VIIDEI:O IINSTALL ATIONCHARACTEI:RSTICS OF AN EXPANDING MEDIIUM

ideo installations, with their multiple historic roots, are

unique hybrid art forms that represent the dominant

direction art-making has taken in the twentieth century

toward interdisciplinary boundary-crossing collaborations that

connect artists to new ideas and practices, while integrating media

technologies and systems into the art world. How can we begin

to define these ephemeral, protean art forms that have become

increasingly dominant artistic modes of expression? In this essay,

I will first identify some of the significant cultural, conceptual, and

technological characteristics that define video installations; I will

then examine three video installations by first-generation artists who

helped define the medium.

The history of early video installations is imbedded in the larger

histories of video as an art form. According to Michael Nash, "It

was said a decade ago (by Bill Viola) that video art may have been

the only art form to have a history before it had a history, and now

its history is 'history' before we had a chance to mourn its passing."'

As an artistic genre, video has become increasingly visible and more

predominant in the hyper-mediated world of the early twenty-

first century. Since video's emergence as a distinct technology

and art form in the mid-1960s, artists-painters, sculptors, and

poets-quickly found in it an expressive medium. Video is now

an inexpensive, accessible image-making tool for artists, and

many of today's artists working in the plastic and performing arts

incorporate video into their dances, theatrical productions, musical

performances, sculptural pieces, and multimedia installations.

From its beginnings, video technology used by artists represented

a complex, multidimensional set of processes, interrogations, and

oppositional practices that extended video beyond the traditional

art world due to the ephemeral and technological nature of the

final "product" of videotape and live transmission. Early video

artists tackled a number of larger political, socioeconomic, and

telecommunications issues that were just beginning to be recognized

by the general public in the late 1960s.

There is no one "official" version of video art's history because of

its international and heterogeneous nature as part of a larger set of

histories. A primary set of histories that began to define video art

took place in the 1960s when the technology was first introduced.

John Hanhardt, one of the first media arts curators in the United

States, witnessed much of the early history and has written about

it extensively In 1988, he described how some of the major

mid-twentieth century art movements contributed to the initial

emergence of video art:

The potential of artists' video was first apparent in the late

1950s and early 1960s, when the art object and its sources were

being re-evaluated in the diverse movements of Pop, Fluxus,

Happenings, Minimalism, lettrism, avant-garde film and the

intertextual and multi-media programs of performances and

dance. All these movements rejected the notion of the heroic,

existential artist-self portrayed in Abstract Expressionism.

The metaphysics of the Action Painter's canvas was replaced

by the matter-of-fact and everyday... One of the inescapable

facts of daily life was the omnipresence of television. From the

initial questioning in the early 1960s of the myth and power

of television to the expansion of technology's potentials in the

1980s, artists have sought to question assumptions of art and

art-making.2

As Hanhardt explained, video art helped reshape and redefine the

nature of art and art-makingin the last century through its conceptual

links to larger cultural and technological histories, especially

television, which had already begun to change people's perceptions

of the world. This blending of aesthetic and technological forces

emphasizes video art's unique legacy

Video art also emerged out of a turbulent era defined by a larger set

of radical social and political issues in the late 1960s.Just as Sony

was marketing the Portapak video recorder in the mid-1960s, the

political landscape in the U.S. was exploding with antiwar protests,

counterculture be-ins, civil rights actions, and new theories of

media introduced in the popular press from the writings of Marshall

McLuhan and others. As a result of these larger converging

cultural, technological, and social forces, video is not only an art

world phenomenon. As Marita Sturken explains, "This is a medium

whose development embodies many dichotomies of Western

culture, whose position at the axis of art, electronic technology,

and telecommunications offers a problematic subject for historical

interpretation that has no direct antecedents."3

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If video art is a problematic art form to define, video installations are

even more ambiguous in terms of their historical roots and unique

characteristics. At their most basic, video installations are spatial

and temporal art forms that can include the elements of audio and

video/moving images, sculptural forms, and other visual static or

moving elements situated and aesthetically constructed in a three-

dimensional space. They also lend themselves to larger cultural

and socioeconomic explorations. As Margaret Morse suggests in

Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (1991 ):

... exploring the materialization of the conceptual through all

the various modes available to our heavily mediated society

is at the heart of the cultural function of video installation.

In that sense, the "video" in video installation stands for

contemporary image-culture per se. Then, each installation is

an experiment in the redesign of the apparatus that represents

our culture to itself: a new disposition of machines that project

the imagination onto the world and that store, recirculate, and

display images; and, a fresh orientation of the body in space

and a reformulation of visual and kinesthetic experience.4

Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art's Anne & Joel

Ehrenkranz Curator, elaborates on "a fresh orientation of the body

in space" when she describes an installation as "a hybrid work of

art which demands a critical distance (and) the physical presence

of the viewer to complete the work.... Critical distance enables

the viewer to move between immersion and contemplation so that

he/she can both experience and analyze the work's intentions and

contents. The viewer's physical presence is crucial because the

elements of video installations are arranged by the artist as part

of a larger gestalt in a complex cybernetic loop of technology and

mind/body that form a conversational communication system of

sender (artist) and receiver (audience).

Video installations encapsulate three approaches to art-making--

representational, presentational, and perceptual-which help to

define their protean form and content. Hanhardt described what he

called the "expanded forms" of video installations as both the visual

(representational) and performance (presentational) art forms of"collage" and "de-collage" that create an "intertextual" language,

including critiques of media's language. As he explained in 1990:

The spectacular history of the expanded forms of video

installation can be seen as an extension of the representational

techniques of collage into the temporal and spatial dimensions

provided by video monitors placed in an intertextual dialogue

with other materials.... The technique of de-collage in video

installation also extends performance and multimedia into a

critique of the social and ideological by deconstructing existing

constructions of communication technologies and industries.6

The presentational aspects of video installations also foreground

their connection to the larger cultural rebellion against the art

establishment during the late 1950s and early 1960s. When video

first became accessible to artists, it represented a way they could

defiantly work outside the traditional art world to explore video's

distinctive non-art world features of time-based processes including

recording and altering real time; recording and transforming the flow

of broadcast television; and creating a spatial or conceptual critical

distance from the usual televisual and cinematic viewing experience.

Both the representational and presentational aspects of video

installations are grounded in the art world. The third aspect,

perceptual, revolves around the "live" quality of video and links it

to the counterculture movement that embraced Eastern and Native

American religions, cybernetic systems theory, environmental

awareness, and psychedelic explorations using mind-altering drugs

for expanding consciousness. Video's unique phenomenon of

"liveness," manifested in the ability to record and playback real time,

came close to simulating some of those subjective and technology-

based processes. "Liveness" enabled artists to explore psychological

states of mind, levels of consciousness, interior vs. exterior realities,

communication processes, and the body's multi-sensory relationship

to both the technologically based media and natural environments.

These perceptual explorations also link to the technological history

of cinema and the media of film and television. Hanhardt wrote

about this connection:

Video works exploring the artist's relationship to the world

around him/her have proliferated since process and site-

specific land art of the 1960s and 1970s dematerialized the art

object. Part of this response to a landscape/place derives from

a unique property of the video medium-the property that

allows an artist to see immediately the image that is recorded

on videotape. This is unlike film celluloid-which must be

processed before the image can be screened. The power of

this essential, indeed central, capacity of video was to have

a subtle and profound impact on how the medium itself was

employed. Even prerecorded video carries an immediacy

born from its electronic nature and the almost mythological

connotations of video as a "live" medium. This mystique of

"live" television, which began in the commercial sector during

television's "golden age" of live telecast, continues today in the

use of the home video camera recorder and player....'

Three historical works by first-generation artists exemplify many

of the unique characteristics just described. In 1969 Howard

Wise, a wealthy New York City art dealer who was interested in

art that incorporated "new" technologies such as kinetic and fight

sculptures, organized the exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium"

in his gallery. Presenting the works of twelve artists, this seminal

event in the history of video art explored a wide set of issues both

FACING PAGE

Nam June Paik's "Participation TV" from the exhibition "TV as aCreative Medium" (1969); courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix

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within and outside the traditional art world. It was the first group

exhibition in the U.S. to identify and reify video as a new art form

and art-making tool. (Soon after the exhibition, Wise closed his

gallery in order to fully support the emerging art form of video.

In 1971, he established the nonprofit organization Electronic

Arts Intermix, which has grown into one of the major video art

distributors in the world.)

All the artists in "TV as a Creative Medium" explored the larger

issues around the then-new concept of a "media environment,"

and especially the phenomenon of television. They presented ideas

of how society consciously and unconsciously is shaped by the

pervasive landscape of a manmade communications ecology where

radio, telephones, and television are ubiquitous technologies in the

home and workplace. The exhibition also expressed a utopian,

McLuhanesque vision of a "global village" of instant communication

and expression through the electronic medium of video/television

that anticipated today's wireless world. These were revolutionary

ideas signaling a new technological force in art-making practices

that would change the very meaning of art. Sturken, in her 1984

article inAferivmage about Wise, describes this landmark show:

[It] effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art

form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned

for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future

advocates of video.... Theoretically, they variously saw video

as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience,

a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural

machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with

a heady optimism about the future of communications, these

artists used video as an information tool and as a means of

gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as

an art form.8

Thus, this show signaled artists' connections to larger ideas and issues

found outside the art world such as the counterculture movement.

One of the key works in the show was "Wipe Cycle" (1969), created

by Ira Schneider, a filmmaker, and Frank Gillette, a painter. Gillette

was able to gain access to a Portapak video recorder through

Paul Ryan, McLuhan's research assistant at his Center for Media

Understanding at Fordham University in the Bronx. "Wipe Cycle"

is often mentioned in the historical writings about "TV as a Creative

Medium" as the most successful and intriguing work in the show. It

represented the artists' view of video as "a cultural machine to be

deconstructed" and was one of the earliest uses of video surveillance

in an artwork to incorporate the viewer directly into the real-time

imagery of the piece. It was also one of the first video installations

to directly address the larger issues around communications media

and their pervasiveness in a larger "media ecology" that blurred

the boundaries between the body and the phenomenon of recorded

(time past) and real time (time present) displayed on a TV screen.

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The installation consisted of a 3- x 3-foot wall of nine color TV

monitors. Intercut with broadcast images, live images, captured from

a camera hidden amid the monitors, were fed to the center screen,

shifting to outer monitors in eight- and sixteen-second intervals.

The work situated the viewer in a space where he/she felt firsthand

the simultaneity of time present and time past as a visceral response

to being "inside" the immaterial media space of network television,

which itself is a blend of multiple, simultaneous time periods.

Video art curator Kathy Rae Huffman has recently described video

artists' explorations of real and virtual spaces in installations that

demonstrate their early colonization of cyberspace:

In the earliest actual practice, video was used in the same way

as surveillance devices are today: itwas employed to keep watch

over and to observe reality... It was ... a valuable experience

that facilitated artists' understanding of electronic space,

memory and video's ability to document experience in real

time.... This act-creating electronic territory and involving

the viewer in it as a physical entity-is a direct predecessor

to contemporary, interactive multimedia art and immersive

technology. Installation artists introduced strong concepts of

both psychological and physiological territory, and advanced

an awareness of extended boundaries, as well as an electronic

ability to define space, time, and energy9

Another work in the Wise show, "Participation TV" (1969), was

created by Nam June Paik, a key figure in video art history. Paik

was one of the first artists to take on the phenomenon of broadcast

television as both a sculptural icon and a powerful communications

ABOVE

Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette's "Wipe Cycle" from theexhibition "TV as a Creative Medium" (1969); courtesy ofElectronic Arts IntermixFACING PAGE

Still from video/sound installation "Room for St. John of theCross" (1983) by Bill Viola; photo by Kira Perov

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medium. Hanhardt wrote about Paik in his essay for The Luminous

Image video installation catalog in 1984:

The transformation of television into a post-modern art form

came about through Paik's understanding of the socialpresence

and meaning of television. To Paik the popular perception of

television as only a mass commodity of entertainment, or as

simply a radio with pictures, was shortsighted and he set out

as an artist to both demystify and change it. As he expressed

... television represented a new communications technology

of enormous potential and signaled the beginning of a post-

industrial age where manufacturing, the organization of

society, and the making of art would be transformed.1

In "Participation T17" Paik worked with engineers to distort the live

signals from several television cameras that were displayed on multiple

monitors. The name "Participation TV" is an ironic comment on

the actual one-way, non-participatory nature of broadcast television.

Paik's revolutionary views about television and its relationship to

the artist and society came out of his training as a musician and his

active participation in the New York-based Fluxus movement, which

Hanhardt describes as "anti-high art ... that resulted in events which

highlighted the materiality of consumer culture.""I

Out of this fertile environment of new ideas and technologically

based art-making processes, Paik began to develop a new way of

thinking about television and its role in society. Paik's "Participation

TV" was one of many early approaches to making video/TV

artworks that included the "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" (1969)

series with cellist Charlotte Moorman, also seen for the first time at

the Wise exhibit. Television's sculptural element is represented by the

single TV monitor on a stand, with several video cameras focused to

capture both a wide shot and the viewer's face as a close-up image

on the screen. It is similar to "Wipe Cycle" because it uses a closed-

circuit video surveillance system that posits the viewer as an active

performer inside a live electronic image/playback loop where he/

she performs as both viewer and actor in real and televisual space.

This almost visceral connection linking the physical human body in

actual space to a real-time virtual representation on a video screen

has become a defining characteristic of video installations. New media

critic Holly Willis elaborates in her recent book about digital cinema:

Video installation's focus on the body is not insignificant. The

relationship between the body and technology has grown

increasingly complex over the last decade such that to speak of one

is to speak of the other Body and machine become co-extensive,

and yet the predominant trope for understanding the relationship

between the two tends to presuppose a desire to be rid of the body

altogether, or to view technology as a prosthesis.Y'

These two video installations are also distinctive because they

represent the mutability of time in all its simultaneous past, present,

and future tenses. Morse also distinguishes between two types of

video installations that present Time, the first type describing both

"Wipe Cycle" and "Participation TV," which, she states:

explore the fit between images and the built environment....

Two types of video installation art can be differentiated by

tense. Closed-circuit video plays with "presence" .... Shifting

back and forth between two and three dimensions, closed-

circuit installations explore the fit between images and the

built environment and the process of mediating identity and

power. [Secondly, t]he recorded-video art installation can be

compared to the spectator wandering about on a stage.... That

is, the technique for raising referent worlds to consciousness is

not mimesis, but simulation.'3

Morse's second type describes installations in the 1980s that attempted

to create immersive architectural environments through the use of

large-screen cinematic video projection. They expanded the earlier-

articulated cybernetic communication cycle of viewer and media

technology beyond the single surveillance mode into more complex

loops that included narratives and simulations of altered states of

consciousness. They also situated the viewer inside the work as an

active participant, connecting the body to a range of media-based

phenomena that were potentially (and intentionally) transformative.

"Room for St. John of the Cross" by Viola, first shown in 1983,

indicates how video installations quickly expanded into separate,

controllable spaces intended to be dramatic, immersive environments

through the artful combination of sound, lighting, and the use of

multiple monitors and projected video images on walls or screens.

Viola's installations are designed to remove the audience from the

usual gallery experience of viewing multiple static visual artworks

in a large space. They give the viewer a more intense, theatrical

experience of entering a private space much like that of a movie

or live theater. The darkened space is charged with narrative,

multisensory elements that situate the viewer as an active participant

inside an environment. As Viola has said, there is no "outside" to

the piece. Once viewers enter the dark space of the large room, they

are enveloped by the work, which negates distancing or objectivity.

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In 1988, media art historian Deirdre Boyle wrote a detailed

description of the piece:

Within a large room is a smaller room-a low hut that invokes

the cell in which the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, who was

imprisoned by the Catholic church and tortured, composed

his most profound mystical poetry. By enclosing his room

within the larger room of the installation itself, Viola creates a

dialectic between interior and exterior space. And through the

metaphysics implicit in the geometry of opposites--inside and

outside, being and non-being-Viola confers spatiality upon

thought. The larger room is dark, except for one wall where a

video projection screen emits a dim light as a camera dizzily

scans the bleak horizon of jagged unsurmountable mountain

tops. A roaring wind resounds in the space, and the viewer

feels buffeted and menaced by all that is hostile .... But in the

very center of this stormy negative space a warm light inside

the small hut glows through a window... The dialectical

opposition between interior and exterior space reflects the

psychological reality of St.John's mystical experience ... 14

This installation is exemplary of video artists' early use of projected

video to create immersive, even transformative viewer experiences.

This close reading of three early video installations reveals

approaches to making art that are more about systems and

process, interaction with the viewer, and subjective explorations

and transformations than they are about art as object, image, or

genre. Artists such as Viola were interested in exploring new ways

of perceiving, experiencing, and making meaning with all our

senses, while others such as Gillette, Paik, and Schneider explored

the increasingly permeable membrane that separates what is now

called "cyberspace." Video installation artists embraced change

and fluidity, dialogue and communication systems, and subjective

explorations of consciousness and reality as central to their artistic

practices. These artists also tackled scientific concepts of time and

space and intuitively recognized how technology transforms people

into information by inserting them into the global flow of electronic

impulses through the use of video cameras and screens capturing

their images in real time.

In Installation Art in the New Millenium: The Empire of the Senses (2004),

Nicolas De Oliveira defines the current state of installations that

embrace video installations as part of larger, fluid forms that self-

consciously push on their own boundaries as they connect artists to

their audiences:

Earlier attempts to define Installation art by medium alone

failed because it is in the nature of the practice itself to

challenge its own boundaries. This questioning process

constitutes a discourse which investigates the relationships

between the artist and the audience. Installation is therefore

defined by this process, something that has led artists to work

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with materials and methodologies not traditionally associated

with the visual arts.... Marshall McLuhan was one of the key

theorists writing in the early 1960s to address the impact that

information technology would have on global culture. This

formula predicts the shift from objective critique towards a

new subjectivity which emphasizes uncertainty and brings both

artist and viewer together in a discursive environment. 5

As early forms of installation art, video installations define a unique

set of characteristics and issues in contemporary art practice and

discourse that are centered on the cybernetic processes of the body's

real-time interactions with technology, the media environment,

and alternative realities. Video installations can now be defined as

hybrid art forms that were the first to introduce media technologies

as legitimate art-making tools into the cloistered, privileged spaces

of museums and art galleries. They also explore a wide range of

phenomena outside the art world that connect human consciousness

to new techniques involving video surveillance systems and the body

located in simultaneous times and spaces. Finally, video installations

introduce a critical awareness of technology and the media

environment as a pervasive landscape into art world discourse

and demonstrate how media technologies continue to change the

process of art-making and the very nature of art.

ROBIN OPPENHEIMER is a PhD student in the School of Interactive Arts andTechnology at Simon Fraser Universit in Vancouver

NOTES 1. Michael oash, "Pinion After Television: Teehnocultmral Convergence, Hypermedio, and

the New Media Arts Fmld" in Michael Renao and Erika Suderburg eut, Resolutions (Minneapalis:

Universiy ofMinnesona Pres; 1995),382. Z John Hanhard; "77e Disourse of Landscape Widea Art

From Fiaxur to Post-Mademnism," in William Judson, ed, American Landscape Video (Pittsburgh:

Carnegie Mnsenm of Art, 1988), 70. 3. Marita Siunken, "Paradav in the Elolution of an Art Farm:

Great Expeclationa and the Making of a Hisloy" in Doug Hall and Sal!y Jo Fifef, edA, Illuminating

Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (San Francisco:Aperture/BAVC, 1990), 106. 4. Margaret

Morse "F•oeo Installation Art. The Body the Image, the Spare in Betamen" in Illuminating Videc,

153. 5. Chrissie Iles, "Sins and Interpretation: Time-baosed Installation in the Eighties" in Chiissie Ilek,Signs of the Times (Oxfordo Museum of Modern Art, 1990), 19. 6. Hanhardt, "De-collage/Collage:

Xotes Toward a Reexamination of the Orighu of Video Art" in Illuminating Video, 79. Z Hanhardt,

1988, 64. 8. Saurken, "TVas a CreativeMedium: Howard WIue and VFdm Art," Afterimage 15hlone

11, na 10 L7nne 1984), 2._9. Katly Rae Huffnan, "Video andArchitecture" in Tminothy Druckerg ed,

Ars Electironica: Facing the Future (Cambridge, AM: MIT Pras, 1999), 138. 10. Hanhardt,"Video Art Expanded Fornks Xotes toward a History" in Dorise Mignot, ed., The Luminous Image(Amsterdam: Stedel#k Munmeun 1984), 57-8. IL Hanhardt4 'The Discourse of Landscape Video ArtFrom Fluxus to Post-Maderni.m " 73. 12. Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the

Moving Image (London andNew Fork- W4l#flower, 2005), 76. 13. Morse, 157-8. 14. Deirdre Boyle,"Bill Vioa'os Phenmnenology of the Soul" in Marilyn Zeitlin, ed, Bill Viola: Survey of a Decade

(Houston: Contempera!y Arts Museum, 1988), 9-10. 15. Vicolas De Oliveira, Nicola O.YejA and

Michael Petg, Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London:

Thames & Hudson, 2004), 13-14.

ERRATUM

In the feature article by Melinda Barlow in the January/February

2007 issue, the photographs of Janie Geiser's installation "The

Spider's Wheels" were taken by Geiser, not by Barlow,

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TITLE: VIDEO INSTALLATION: CHARACTERISTICS OF ANEXPANDING MEDIUM

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