For the beginner artist who has a flair for drawing and painting these being the routes through which most people enter in practising the Fine Arts, media such as Video art can be initially intimidating and confusing

It is often felt that Video or Digital Video is something more associated with the media, with movie making, documentary and music video. Those videos that are classed as Fine Art often seem abstract, confusing, and sometimes so simple as to warrant very little in the way of real ‘skill’.

How to Look at Video Art

Video art essentially differs from most other art forms in that it expresses the flow of time and movement. It differs from performance art, however, in that it can be edited so that the flow of time is interrupted. This is often used to give a disorientating effect, reflective of the busy times we live in.

Video Art surfaced some time in the mid to late 1960’s with various artists claiming that they were the first to record video pieces. Naim June Paik, for example claims to have made the first video artwork, in recording the Pope’s tour of New York in 1965, before screening it across town on the same day.

This is disputed, but it is certain that the distribution of hand held portable video cameras at this time was quickly seized upon by artists keen to show easily transmittable and edited images, which made the moving image something not just the preserve of those who could afford major film studios, or those who had the time and expertise to develop expensive reels of film.

Video art essentially offers two things to the artist today – a cheap, easily screened motion medium, and a medium that is easy to edit on home systems. Digital Video, which has a quality slightly different to traditional video art, and mobile phone motion cameras have made video art as easy to make as a drawing (sometimes, arguably, easier). The ease of editing has led to a wide variety of effects being incorporated within Video Art and the manipulation of video in much the way that audio recordings are mixed. One artist, Sven Konig has created a system in which video can be played in such a way that the viewer can sing into a computer program which will then play the part of the video back which correlates most closely to the musical pitch they are singing. In this way new songs and new videos can be made by people with little or no technical skill.

Essentially, the use of video, which can now be uploaded and played on sites such as YouTube, enables a greater freedom to artists in making and distributing their work and is indicative of a major change in the arts away from galleries and large institutions and towards greater accessibility.

Despite this, Video Art, being as versatile as it is, is sometimes used to evoke the grandeur of old master painting, as in the work of Bill Viola, whose huge slow motion paintings of moving bodies in water evoke a mythical element. Clearly Video Art is here to be used in whatever way the artist feels comfortable, thus providing a medium of expression on a myriad of different accessible levels.