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Video

Last revised 9/1/2014. Return to Major concepts. See also cinema (for statistics and comparison), animation, games, television.

- Our posts and references.  

We concentrate here on conceptual considerations and the state of the art. The historical development of the field is described, period after period, in our history of digital art.

In 2017, a Video Mapping dedicated website Projection Mapping.

Video as an art for itself

Video is an art in itself (practiced "videasts". From the 90's, its mainly digital, at least at low level (cameras, formats). Grassroot forms of video art suit now every pocket and every level of talent, since cameras are included even in basic models of cell phones. That's not to say that every father filming the kids on the beach is really an artist... (but, who knows ?). But we can add that the millions of surveillance cameras may become a sort of robot video artists.. On the least do these cams provide inspiration as well as row material for many artistes (See surveillance).

The expression "video art" ... "is now rejected even by those who contributed to establishing it in the past" writes [Quaranta] p. 31.

Among artists using specifically this form or art, let's quote:
Bill Viola, the most famed.
Allante Claire France (strongly generative abstract patterns).
Dupouy Marcel , since the 80's uses analog tools to transform video flows, generating abstract patterns and combine the two modes.

Projection mapping can be done on paintingsn, see below.

Glitch. "Distortion experimentations or plastic utilization of the medium had yet been attempted by TV directors like Ernie Kovacs (as soon as 1957 in the US) and Jean-Christophe Averty (in France, in the same period), or artist like Lucio Fontana in 1952. (Parfait, p. 21) and more in line with the present state of the art, by Jacques Perconte.

Video combined with sculpture

Video, be it gotten from a camera or from a generative process, is a difficult to protect intellectual property and tax-free asset. Combination with sculpture gives it the proper statute of a work of art, unique and legally well defined.

Video mapping, or Projection mapping, a technique for projection of light on volume, possibly with illusionist effects. Wikipedia.
- Main art applications: projection on a sculpted face (creating the impression of a moving and emotional face, done by many artists), and projection on monuments. Is done also on drawings and paintings by transmedia.

. Music is sold on DVD's, with images accompanying the music files, or live concert recordings.
. Genetic art, is transformed in video, for better facility of communication, and possibility of perennity.
. Films, or course.
. Painting. From an existing canvas, the camera may create a film by its moves around, zooms in and out, or environment changes (lighting, hours of the day). The camera may also film a painter in action as a sort of performance. See for instance Michel Batlle, with of course the historical (pre-video) The mystery of Picasso (Wikipedia) by Clouzot.
. Performance of all sorts (dance, theater, conferences and their image presentations) find there the one and only opportunity of perennality. An artist like Donald Abad transforms his performances, as well as his interactive contraptions, into short videos.

Video and is standard formats is also a way of reuse and remix in the present convergence of media, from archives and broadcast to live performance. On the other way round, VJ transform video recordings into new performances, in the "digital magma" [Leloup 2013]

Some references

- Video distribution, free : Dailymotion and Youtube. To do profit on it Dacast.
- Video synthesizer. Wikipedia

< Digital video and HD. Algorithms and interfaces. by Charles Poynton . MK 2012.
< Designing a system for supporting the process of making a video sequence. by Shigeki Amitami and Ernest Edmonds. 11 pages in [Adams].
< Notes in [Foley] and in [Meredieu].
< L'art vidéo aujourd'hui. by Stéphane Moisdon (Beaux-Arts éditions 2008). Nearly nothing digital.
- Cutting and sequences, retrieval in bases AH No 131 (interview of Stéphane Bres).
- Video on IP. AH No 78 (concepts).
- Video for cooperative design AH No 125 (interview of Wendy Mackay)
- Automated video animation creation , see "film maker robot"? AH No 64 (biblio).
< Le guide de la vidéo numérique, by Laurence Beauvais, Thierry Gérard and Stéphan Schreiber. Dunod 2003.
< Booster - La vidéo numérique by J. Dunn . Dunod 2003.
< Vidéo, un art contemporain. by Françoise Parfait. Editions du Regard, Paris, 2001. An important document on video art. It shows the progressive digitization of moving images by fragmentation, from cinema (fragmentation of time into frames), analog televisision (fragmentation of frames into lines) then digital video (fragmentation of lines into pixels). It shows also how, each time, artists make use of the possibilities of the new technologies... and their limits (glitch).
< Are you afraid of Servaas? an article by Annie Jourdan, in Art Press, Feb. 1990. Not digial. Can be compared with Nam Jun Paik.
-<Vidéo et société virtuelle. by Alfred Willener, Guy Milliard and Alex Ganty. Tema Communication, 1972.