Electromorphologies : pioneering video art and its language

Abstract

Since its inception, video has been a problematic medium to define. In his book Being & Time: The Emergence of Video Projection, Marc Meyer describes video’s enigmatic character and its unstable relationship with the plastic arts as one that “would connect it more appropriately to the temporal arts of music, dance, theater, literature or cinema” (Meyer, 1996). He explains that through a set of complicated electro-magnetic devices, “video is more an end than any one specific means; it is a series of electronic variations on an audio-visual theme that has been in continual progressive flux since its inception” (Meyer, 1996). When looking at the medium from the already established, plastic arts point of view, Meyer at the time of writing explains that “video’s theoretical and practical possibilities are so inconceivably vast, its versatility so immeasurably profound and of such perplexing unorthodoxy, that even after a quarter of a century, the medium’s defenders are still struck with vertiginous awe as if glimpsing the sublime”.