSA63 BUT WHY IS IT ART? | Winter | 2025
STUDIO | ARTS, CULTURE, AND MEDIA | UTSC
PROF. Adam David Brown

LECTURE 09: “...a kind of media trickster...”

Video is the key medium of contemporary art. Why is it such an important tool for visual
artists? How has the availability of video cameras and video technology allowed artists to
critique the media culture that surrounds us? How does video differ technically and
artistically from other forms of moving image?
The planet Earth – seen for the first time - photographed by the crew of the Apollo 17 lunar spacecraft, 1972
Critics and protestors criticized news
agencies and the media because they
could not be trusted.
They were biased as part of the
consciousness industry; the news was
packaged for commercial television
programming and controlled by the
government and corporate monopolies.

What does the author mean? Is there a consciousness

industry? What do you think it is???
Regina Jose Galindo – Tierra 2013 https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/tierra/7QHkMOfomtQ_1Q?hl=en
Regina Jose Galindo – Tierra 2013 https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/tierra/7QHkMOfomtQ_1Q?hl=en
Regina José Galindo - Tierra
In 2012, José Efraín Ríos Montt, the former President of Guatemala, was accused of and
initially convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity; Regina José Galindo’s video
is a haunting reinterpretation of the atrocities recounted during his trial. Tierra begins with
the artist standing naked in a verdant field, the tranquility of which is shattered by an
earth-moving machine. Here, Galindo alludes to the incident in which innocent citizens
were murdered and cold-heartedly buried in a bulldozer-dug mass grave. The stark
contrast between the machine’s huge, armored bulk and the artist’s vulnerable body
captures the injustice of Montt’s regime, while the abyss that grows around her serves as
a poignant symbol of the despair and alienation born of political violence in general, and
Montt’s post-conviction acquittal in particular.
 Video is a a kind of media trickster..

Video plays a very important cultural role as a kind of media trickster

operating from the edge of several different but often overlapping
systems of communication: personal expression, the art world,
independent cinema, television, and academic studies. One of the
strengths of video art is that it has never been absorbed by any one of
these systems but remains peripheral to all. Pg 8.
 Illustration of the principle of the camera obscura

The earliest known written record of the camera obscura is to be found in Chinese
writings called Mozi and dated to the 4th century BCE. In these writings it is
explained how the image in a "collecting-point" or "treasure house” is inverted by
an intersecting point (a pinhole) that collects the (rays of) light. Light coming from
the foot of an illuminated person would strike below the pinhole and form the top
part of the image. Rays from the head would strike above the pinhole and form the
lower part of the image.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) asked, "Why is it that when the sun
passes through quadri-laterals, as for instance in wicker work, it does not produce a
figure rectangular in shape but circular?”

“Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through
leaves, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same
reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular
in the form of a cone?"
Multiple images will be projected onto the surface of a screen or wall if there are
multiple pin holes through which the light can travel.
 Nicéphore Niépce, View from the Window at Le Gras, 1826/7

In the mid-1820s, Nicéphore Niépce first managed to fix an image that was captured
with a camera, but at least eight hours or even several days of exposure in the camera
were required and the earliest results were very crude.
 Eadweard Muybridge The
Horse in Motion, 1878,
Collotype, photographic
print

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering

work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

Between 1878 and 1884, Muybridge perfected his method of horses in motion, proving
that they do have all four hooves off the ground during their running stride. He
accomplished this by experimenting with an array of 12 cameras photographing a
galloping horse in a sequence of individual photographs.
Eadweard Muybridge, Woman jumping over barrier, 1887.
Collotype. 18.7 cm x 40.2 cm.

Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, 1972. Black and white video,

20mins.
William Henry Fox Talbot. Oak Tree in
Winter, c. 1842-1843. Calotype. 19.5 x
16.8cm.
35mm film captured sequential images onto a celluloid ribbon that was covered in a very thin layer of
photosensitive emulsion. Cameras were large and heavy and expensive.

Film and it’s attendant format, the cinema,

rapidly developed into a powerful form of
story telling and was soon used as a
technology for propaganda and social control.

Within decades of the development of film

technology, the television was developed.
Television
‘In 1965, Sony marketed the first portable video recording equipment, providing the means by
which artists, activists, and other individuals launched an era of alternative media...Prior to this
time the government and corporate media giants exclusively controlled all television production,
programming, and broadcasting. The new Sony portable camera and recording deck, called the
Portapak, was designed for small business and industrial uses but was released precisely in the
midst of the political turmoil of the ‘60s. Video immediately captured the attention of artists who
saw its potential as a creative tool and of social activists who saw it as “a weapon and a
witness”...’ (Horsfield 2)

Television camera at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the first Games

to be broadcast. The transmission went out to 28 viewing rooms
set up around Berlin with an audience of approximately 150,000
people.
Advertisement image for the Sony CV-2400 Portapak, 1967.
Recording time with this camera was limited to 20 minutes.
Notions of the Post-modern have been centered around the
critique of televised media in many ways. Especially as
commercial Television produced representations that artists and
media visionaries were highly critical of.
This combination of images (to some extent) illustrates a form of cultural bias that was prevalent in
mainstream Media in the 1950s and 60s. In both cases the male is the one in control of the media.
The female is relegated to the care and concern of children and there are no people of colour
represented at all. This is precisely the type of representation that artists and media visionaries
were critical of.
A man adjusting his Motorola television set, c. 1955. Source: Getty Images.
View of a Sony CV-2000 video recorder and Sony CVC-2000 camera being used by a man to film a woman
and two children in 1967. Source: Getty Images.
‘Throughout the 1950s, television had gained enormous power; more than 85 percent of
American households owned at least one television set by the end of the decade...intellectuals
and media theorists, saw that it reinforced the status quo while simplifying, or omitting altogether,
representations that did not fit consumerist demographics...
• Women, in spite controlling large amounts of money designated for household spending, were
seen as manipulated and controlled by images from television
• People of color and others who were not seen by advertisers to be important in the
marketplace were mostly excluded from any television representations at all...
• Protesters also criticized news coverage of the Vietnam War, arguing that the media could not
be trusted because it was biased as part of the consciousness industry...’ (2)

David Cort shooting Mayday Realtime, 1971.

Source: Videofreex
Quickly artists saw that the video medium rich with possibilities
for aesthetic experimentation that included using the medium
as:
1. A window to the perception of time, space and sound.

2. Or as a mirror to the self, to consciousness, or cultural

patterns of subjectivity.

3. It could function as a witness in the surveillance of observer

and the observed.

4. As a conceptual tool deconstructing language, text, or

cultural apparatus. (Jacques Derrida)

5. Eventually, the video signal itself became a site for

investigation into the intrinsic properties of the medium.
 Jacques Derrida, French philosopher

The acceptance of video in the art schools (academy) helped validate its use among
scholars at a moment in which Jacques Derrida’s theories of media and
deconstruction were gaining influence.
Derrida’s interest in cultural production and interpretation of linguistic systems, signs,
and the construction of meaning created a use for alternative renditions of cultural
subject matter, such as video art. As a form of resistance.
A good example of this is Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen.

A single video art piece, such as Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975),
could be critiqued (examined) through numerous different theoretical discourses:
art, performance, feminism, cultural studies, politics, gender studies, philosophy,
and psychology. pg6

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of

the Kitchen, 1975. 6:09 mins.
A parody of a cooking show
in which “an anti-Julia Child
replaces the domesticated
'meaning' of tools with a
lexicon of rage and
frustration." Source: EAI New
York.
Protesters also criticized news coverage
of the Vietnam war, arguing that the
media could not be trusted because it was
biased as part of the consciousness
industry; the news was packaged for
commercial television programming and
controlled by the government and
corporate monopolies.

What does the author mean? Is there a consciousness

industry? What do you think it is???
Raindance Corporation: ‘Power is no longer measured in land, labor, or
capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it...Unless
we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and
reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no
more than products of the existing process...Fortunately, the trend of all
technology is towards greater access through decreased size and cost. Low-
cost, easy-to-use, portable video(tape) systems...are the seeds of a
responsive, useful communications system.’ (2)

Raindance Corporation publication Radical Software. No. 1,

1970.
Beryl Korot, founding member of Raindance Corporation
discussing the group’s video and publication projects,
Art:21, 2010.
 A Model that shows the control of
television programming in the 1960’s
would resemble a standard hierarchical
pyramid of power. Only the components
had changed to reflect the times:

1. Governments and Big Corporations

2. Advertisers

3. Wealthy consumers

4. Merchants, Farmers, Manufacturers

5. Consumers, Citizens, Immigrants

In the traditional model of art production there was a long, “top down”, history of
religious, political and Philosophical limitations, restrictions and hierarchies to be
contended with. In that model only the powerful had access to art. Only now in the
Media Age, the same group has control over the mainstream media: Television.
 Presidents..

Beginning with DADA and coinciding with the First World War, a new model for art was put forward.
One which could be seen as a point-by point-refutation of the old Aristocratic order, which had
become increasingly outmoded. This idea re-emerged in the 1960’s as a response to social
inequality.
 ‘Media activists saw handheld video equipment as a tool to document a new type of
direct-from-the-scene reportage that was not manipulated, biased, or reshaped in any
way to distort reality. Sometimes called “guerilla television” because its practitioners
used video in a war-like operation against the domination of network television, the
video verité method used technology in an unassuming way, going places where
cameras had never been without drawing much attention.’ (3)

David Cort shooting Mayday Realtime, 1971. Source: Videofreex

Chuck Kennedy of Videofreex at his video workbench, 1973. Videofreex built a studio and transmitter in
an old boarding house in Lanesville, NY. They produced several thousand videotapes, installations and
multimedia events, and trained hundreds of video-makers in the brand new video medium. Source:
Videofreex
‘While television programming was heavily critiqued, Canadian media theorist
Marshall McLuhan...outlined a new utopian vision for media. In which electronic
communications were thought of as an extension of the human nervous system, and
operated in a binary kind of progression—as technology advances, so does the
human sensory perception needed to receive it...McLuhan’s ideas placed technology
at the center of human transformation and emphasized that the emerging technology
not only would transform consciousness but also provide a very powerful path to
social change.’ (2)

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions

of Man. Published in 1964.
Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto, 1973.
Another Utopian Vision, Marshall McLuhan

Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the

extensions of [humanity] – the technological
simulation of consciousness, when the
creative process of knowing will be collectively
and corporately extended to the whole of
human society, much as we have already
extended our senses and our nerves by the
various media (television, the news, film,
radio, advertising etc). Pg 2.

Lucinda Furlong, “Notes Toward a History of Image Processed Video” Afterimage 11:5
(1983).
Video Art- A New Art Form

Driven by a desire to create new types of art

that defied both the modernist doctrine [of
painting or sculpture], as well as the
commercialism of the gallery system, many
artists began working with materials and
processes that challenged these boundaries.

Video was new, versatile and inexpensive.

 ‘This shift in artistic practice began to challenge the modernist imperative of the
gallery-based object and replace it with a more ephemeral version of art that emphasized
process, critique, or experience over pure form.’ (3)

[Video] ‘was a brand new medium with no history of its own but with tremendous potential to
carry out several different cultural and political agendas.’ (3)

John Baldessari, Baldessari

Sings Lewitt, 1972. Video,
12:48mins. Baldessari sings
Sol LeWitt's thirty-five
"Sentences on Conceptual
Art" (1969), forcing LeWitt's
text into the melodies of well-
known tunes, including "The
Star-Spangled Banner."

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-
d&q=John+Baldessari%2C+Baldessari+I+am+making+art#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:8af96623,vid:MOF3qhM6vIA,st:0
Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972) is a performance piece re-
scanned from an image on a monitor on which the vertical-
roll control was intentionally set off kilter. The visual effect is
of an image continuously rolling, vertically out of the frame
that deliberately interferes with the visual pleasure of
watching a woman on camera. Pg 5.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpstpzBDJ7s
‘Artists who wanted to experiment with controls beyond what was commercially available needed
to understand engineering...these artists worked collaboratively with scientists grounded in
electronics to design visualizing tools called video synthesizers to alter, control, and synthesize
video signals to produce abstract and highly colorized images...’ (5)

Nam June Paik, Participation TV, 1969. Video installation

with prepared TV monitor, microphone, audio amplifier.

A man working in a DuMont factory putting a television

set together circa 1950. Source: Getty Images. Visible in
the image is a cathode ray tube.
Nam Jun Paik, Magnet TV, 1974
 TV Buddha (1974)
Closed circuit video
installation, bronze
sculpture.

Nam June Paik TV

Sunglasses 1971 Collection
& © The Estate of Nam
June Paik
‘Editing equipment was expensive and very difficult to use; an edit could only be made through a
laborious process of rewinding and marking points on each of the two reels tape, then hitting the
edit button on the record and playback decks simultaneously. Since tapes were so hard to edit,
the video art piece was often the same duration as the reel of tape, hence the name “reel-time”
and the prevalence of 20, 30 and 60 minute pieces.’ (4)

Bruce Nauman, Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1968. Video, b&w, sound, 60 min. A fixed camera turned on
its side records Nauman repeating for nearly an hour a laborious sequence of body movements inspired by
passages in works by Samuel Beckett that describe similarly repetitive and meaningless activities. Source: EAI
Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971. Video, b&w, sound, 7:10 min. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's face, as
Acconci tries to pry open her closed eyes. A graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of
male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. Source: EAI
‘Feedback, the endless mirror effect that occurs when a camera is pointed directly at a monitor
displaying its image, and instant replay are unique visual characteristics of video that were
available to any artist with a camera, monitor, and recording deck...Instant replay, the capacity to
simultaneously watch what the camera is recording provides an opportunity for immediate
response to the recorded information...’ (5)

Nam June Paik, TV Buddha, 1974. Closed circuit video installation

with camera, TV monitor, and sculpture.
Joan Jonas, Left Side, Right Side, 1972. 9 mins. ‘Jonas explores the
ambiguities caused by her attempt to identify correctly the spatial
orientation of images simultaneously played back by a monitor and
reflected in a mirror.’ David Ross.
 ‘...a mirror to the self, consciousness, or cultural patterns
of subjectivity. it could function as a witness in the
surveillance of observer and the observed...’ (4)

Lisa Steele, Birthday Suit (With Scars and Defects), 1974. 13 mins. The artist showing various scars on her
body to the camera. http://s133370137.onlinehome.us/2020/05/31/birthday-suit-with-scars-and-defects-2/
‘Video screenings of new work expanded
across all types of venues and presented
many new opportunities for the exhibition
of video art–from museums, galleries,
alternative art spaces, and media arts
centers to community-based centers.’ (6)

‘By presenting single- or multi-channel

pieces as large-screen projections and
calling them limited editions, video has
been re-invented and popularized within
the gallery system. Limited editions also
resolved the problem of how to sell videos;
they were now bought, sold, collected and
auctioned like painting, drawing,
photography, and sculpture.’ (8)

Master copies of artist videotapes at V-Tape,

Toronto. V-Tape is media centre that distributes
and exhibits video art.
Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho, 1993. Alfred
Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho slowed down to
play over the course of 24 hours. Each frame
takes on a new visual and psychological intensity.
Many of the visual strategies in video of the ‘80s were based on
post-production technology, such as:

Multiple camera inputs,

Fades and wipes,
Slow motion,
Collage effects,
Scrolling text, and animation.
Pg 7.
‘Video was still considered to be an alternative to broadcast television, but...video artists of the
‘80s had become very interested in mastering the powerful state-of-the-art technology and even
showing their work on television. Since more funding was available for video, post-production
equipment became more accessible to video artists...An artist typically worked with a
professional editor for on-line editing to achieve broadcast-standard production values.’ (7)

General Idea, Shut the Fuck Up, 1979. 14:07 mins. A video about the media cliché of the artist, using clips from
TV programs, documentaries, and feature films intercut with statements and monologues by General Idea.
Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves, 2010. Nine-screen video installation, 55 mins. Inspired by the tragic
drowning of 20 Chinese cockle pickers in northwest England in 2004. Julien interweaves contemporary
Chinese culture with the fable of the sea goddess Mazu, who leads fishermen to safety. The installation is set in
modern and old Shanghai, fusing Eastern and Western traditions.
With new technological developments, artists were no longer
solely reliant on images made by them-selves with a camera but
could take images directly from television programming and
advertisements, archival films, Hollywood
films, or home movies.

Appropriation became a new type of post-modern visual

and textual critique based on uprooting images from their original
contexts and pro-scribed new meanings determined by the
artist.

Christian Marclay’s, The Clock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gSwtr3E4Fo

‘Video plays a very important cultural role as a kind of media trickster operating from the edge of
several different but often overlapping systems of communication: personal expression, the art
world, independent cinema, television, and academic studies.’ (8)

[Video is] ‘not a medium with a clear set of aesthetic properties and cleanly defined theoretical
concepts. Instead, one sees paradox, the paradox of video’s apparent merging of (hence its
negation of) certain cultural oppositions—art and technology, television and art, art and issues of
social change, collectives and individual artists, the art establishment and anti-establishment
strategies, profit and non-profit worlds, and formalism and content.’ (6) Marita Sturken

Candice Breitz, Working Class Hero

(A Portrait of John Lennon), 2006.
Twenty-five channel video
installation with synchronizable hard
drives, sound, 39:55 mins. 25
Lennon fans simultaneously
performing his 1970 album “Plastic
Ono Band.”
‘Deconstruction of media took on a darker and more urgent agenda as AIDS began to sweep
through the country in the mid-‘80s, infecting and killing huge numbers of people. Artists joined
up with AIDS activists to fight against rising hysteria caused by ignorance, omission, and
misinformation presented in mainstream media...’ (7)

‘A natural outgrowth of AIDS activism was a unification of the gay community and the rise of a
new queer cinema... Recognition and the need to establish specific historical and community
identities organized around shared experience as the Other drove identity politics, and many
important video works made from the perspectives of Asian, Hispanic, black, and urban youth
artists.’ (7)

DIVA TV, Like A Prayer, 1991. Video,

colour, sound, 28 mins. Damned
Interfering Video Activists) was a
video collective affiliated with the
activist organization ACT UP NY.
 Life Imitates Art Imitates Life…

Diana, Princess of Wales, chats with Wayne Taylor

at Casey House AIDS hospice in Toronto on
Oct. 26, 1991.
(note that the image has been copyrighted
by getty images)

And now, more than 30 years after Diana,

Princess of Wales, spent time talking and shaking
hands at Casey House in Toronto, that visit has
come to theatrical life, with the play
Casey and Diana opening at the Stratford Festival
in Stratford, Ont.,
Nam June Paik's 'Tiger Lives- Cello’ , on display at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.
It was introduced to the public on Jan. 1, 2000, at the 'DMZ 2000: The Millennium Celebration' concert held
at the Imjingak Pavilion in the city of Paju.
More about Paik: https://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=132150