The Unification of the Senses: Intermediality in Video Art-Music

ABSTRACT

The electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between them.

The beginning of the twenty-first century is the perfect time to attempt a historical contextualization of video art and music. The format, with its easily operable, inexpensive, reusable design, did not become available until the mid-1960s, and thus is approaching its first half-century. Enticed not only by the audio-visual possibilities of video, but also by its connection to the prevailing cultural climate (most notably the rise of television), artists and composers at the more daring edge of innovation were among the first to seize on this new creative format, readily incorporating the experimental technology into their work. The ability of video to record and play back sound and image simultaneously was one of its most alluring features, as it presented a rare opportunity to create a form of visual music. Able to produce and maintain creative control over the visual and audio elements of their work, those working with the new technology were often both artists and musicians. As a result, such practitioners, working mainly in America and the UK, initiated a radical and important break with the traditional artist/musician divide.

The opportunity to explore the new possibilities of video was first taken by the ‘father of video art’, Korean-born Nam June Paik: on 4 October 1965, he travelled the streets of New York with a portable video camera in a journey that kick-started an explosive revolution in art and music circles.1 Resident by this time in America, the artist took a cab home with his newly acquired camera. When the journey was delayed by a traffic jam, Paik, with true Fluxus spontaneity, made his first video piece. Pope Paul VI was visiting the city to address the United Nations, and Paik recorded the commotion caused as his convoy paraded the streets. Because the Portapak could be inputted directly into a television monitor, Paik was able to show his tape at the Café-a-Go-Go, Greenwich Village (a popular haunt of artists and musicians) that evening, so bringing closer together creation and display in a way that was to characterize many of his later works. The widespread significance of this date was signalled recently by Miami Art Central's 2006 presentation of the Pompidou Centre's video and multimedia installations entitled Video: An Art, A History, 1965–2005: New Media Collection, Centre Pompidou.2 MAC's ‘history’ of video begins with the year in which the Sony Portapak – the equipment that Paik purchased on 4 October – became commercially available.

When compared with the length of time it took for photography to be accepted as an artistic discipline (as the most recent example of a ‘new’ mode of expression), video's rapid rise to success is rather astonishing. Today, audio-visual video pieces are collected and commissioned by the main art galleries, museums and concert halls worldwide, and are found in both permanent and touring art collections and on some of the largest opera stages. It is commonly believed that this acceptance of audio-visual video into the museum and gallery world was signalled by the first two major retrospectives of video artist-composers: in 1982, the Whitney Museum of American Art became the first American museum to exhibit video work when a retrospective of Paik's sculptural moving-image pieces such as TV Garden (1974–8) and TV Clock (1963–81) was held; five years later, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presented its first large-scale video exhibition with a Bill Viola retrospective.3 But evidence of institutional acceptance can be found much earlier. During the early to mid-1970s, for instance, the Everson Museum of Art hired its first video curator; MoMA established a video department; and the Whitney Museum created a film and video gallery (although a permanent collection was not introduced until 1997).4 By 1976 most of the major galleries and museums in America had exhibited video pieces, and both the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) had begun to support the format financially.

Although the video format quickly became one of the most innovative creative materials of the twentieth century, by 1995 the technology was already being superseded by the more resilient and reliable DVD system, with its longer playback capability and higher-definition output. Only eight years later, DVDs were the preferred format for weekly film rentals in America: today video is as obsolete as audiotape, with new films no longer released on the format and replacement cassettes for camcorders and home recording units increasingly difficult to come by.5 In what appears to be an even quicker turnover, the DVD format is being pushed aside by Microsoft's High Definition DVD and Sony's Blu-ray technology (launched commercially in late 2007). The development of artistic material, in other words, has attained an unprecedented velocity, in which formats are advanced and discarded in the blink of a historical eye. In terms of its technical rise and fall, then, video can be considered a closed genre. As the digital age marks the demise of video usage, we are faced with an epoch that is already almost complete, a phenomenon rarely encountered before in the visual and sonic arts.

In one sense, however, this closure is a false one. Practitioners such as Viola, who represented America at both the Forty-Sixth and Fifty-Second Venice Biennales (1995 and 2007 respectively), may have swapped their material preference from magnetic to digital formats, but they have nevertheless retained many fundamental aesthetic aspects of video art. In fact, the shift between formats has been so seamless that moving-image work continues to be collected under the term ‘video art’ despite the obvious technological inaccuracy. While it is true, then, that video technology is now redundant in terms of recording and playback, the implications of audio-visual fusion that it stimulated are still thriving. Many contemporary video practitioners, for instance, continue to embrace the audio-visuality of the medium and take charge of both image and sound: Sabrina Pena identifies herself as both ‘avant-garde composer’ and ‘video artist’, while Kathy Hinde prefers the term ‘interdisciplinary artist’ to describe her video work with music and image.6 The equipment may have evolved, then, but aspects of its technological basis and the opportunities for synthesis it affords continue to inform the new digital age.

That video extended well beyond its technological lifespan demonstrates the impact the technology had on the arts. Although occupying a comparatively tiny segment of visual and music histories, video work became so influential as to outlive its own means of expression. Moreover, as a genre, video work continues to grow in popularity and recognition despite departing from its technological namesake. The Turner Prize was won by video artists in 1996 (Douglas Gordon), 1997 (Gillian Wearing) and 1999 (Steve McQueen), for instance, and the Hugo Boss Prize, a biannual international award administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, has awarded first place to moving-image artists in all but one of its competitions.7 As further recognition of video art's integral and evolving position within the art canon, London's Tate Modern has recently begun to build a £215 million extension that will be devoted exclusively to video art, installation and photography: ‘The world has changed rapidly over the last ten years, particularly in how we use technology. Tate Modern needs to respond to new developments,’ explains the published proposal outlining the changes.8 ‘New developments’ are similarly afoot in Yong-In, South Korea, where the $31 million Nam June Paik Museum, the ‘world's first museum devoted exclusively to video and media art’, is currently under construction.9

As contemporary video practitioners such as Pena and Hinde, mentioned above, have continued to work with the audio-visual possibilities of the medium, composers, music directors and concert venue managers have demonstrated an interest in including these ‘new developments’ in their work with increasing frequency: Steve Reich's collaborative project with his video-artist wife Beryl Korot, The Cave, a six-screen, vocal-instrumental multimedia theatre work (premièred at the Theater Messe Palast, Vienna, 16 May 1993), and Viola's partnership with Peter Sellars for a production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Opéra Bastille, Paris, June 2005) are two of the most publicized examples of video practice being closely combined with music composition and performance.10 The use of video as part of an opera's staging has also become increasingly common: Katie Mitchell's production of Mozart's Idomeneo ( June 2010) at English National Opera, for instance, made use of video projections (by Fifty Nine Productions) to depict sea- and landscapes, and Jocelyn Pook's Ingerland, part of a trio of new pieces gathered under the heading ‘Opera Shots’ (2010) at the Royal Opera House, included videotaped interviews with football supporters.11

Today, then, video pieces routinely collected by major art galleries and frequently used as a component in music performance are recognized as a valid and well-respected genre; it is difficult to imagine anything different. But such recognition was not always forthcoming, and critical and institutional acceptance was hard won (although it is important to note that many artists and composers working with video were actively opposed to institutionalization and that, in some sense, the achievement of video in reaching into the heart of the academic establishment signals the loss of its early radical attitude, a problematic inclusion also faced by the avant-garde artists and composers).12 During the early years of video work, the audio-visual format came head to head (often intentionally) with centuries of art exhibition and music performance traditions: it challenged the sanctity of music and art spaces, their ritual and symbolical conventions of listening and viewing that were already under threat from a radically evolving socio-cultural context in the early 1960s in light of contested civil rights, anti-war sentiments, feminism and the anti-commodity aesthetic.

One of the main reasons for this was the very ‘newness’ of the artistic material. Because the video medium, in its portable format, became available only in 1965, it appeared to promise an art form with little historical baggage and no clear material lineage to refer to, despite its initially apparent similarities to film (as will be discussed later): video ‘had no tradition’, contends critic David A. Ross. ‘It was the precise opposite of painting. It had no formal burdens at all.’13 As there have been few instances in music and art histories in which a completely new resource has become available (examples that have had a profound effect on music practices include the piano and print technology), the technology's nascent quality was a great allure to video artists and critics alike. Paik, for instance, frequently praised video's promise of liberation from traditional art techniques: ‘As collage technique replaced oil paint,’ he writes, ‘so the cathode-ray tube will replace canvas […] as precisely as Leonardo / as freely as Picasso / as colourfully as Renoir / as profoundly as Mondrian / as violently as Pollock and / as lyrically as Jasper Johns.’14 Although his reference to other artists and techniques postulates a familial connection with different media, Paik nevertheless speaks of ‘replacing’ them with this brand-new material.

Filippo Marinetti, founder of the Futurist movement, admired variety theatre because it had ‘no tradition, no masters, no dogma’.15 Video, as newly developed equipment, seemed to come with an even greater promise of historical independence. Like those working with broadcast television and film, video artists had often to learn how to use the equipment from scratch, and this was seen by many as a distinct advantage: in his influential, yet somewhat utopian, book Expanded Cinema, Gene Youngblood argued in 1970 that ‘to explore new dimensions of awareness requires new technological extensions’, a completely new medium that could emancipate artists and musicians from old habits and learnt behaviours.16

Heralded as one of the few really new art forms of the twentieth century, then, video art attracted practitioners who resisted attempts to ascribe to their work a past, preferring instead to operate within the generic and historical free space that video seemed to offer; enjoying a ‘new life’, as it were.17 To put it in the words of early video artist Scott Bartlett: ‘There's a whole new story to be told thanks to the new techniques: we must find out what we have to say because of our new technologies.’18 But did the ‘new technologies’ really engender a ‘whole new’ form of artistic creativity that began only in 1965, as MAC and the Pompidou Centre would have it? I suggest that video work, far from having no past, in fact has a double history that can be traced back centuries before 1965: it is the result of a musical and artistic convergence. The inclusion of sound and music into video art's mixture was a natural extension from Fluxus, where artists had begun to unfold their work through time in happenings and so on; simultaneously, composers both within the group and beyond (such as John Cage) were acquiring heightened awareness of spatial implications of music first explored during the Renaissance. Just as artists were starting to investigate the temporal dimension of their work, musicians began to respond to performance spaces in new ways; they were creating art and music that overflowed into each other's realms – a collaboration of sound, image and space. Video, in other words, allowed art and music to disband and recombine in new and hitherto unprecedented ways. For this reason, it makes more sense to refer to the genre as ‘video art-music’, a term that better acknowledges the audio-visuality of the medium and the double capabilities of many of its practitioners. If we look more closely at the cultural context of 1965, then, it will become clear that it makes no sense to speak about video work as having ‘no formal burdens at all’, as many critics and artists have claimed. So, with the idea of a double history in mind, is it more productive to discuss video as a format that introduced ‘new techniques’ into pre-existent narratives? Did video facilitate expansion rather than replacement?

The audio-visual convergence

As the ‘whole new’ story began to unravel, it became clear that the most innovative aspects of video came from the opportunities for audio-visual synthesis that it provided, an intermedial quality rarely encountered before. Traditionally, image is visible and silent; music, on the other hand, is temporal, invisible and audible. To fuse these sensory impressions together into a single experience has been an exasperating mission, and although there have been many efforts (Rimington's Colour Organ (1895), for instance), attempts have rarely managed more than the embodiment of a similar aesthetic (as in the work of Debussy and Monet), or the translation of one sensory experience into another (as in the synaesthetic experiments of Rimsky-Korsakov, Skryabin, Kandinsky, Klee and others). Coexistence, or the simultaneous unfolding through time of both music and image, has been problematic, and the history of art music has thrown up only a few temporal audio-visual forms. Opera, with its mixture of music, text and theatre, is an obvious example, but the staging – the visual side – is most often the brainchild of a director and can change fundamentally from production to production. At first glance, film appears the perfect solution, as it allows image to burst into motion: ‘to paint with time’ (Walter Ruttmann).19

However, both the ‘motion’ of film and its audio-visual synchronicity are illusory. John Belton differentiates between the process-orientated technologies of video and television and the static quality – or what he calls the ‘deliberation’ – of film.20 Unlike television and video, film necessitates a delay between recording and final product, a period of post-production (visual and narrative editing, audio-visual synchronization, overdubbing, the addition of music and sound-effects) that can often demand more time than the filming process itself, a delay that is becoming more exaggerated as the film industry challenges itself to greater heights of technical achievement. During the eight years it took to produce the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for instance, only 274 days were spent filming. Each film then required an entire year of post-production in order for 260 artists to work on the computer animation, miniatures and digital programmes; and director Peter Jackson spent six weeks per film with composer Howard Shore advising on the score.21 In a bid to achieve a greater ‘realism’ or, rather, to produce a less processed product, some film-makers have purposely highlighted the materiality of their work. Usually such examples come from those working beyond the mainstream narrative tradition, such as Andy Warhol, whose films frequently expose their means of creation through a complete lack of editing and post-production effects. Shots are often totally static, a stillness frequently compounded by an unmoving subject matter, such as the Empire State Building (Empire, 1964), while editing fissures and glimpses of the camera apparatus are frequently left in view (as in Sleep and Haircut, both 1963).22 Others have attempted to reduce the appearance of this deliberation by working directly on the film stock. Rather than ‘filming’ what is in front of the camera, paint, scratches or objects can be placed directly onto the celluloid strip. In his early work, during the 1930s and 40s, for instance, New Zealand artist Len Lye developed a method later known as ‘direct animation’. In his 1937 short, Trade Tattoo, with music provided by the Cuban Lecuona Boys, he enhanced black-and-white documentary footage with paint, stencilled patterns and animated text to create a multilayered, technicolor collage. Direct film takes this process one stage further by abandoning the camera altogether. American film-maker Stan Brakhage, in his silent 16mm short Mothlight (1963), placed the wings of moths, dead leaves and flowers between pieces of splicing tape before feeding the whole lot directly through the projector.23 Nevertheless, despite the more instant quality of such work, direct production takes time and requires an intermission between creation and presentation. The emphasis on ‘making’ or ‘working on’ a film – on the development of ‘content’ – to be projected within a closed environment, then, differentiates the medium from the process-orientation and immediacy of television's global transmission.

This ‘deliberation’ has much to do with film's genealogy. Photochemical and mechanical in construction, the flickbook-style delivery of film has its roots in photography. When Thomas Edison took his Kinetoscope to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, he essentially displayed a slideshow of still images that changed fast enough to give the impression of movement. Even though film technology has developed rapidly during the last century, this basic principle has remained constant. Artist Walter Ruttmann's famous praise for film, founded on the opportunity it afforded ‘to paint with time’, alluded, then, to a flow that does not really exist.24 When watching a film, the eye plays tricks on us, joining together the static images through a process known as ‘motion blur’, which creates the illusion of a continuous flow, a smooth movement from one picture to the other. At its most basic level, in other words, the filmic image is intermittent and halting, requiring completion by the audience to produce the desired effect, a cognitive mediation between technology and the mind's eye. Most cinemas promote this mediation by running films at 24 frames per second; below this rate, the slower speed of light pulsation (the flicker fusion threshold) can be perceived by the eye as a flickering rather than as a steady image. This motion blurring is helped by the inclusion of sound and music in a film's final mix, audio elements recorded externally and combined with the images during post-production. (It is primarily for audio-visual synchronicity that the famous clapper-board is used, providing a snapping visual gesture and a precise and easily coordinated sound that can be used by the engineer to kick-start the individually recorded tracks.) Able to move through time without hesitation, music and real-world sound can help lead the mind away from the perception of visual disjunction. Although film-makers working within the ‘mainstream’ tradition attempted to conceal this halting progression under the illusion of flow, many artists who experimented with film technology during the early twentieth century were intrigued by this process. Cubist and Dadaist painting, for instance, with its preoccupation with capturing motion on the canvas, extended particularly easily into film: Duchamp's films provided kinetic solutions to pictorial problems encountered in his experiments with optics and his interest in the work of Eadweard Muybridge, for instance, while Man Ray's first film, Retour à la raison (1923), was a clear extension of his photographic compositions.

But whereas film developed from mechanical visual forms, video shares its magnetic technology with that of sound recording and reproduction. As a recording device whose images and sounds can be transmitted instantly, it is a totally different medium from its moving-image cousins.25 Although video translates as ‘I see’, a name that posits the format within the visual technologies, this designation is misleading. With no photochemistry and no moving parts (apart from the tape), video evolved from the transmission of coded, electric signals across a wire that is common to the telephone and the telegraph. In fact, video was initially a device for recording sound, not image; it was an electromagnetic process closely aligned to audio, rather than visual, technologies, as American video artist Bill Viola explains:

Technologically, video has evolved out of sound (the electromagnetic) and its close association with cinema is misleading since film and its grandparent, the photographic process, are members of a completely different branch of the genealogical tree (the mechanical/chemical). The video camera, as an electronic transducer of physical energy into electrical impulses, bears a closer original relation to the microphone than to the film camera.26

During the Second World War, German engineers used Fritz Pleumer's 1928 experiments with magnetic tape-recording as the basis for developing a reliable means of recording their radio communications.27 When the improved technology found its way to America after the war, it was readily seized upon by the entertainment industries as a means to pre-record material and so liberate programming from the fallibility of live broadcast, which, up until this time, had been the only option. In 1948, a newer version of the magnetic technology, refined and developed by American electronics company Ampex Corporation, allowed the first pre-recorded material (The Bing Crosby Show) to be aired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Investigations into the recording of image were closely connected to these improvements in sound recording.

However, it took another 17 years for the technology to come within the price- and size-range of individuals. This time, the evolution was headed by Sony, who introduced the half-inch CV-2000 ‘Portapak’, a machine that was still able to record only 20 minutes of black-and-white footage with sound taken from an external microphone, but with a price-tag of $3,000. Although advertised as being easily transportable, the Portapak was nevertheless large and heavy, and required mains power to run: it was, in other words, cumbersome and unsuitable for battery operation. In fact, it was not for another two years that Sony introduced a truly portable, battery-operated video recorder, the CV-2400. As primary devices, these machines were largely shunned by the film industry as being an inferior alternative to film stock. Not only was the picture quality substandard, but the editing procedures demanded by the continual scanning movement of the video signal were far too inaccurate for film studios to entertain. However, as we shall see, many artists used to working with other materials (painters, sculptors, musicians) were enticed by the cheaper, more easily accessible moving-image technology, with its unique promise of immediate yet transitory flow.

From the outset, then, the physical components of video positioned it within a technological lineage (or ‘branch of the genealogical tree’) that was audio rather than visual in nature, bequeathing to it physical attributes very different from those of film. Although videotape can be manipulated during presentation, as Paik demonstrated in his early work with magnets, it cannot easily undergo the drastic post-production transformations, or ‘deliberation’, available to film, a complaint voiced by Viola, who frequently bemoaned the laborious process of physically cutting tape and getting to grips with expensive and awkward pre-digital editing machines.28 Produced via a continual scanning process, the video image is in fact not an image at all: it is a moving point of light within a flowing stream of electrons that changes every 400 thousandths of a second.29 To break this stream without rupturing the audio or visual cohesion is therefore a complex business.

As a branch of audio technology, and with problematic editing potential, videotape, during its first two decades, was used predominantly for live recording, as a cheaper and less cumbersome device than film for capturing the moving image. And yet, while both film and video produce the illusion that what they capture is reality, i.e. what is in front of the camera, the nature of each illusion is unique. Able to record and transmit movement electronically rather than mechanically, video at its most basic level has a fluidity of motion very different from the flickbook construction of film, a variation that can be reformulated as the difference between stasis and motion. Robert Arns has described this difference in terms of progress and stillness: ‘In film, movement is the basic illusion; really the succession of still images progressing after each other on the screen. In video, stillness is the basic illusion as a still image cannot exist.’30 While the film image demands mediation by the brain in order to place the stills within a flow that suggests motion, the video image requires no such intervention: it is already in movement. As a continuous scanning motion able to deliver images without deliberation, then, video produces an immediacy not obtainable, at least at the most basic level, through the medium of film. Not only can video record and play back information easily, it is able to do so within the shared time of its perceivers.

This sense of immediacy and flow is enhanced by the ability of video technology to record image and sound simultaneously. While the finished film product is audio-visual, its process of construction requires two different technological methodologies and, at least in mainstream practice, both a visual director and a music composer, specialists in each area whose interactions can be limited. Although cinema provides the illusion of audio-visual fusion, then, and its reception as such encourages an ‘emergent’ reading, as Nicholas Cook would say, it is nevertheless both dual-channelled and multi-authored in construction.31 To put this another way: inherent in this medium is a heterogeneity that belies the illusion of synchronicity and flow apparent in the final, sutured product.

The artist-composer

Unlike film, the video medium allows for perfect synchronicity, as the visual and audio tracks can be recorded and played back simultaneously as one signal. Highly charged with audio-visual possibility, video allows the authorial gap inherent in film's construction to be closed. Video, continually in the process of becoming, is infused with a sense of ‘immediacy and presentness’ that repositions its images within the transitory realm of music, giving it an existence and decay that coincides with its moment of production. Able to unravel temporally, the video signal undergoes a sort of ‘aging’, a ‘kind of irreversibility’ that is normally reserved for musical and theatrical experience.32 Because the virtual image of video is immediate, it creates a sense of the ‘now’ that allows it to coexist temporally with music, to be present in the same, as Stravinsky would say, ‘psychological’ dimension.33 This audio basis, together with its continual motion, posits for the video image an existence in the musical sphere and vice versa in a way that is not possible with other artistic media, and its meaning no longer needs to be ‘emergent’ as it materializes, unified, at the moment of its creation.

Such material audio-visuality raises issues of reception and perception. To the viewer, film and video both provide a similar illusion of a smooth and realistic progression of images, though the different ways in which the brain must create this illusion is not immediately obvious to most of us. But what is important is the creative possibility that such a difference allows. Derived from, and existing in, the musical sphere, the physical make-up of video has clearly influenced the aesthetic uses to which the medium has been put, uses that differ in fundamental ways from that of film. Because the format is, at root, an audio-visual one, practitioners often have to take charge of both the audio and the visual sides of their work. It is true that variations on this practice can also be found in mainstream film, whereby a director creates what Kevin Donnelly has termed a ‘composite score’, a quintessential postmodern composition of disparate pre-existing pop, rock and art music: most famously, Stanley Kubrick favoured his temp track of pre-existent music by Ligeti and Johann Strauss over Alex North's original score for 2001: A Space Odyssey.34Occasionally, a director is able to compose his own score, a phenomenon exemplified by Clint Eastwood, who has both composed for and directed several of his films, including Million Dollar Baby (2004), which earned him a nomination for Best Original Score at the 2005 Golden Globes. And yet, even if the conception of both aural and visual tracks comes from the same source in film, the technology demands that the two remain physically separated during the production stages (Kubrick again flouted this necessity by playing his temp track aloud in the studio to create the correct atmosphere for the actors). As film theorist Rick Altman has pointed out, however, the large production-scale of mainstream film requires a considerable workforce to construct the soundscape, of which music is only one part.35

Informed by cultural and economic forces very different from those of mainstream film, many examples of single-authored audio-visuality can be found in early experimental film. Despite the visual emphasis of its nomenclature, the early Munich-based school of film-makers that produced what is known as ‘graphic’ or ‘absolute’ cinema used musical forms to inform their visual structures. In 1919, Walter Ruttmann, who commissioned dedicated pieces of music for each of his silent films, described his work as ‘an art for the eye that differs from painting in that it takes place in time (like music). Hence a completely new type of artist that has hitherto been only latent will emerge, placed somewhere between painting and music.’36 Hans Richter articulated his idea of visual music in a statement with Viking Eggeling:

Music became a model for both of us. We found a principle that fitted our philosophy in musical counterpoint: each action produces a corresponding reaction. So we found a suitable system in counterpoint fugue, a dynamic and polar arrangement of conflicting energies.37

Such an ‘arrangement of conflicting energies’ can be found in Richter's silent animated film Rhythmus 21 (1921), in which black-and-white geometric shapes move across the screen, receding and pulsing to an unheard beat. Working along similar lines, Oskar Fischinger developed an audio-visual aesthetic that culminated in his ‘tönende Ornamente’ (‘sounding ornaments’), or hand-drawn optical soundtracks. While many of his films were based on pre-existent music (visual interpretation of no. 5 from Brahms's Hungarian Dances (1931), for instance, or the first movement of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in his Motion Picture no. 1 (1947)), other work attempted a type of visual composition founded upon musical structures:

Undoubtedly, the composer of tomorrow will no longer write mere notes, which the composer himself can never realise definitively, but which rather must languish, abandoned to various capricious reproducers. Now control of every fine gradation and nuance is granted to the music-painting artist, who bases everything exclusively on the primary fundamental of music, namely the wave – vibration or oscillation in and of itself.38

The idea of a silent, optical soundtrack or visual music can be found in the work of many later film-makers working with sound technology, such as Norman McLaren and the Whitney Brothers in the 1950s and 60s through to the contemporary work of Paul Friedlander.

In mainstream film, even if the conception of both aural and visual tracks comes from the same source, the technology demands that the two remain physically separated during the production stages. Experimental film-makers, however, working with a smaller budget and a different set of aesthetic codes, found ways to create single-authored ‘visual music’: Richter and Ruttmann by creating silent films based on musical structures; and Fischinger by constructing optical soundtracks. The creation of such single-authored work demanded engagement with the materiality of film (painting, punching holes in, or scratching the film strip) and a resultant ‘deliberation’, and the results, at least in the early years, were visual translations, or interpretations, of music. The single-authored visual music was, in other words, confined to pure image.

Like experimental film, video does not have to be a collaborative art form: it does not have to involve artistic coexistence. But, unlike film, video's sound and image tracks can be recorded simultaneously, emerging together and so encouraging those working with the medium to take control of both audio and visual tracks not only conceptually, but also concurrently. To put this another way: the video practitioner can be both artist and composer in the immediate, intermedial sense.

Field perception

In its early years, video's unique audio-visuality was particularly appealing to musically trained artists. Paik is a perfect example of such hybridity. Trained in music history and composition at the University of Tokyo, where he submitted a thesis on Schoenberg, he later continued his music education at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music, Freiburg.39 He found the International Summer Courses of New Music, Darmstadt, particularly influential, and it was here that he first met Stockhausen and Cage in 1957 and 1958 respectively. His subsequent work for the electronic music studio at the West German Radio Station Cologne (WDR) from 1959 to 1961 brought him into contact with the work of composers such as Cardew and Ligeti.

With this training behind him, Paik's early compositional work demonstrates his preoccupation with bringing together artistic and musical elements. His style began with spliced tape work, such as Hommage à John Cage (1959), in which screams and piano-playing are juxtaposed with excerpts from the Western art-music canon and sound effects, to create what he called ‘action music’. Based on the concepts of improvisation, chance and spontaneity that were informing concurrent work by John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Yoko Ono and others, the scores for Paik's ‘action music’ described simple procedures that would demonstrate the physicality of performance: One for Solo Violin (1962), for example, asks the performer simply to smash a violin. Once performed, this visual music could not be repeated, as the instrument had been destroyed: it was, literally, deconstructive music that rebelled against the musical canon and the nature of repeatable music performance. Highlighting the physicality of performance led Paik to reconsider the space that traditionally exists between performer and audience in the concert hall. Other works tried to activate the audience, to draw them across this space, a process demonstrated during a performance of Paik's Étude for Pianoforte (1960) in Cologne, where the composer jumped from the stage and cut the tie of audience-member Cage and covered David Tudor with shaving cream.40 Such multi-gestural performance is also called for in Symphony for 20 Rooms (1961), in which visitors were invited to kick objects around the space and accompany Paik's audio-tape collages by manipulating various tape players themselves.

Although Paik did not turn his hand to the moving image until around 1961 and, as we have seen, acquired his Portapak only in 1965, his early performances and their inclusion of the tape-deck apparatus clearly displayed the tendencies towards music performance and audience participation that he would adopt in his later video pieces. Acknowledging Paik's interest in the material aspects of video technology, the artist's curator and biographer John Hanhardt describes the movement between sound and videotape as ‘a seamless investigation into the mechanics of sound and image reproduction’.41 Viewed in this way, and with Viola's description of video as an audio technology in mind, Paik's move into video work seems very natural.

In 1971, Paik created an audio-visual video piece that perfectly demonstrates his ‘seamless investigation’ into audio-visuality. Concerto for Videotape and TV Cello, a performative installation that requires continual interaction between performer and audience for its successful delivery, was the result of a long-term collaboration with avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. Three television sets of diminishing size were encased in clear perspex cases and mounted on top of each other to resemble the body of a cello. The neck and bridge of a cello were then attached to the body, as were several strings. When Moorman played the instrument with a purpose-built bow, electronic pickups created distorted sounds that were fed through speakers. The screens showed video footage of Moorman in previous performances, brief clips of happenings in which Paik was involved, and snapshots from iconic moments from the twentieth century, all interspersed with magnetically distorted broadcast transmission. The instrument was also connected to several video cameras that transmitted a live, closed-circuit feed of the current performance onto the cello's monitors. Moorman's actions were relayed immediately onto the screens, her video image appearing as though it were miming, a perfect lip-synch to the live events.

Both performer and instrument, she was able simultaneously to play and be played, becoming inextricably linked to the cello and her own image. Occasionally, the video's gaze moved from Moorman to the audience, capturing it on the instrument as they moved around the performance space. As images of audience members were relayed onto the screens, they became active participants, with the ability to change the visual display and become an integral part of the performance. As Moorman played, the pickups that created what she called ‘TV Cello sounds’ also transmitted electronic signals to the television screens, distorting the images as the installation was played to produce horizontal and vertical flashes of colour and spiralling loops. The act of playing not only created sound, then, but also caused a corresponding visual reaction. Related directly to the ebb and flow of the music, the images of the performance space and the audience members were quite literally structured and controlled by sound: images of the audience, in other words, were used as compositional material, causing the previously separate spaces of stage, frame and audience to collapse into one. Transformed into a theatrical, participatory space, the TV Cello represents a media-extended reality, in which music and image appear in complete synchronicity, generating what Viola would surely cite as an instance of ‘field perception’.

Such a seamless move between working with sound and videotape can be seen in pieces by many other artists, including Icelander Steina Vasulka, who, along with her husband Woody, founded ‘The Kitchen’ in New York in 1971, an influential media-arts theatre where people could interact freely with those working with video technology. Vasulka, like Paik, was a trained classical musician, graduating from the Prague Conservatoire and gaining a position as violinist in the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra before turning her hand to video work:

My background is in music. For me, it is the sound that leads me into the image. Every image has its own sound and in it I attempt to capture something flowing and living. I apply the same principle to art as to playing the violin: with the same attitude of continuous practice, the same concept of composition. Since my art schooling was in music, I do not think of images as stills, but always as motion.42

Vasulka's interest in continual-motion images drew her to the transitory nature of video, and her musical influence is often clear to see. The portrayal of something ‘flowing and living’ is evident in her early performances of Violin Power (1970–8), for instance. For this closed-circuit performance, Vasulka videotaped the movements of her bow moving across the strings as she played her violin. The sound waves, recorded through a microphone, spread the scan lines of the video image horizontally until they became visible. Vasulka then used a Scan Processor to manipulate the images further, building up spatial forms in the vertical. Vasulka revisited this work in 1991, this time making use of a MIDI instrument – the five-stringed, electric ZETA Violin – and a PowerBook to interface her sounds, thus providing ‘an instant access to any frame of video on the disk as well as access to fast/slow and forward/backward movements’:43

The assignment at the moment is that stops on the A and E strings point to frame locations on the disk. The D and G strings control speed and direction and the C string is a master controller assigned to address segments on the disk. In another programming scheme, the C string controls which upper strings get assigned their function, as I experiment to make the performance more musical.44

Whereas Vasulka created and shaped her images in a performative sound-image composition, a different form of audio-visual synthesis can be found in the work of French video artist-composer Robert Cahen. Beginning his artistic life as an electro-acoustic composer, Cahen completed his studies in 1971 with Pierre Schaeffer at the Conservatoire Nationale Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, before becoming a member of the Musical Research Group of ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française). After his musical training, Cahen turned his hand to video work. While some of his pieces use music as narrative focus (including Instantanés, trois portraits de compositeurs: Marco Stroppa, Philippe Manoury, Thierry Lancino (1989) and Blind Song (2008)), others are informed by musical process. Just as composers of musique concrète created music from found sound, Cahen's video aesthetic was based on the translation of sound into image: ‘Everything that's done in concrete music can be done with electronic imagery. I wanted to do images that I had made with music.’45 To create such musical imagery, Cahen's video works manipulate images as though they were sounds, using colour, editing and modelling to transform reality. In this way, objective images are removed from their original source and internalized:

Schaeffer taught me to edit sounds, to listen to a sound in itself, to know how to grasp what's in a sound independently of its original concept […] that helped me to realise that you can look at an image without looking at what it originally signifies.46

Although not single-authored (the soundtrack is by Michel Chion), Juste le temps (1983) depicts a woman's journey on a train: the French landscape that flicks past the window is electronically processed to abstraction, its slow motion making time visible and replacing the real landscape with an imagined one, independent (like the musical material of musique concrète) of its ‘original concept’.

Despite the nuanced work produced by musically trained video artists, however, a working knowledge of composition or performance was not required to produce close audio-visual work. Tony Conrad, for instance, was trained in mathematics. Before he turned his hand to video in the 1970s, he became a member, in 1962, of the Theatre of Eternal Music (also known as the Dream Syndicate) alongside LaMonte Young and John Cale. Working in ‘solid opposition to the North Atlantic cultural tradition of composition’ (Conrad), the group developed a style known as ‘dream music’, a highly repetitive soundscape based on the minimalist drones of just intonation.47 Conrad later collaborated with Krautrock group Faust (1972) and formed his own ensemble, Slapping Pythagoras, in 1995.48 Viola shares a similar background to Conrad. He studied visual art at the Experimental Studios, Syracuse University (although he also worked on electronic music with Franklin Morris), before joining David Tudor's avant-garde performance group Rainforest (later called Composers Inside Electronics) from 1973 to 1980. As we have seen, Viola has been particularly vocal about the audio basis for video at a material level. But he has also repeatedly expressed the artistic consequences of such a basis; namely the possibility of audio-visual confluence, or interchangeability:

One of the many things I learned from [Tudor] was the understanding of sound as a material thing, an entity. My ideas about the visual have been affected by this, in terms of something I call ‘field perception’, as opposed to our more common mode of object perception. In many of my videotapes, I have used the camera according to perceptual or cognitive models based on sound rather than light. I think of all the senses as being unified. I do not consider sound as separate from image. We usually think of the camera as an ‘eye’ and the microphone as an ‘ear’, but all the senses exist simultaneously in our bodies, interwoven into one system that includes sensory data, neural processing, memory, imagination, and all the mental events of the moment. This all adds up to create the larger phenomenon we call experience […] field perception is the awareness or sensing of an entire space at once.49

For Viola, the possibility of creating ‘field perception’ by moving image into music's ‘psychological’ dimension came from the physical peculiarities of video, a potential unification of the senses that was the most alluring prospect of the format. That video art-music is often sound-based, then, owes much to its audio genealogy, a lineage that has ensured that what could easily have become an image-based genre remained instead highly aware of its audio-visual qualities. Moreover, this intermedial technology, according to Viola, led to the creation of a new, hybrid being: the artist-composer, or audio-visual practitioner.

Because sound was readily producible by video, those with no musical training at all were able to include an aural side in their work. Many early exponents of video work developed an interest in sound through different disciplines: Joan Jonas through her background in dance and performance art, for instance, and Carolee Schneeman and Wolf Vostell through their training in painting, while Vito Acconci's first creative endeavours were through poetry, an interest in vocalization that developed into a career-long preoccupation with sound-and-image combinations. Others did not even have a background in the arts: as we have seen, Conrad read mathematics at university, Woody Vasulka trained as an engineer and Peter Campus studied experimental psychology. Despite the differences in the two genres’ articulations, many film-makers also turned their hands to video. Warhol was what Jud Yalkut called ‘a dabbler in video’, while Stan VanDerBeek, David Hall, Jonas, Richard Serra, Bartlett, Ed Emshwiller, Tom DeWitt and Bruce Nauman used both video and television in their work.50

The art of noises

Video technology, then, made two things possible: first, composers were able to visualize their sounds; and, secondly, artists were able more easily to sound their visual work. Although video pieces by musicians could be considered ‘musical’ in the traditional sense (TV Cello, Violin Power and Instantanés, trois portraits de compositeurs, for instance), video work by artists, film-makers and dancers made use of the instant recording capacity of video to provide ambient or ubiquitous sounds as compositional material. In this sense, video work can be located at the edge of an expanding notion of musical material that had informed much twentieth-century compositional practice. Yvonne Spielmann has positioned the material quality of video within the ‘descriptive category of noise’, explaining that video, ‘considered precisely, does not present image and sound (like film) but instead forms of expression from both these signal states’:

Audio and video are interconnected noises with which the video signal can selectively produce the electronic noise aurally/auditively and visually. From the definition of the audio-visual qualities, it follows, in terms of categorization, that video in its radical media form has to be actually allotted to the category of noise rather than to a consistent type of image. In other words, electronic noise can also be moved horizontally and multiplied into a spatial object – different from a ‘fixed’ moving image as in film – by means of feedback and delay.51

Although the literal visual spatialization of electronic noise was explored by Steina Vasulka in Violin Power, locating video within the ‘descriptive category of noise’ also points towards an emancipatory effect on visual compositional strategies. Spielmann uses Woody Vasulka's No. 25 (1976) to illustrate her point. Like Violin Power, No. 25 is based on video noise visualized as scan lines; but whereas Steina's piece used scan processing to manipulate video lines, in No. 25 the video signal audibly and visibly scans the raster field so that the image can be both seen and heard, thus exemplifying ‘the purest form of creating video by means of video noise’. This piece, Spielmann continues,

belongs to the category of ‘noise objects’, for the transformations created by modulating the waveforms in the scan processor (with its oscillators) show an unfinished visual process consisting of the interplay of horizontal and vertical shifts. At the same time, they amplify the nature of the blank image as noise. When the blank image is curved, stretched, and compressed, we hear video noise. The video image has become the presentation of its audiovisual structure.52

Although such visualization of video noise suggests the ‘unification of the senses’ that so intrigued Viola, can these ‘noise objects’ be considered as music, or does video audio-visuality point towards a different aesthetic? When Jacques Attali described music as ‘the organization of noise’, he did so with the knowledge that definitions of noise have shifted over time.53 Thinking along similar lines, Paul Hegarty begins his history of noise-music with the claim that ‘noise is not an objective fact. It occurs in relation to perception – both direct (sensory) and according to presumptions made by an individual. These are going to vary according to historical, geographical and cultural location.’54 This idea is demonstrated by the reception of Beethoven's Große Fuge, op. 133 (1825–6), a work described by one confused critic present at its first performance as being ‘incomprehensible, like Chinese’, but later praised by Stravinsky for being ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’.55

The idea that noise and music were not separate entities but rather existed on a continuum had been discussed since what Marjorie Perloff has called ‘The Futurist Moment’.56 When Luigi Russolo presented his manifesto The Art of Noises (L'arte dei rumori ) in 1913, he predicted a musical response to the new soundscapes forged since the Industrial Revolution. As society is faced with a greater array of sounds, music, he reasoned, must expand to incorporate noise. In order to illustrate the expansion of musical material Russolo invented a number of instruments, intonorumori (noise machines), writing in his manifesto that he and his assistant Ugo Piatti ‘enjoy creating mental orchestrations of crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffle of crowds, the variety of din from the stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways’.57 Russolo put his manifesto into action in Awakening of a City (Risveglio di una citta, 1913), a piece created from the sounds of sirens, factories and the pitch-bending noises of his intonorumori. A similar dissociation of real-world sounds from their mimetic function in order to create musical forms can be found in works by later composers. Edgard Varèse's Ionisation (1931), for instance, features sirens, anvils and a lion's roar alongside the more traditional array of percussion instruments. Referring to the ionization of molecules, the work is based on the variation of rhythmic cells: ‘I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena’, explained Varèse in conversation with Gunther Schuller.58 Works such as Ionisation counter the understanding that noise is a negative phenomenon or, as C. S. Kerse puts it, ‘sound which is undesired by the recipient’, ‘a sound without musical quality or an unwanted or undesired sound’.59 In this piece, the sirens – culturally understood as a warning signal – are placed within a musical structure, encouraging a redefinition of the traditional understanding of musical material.

While a similar form of sound recontextualization was later explored by Xenakis, Helmut Lachenmann and Cardew, among others, a different type of manipulation can be found in the disembodied strategies of musique concrète, a type of composition which is particularly important, as we have seen, to Cahen. Pierre Schaeffer proposed that music could be made up of ‘sonorous fragments that have a real existence, and that are thought of as being clearly defined and complete sonic objects’.60 In his tape piece Etude aux chemins de fer (1948), Schaeffer organized sounds recorded at the Gare des Batignolles, Paris, according to what he considered to be a musical aesthetic. During the 1950s, the Cologne studio produced further experimentation into the art of noises: Stockhausen used electronics to create a similar acousmêtre in Gesang der Jünglinge, in which the human voice is manipulated and spread over five speakers. Electronically distorted and spatially presented, Gesang anticipates the video work of Cahen, where the manipulation and separation of real-world sound and image is the primary motivation.

The expansion of musical material took a different turn in the work of John Cage, whose compositions for ‘junk’ percussion ensembles and work with radio receivers (such as Imaginary Landscape #4, 1951) was particularly influential to video artist-composers such as Paik and Vostell: ‘If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instruments,’ wrote Cage, then ‘we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.’61

Faced with ‘the entire field of sound’ that marks the future of music, traditional musical techniques such as harmony will, he reasoned, be inadequate when faced with the ‘non-musical’ nature of sound.

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sound effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of ‘sound effects’ recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.62

Cage's notion of ‘organized sound’ called for a change in approach to composition. His expanded and inclusive concept of music that came together with an interest in process-orientated art not only engaged and activated temporal and physical spaces, but also drew attention to auditory perception. In much the same way as Duchamp's found art (not only in terms of sourcing artistic material, but also in the emphasis of its new context), there was an increasing emphasis on seeing afresh, or listening anew. Rather than emphasize the regulated system in which his ‘musical instruments’ were placed, Cage drew attention instead to the different listening strategies that his work encouraged. Hegarty explains hearing as ‘less reflective’ than listening, as ‘a physical process we can do nothing about’.63 Much of Cage's aleatoric music required its audience to listen to sounds ordinarily only heard.

The emphasis on perception and listening opened up composition to the non-musician. By the 1960s, the first generation of what would later be known as sound artists was beginning to take the compositional use of noise into another area: Annea Lockwood's burnt pianos and Max Neuhaus's soundwalks used sound as compositional material that could exist outside the concert hall, for instance, while the acoustic art and sound sculptures of Bill Fontana were, like the work of Cage, created with the aim of ‘challeng[ing] all of the old historical definitions of noise and the resulting preconceptions that most people have about the sounds they live with’.64 Alan Licht has defined sound art against music according to its lack of drama: music, he contends, ‘sets up a series of conflicts and resolutions, either on a large or small scale’.65 Sound art, on the other hand, is not time-based: people do not have to experience the whole narrative, but can experience these works like the plastic arts; they can dip into an aural experience at any time and stay as long as they choose. For this reason, ‘Sound art belongs in an exhibition situation rather than a performance situation – that is, I would maintain, a necessary correlative in defining the term.’66 As a result, the work of sound artists is rarely informed by musical processes or by a linear construction of sounds.67 While the lack of narrative drama may well be the ‘necessary correlative’ in the definition of sound art, however, it must be remembered that many early minimalist works were conceived according to a similar aesthetic. Many of Reich's early compositions, for instance, demonstrate a peculiar stasis as the sense of teleology is replaced with an emphasis on the immediate. And although Morton Feldman often rejected the term minimalist, his works of extended duration(such as his String Quartet II (1983), which lasts around six hours), were premièred in art galleries rather than in concert venues. Despite the similar demands it puts on a visual-arts audience, however, and in the absence of live performers, sound art often lacks visual help, and begins with the ‘invisibility of sound through recording and radio and telephone transmission and continued through the disjunction of sound and image’.68

‘Noise in particular’, argues Licht, ‘may come under the heading of “sound by artists”.’69 With little or no musical training, artists interested in process-driven work had, throughout the twentieth century, explored the artistic qualities of sound in works such as Duchamp's aleatory Erratum musicale for three voices (c.1913), Man Ray's Lautgedicht (Sound Poem, 1924) and Kurt Schwitters's sound poem Ursonate (1926). With the path already paved, artists in the 1960s, including those who would later work with video, produced an array of pure soundworks that were not bound by compositional strategies: Joseph Beuys made an hour-long recording of himself saying ‘yes yes yes no no no’ (Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne, 1968); Acconci recorded himself counting while jogging in Central Park (Running Tape, 1969); and Nauman made Record (1969), a painful recording of him sounding a violin (an instrument he cannot play). Moving even closer to video were works that combined aural and visual elements. In Voice Piece for Soprano (1961), for instance, Yoko Ono required the performer to scream against the wind, against the wall and against the sky. In a similar vein, LaMonte Young produced poetic actions to be performed as music (in Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the performer is instructed to bring the piano a bale of hay and a bucket of water to eat and drink, 1960), whereas the sounds in Poem for Tables, Chairs and Benches (1960) were created by scraping furniture across the performance space.

The sounds recorded and manipulated by the video camera were not always musical, in the traditional sense: they included real-world sounds, accidental noise, recorded music and static feedback. But if we consider them as sounds intentionally collected and meant to be ‘heard’, then many video pieces come close to the aesthetics found in all three types of expanded music – noise music, sound art and sound created by artists. Understood in this liberated context, the audio part of video can be seen as an expansion of musical material into visuality: ‘video noise’ can then be read as a form of audio-visual composition.

The double birth of video

Despite the newness of its voice, then, video art-music did not operate in creative isolation. Video could readily reproduce sound, which enabled those with no musical training to become composers and sound artists as well as visual artists. It is here, within the interdisciplinary possibilities of the medium, that the key to understanding video's history lies. Using cinema as an example, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion have highlighted the problem of pinpointing the ‘birth’ of a new medium in purely physical terms, arguing that before media specificity can be formulated, the technology must first establish itself in relation to pre-existent disciplines (such as music), institutions and other artistic media.70 The cinematograph was invented at a particular time, for instance, yet initially the technology was used to help develop well-established entertainment genres such as plays and other public performances: ‘despite its historically demonstrable irruption as technology’, argue the authors, ‘it wasn't until cinema's practitioners arrived at a reflexive understanding of the medium and until the cinema achieved a certain degree of institutionalisation that the medium became autonomous’.71 This ‘genealogy of media’ results in a problematic identification, in which the film medium is born not once, but twice:

The first birth is when a new technology is used to extend earlier practices, to which it was at first subservient. The second birth is when it sets out on a path that enables the resources it has developed to acquire an institutional legitimacy that acknowledges their specificity. Our perspective has led us to think that instead of talking about the birth of a medium, or at least its second birth, we should instead be talking about its constitution.72

It is easy to map the genesis of video onto such a model of genealogical constitution. The first wave of video work that followed its ‘first birth’ (from 1965 to 1971, when portable video technology became available with ‘playback’, ‘rewind’ and ‘fast-forward’ functions) was characterized by an interest in the technology itself, its sculptural possibilities and its integration into existing artistic investigations. As mentioned, those who seized video were most often already working with other media – film, music, dance, poetry, performance art and so on.

Along lines similar to those of Gaudreault and Marion, Spielmann has argued that video cannot be considered an ‘aesthetically independent genre’ until the 1970s and speaks instead of the ‘integrating birth’ of the format.73 Before the mid-1970s, video became an increasingly significant part of other creative events, such as happenings and multimedia performance art, but its process of constitution towards media specificity was relatively slow. While the notion of genre has always been problematic, then, the case of early video art and music is yet more difficult: not only did its materials constantly change, but they also included audio and visual elements. The enlarged possibilities of reuse along with a renewed ability for spatial expansion make the style of early video work highly difficult to trace. In fact, so prevalent was the literal and conceptual borrowing of early video art-music that Allan Kaprow, in 1974, went against the grain and placed video art-music in an old and tired history:

The use of television as an art medium is generally considered experimental. In the sense that it was rarely thought of that way by artists before the sixties, it must be granted a certain novelty. But so far, in my opinion, it is only marginally experimental. The hardware is new, to art at least, but the conceptual framework and esthetic attitudes around most video as an art are quite tame.74

Heterogeneous in nature, eclectic and plural in perspective, early video work operated like a ‘meta-media’, a multi-incorporative genre that reflects the media overload of television – what Jean Baudrillard refers to as the ‘obesity of information’.75 For this reason, early video work acquired a mobility of meaning: as critic Sean Cubitt argues, the extreme diversification of the form means that it cannot be considered as any one thing, but rather as a set of relationships around the uses of video; in other words, ‘a culture’.76

In this early phase, then, video culture was in the process of becoming, acting more like an adhesive that pulls together hitherto disparate strands of art and music practices than as protagonist in its own story. When introduced into contemporary multimedia experimentation, in other words, video technology became a facilitator of intermedial discourse, a trend that can clearly be seen in the transformation from musician to video practitioner of Paik outlined above. Dick Higgins, who in 1966 appropriated the term ‘intermedia’ from Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1812) in order ‘to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known’, later described the difference between multimedia and intermedia in terms of conceptual fusion.77 Although mixed media allows artists to include one form of media within another (opera, theatre, Fluxus performances, etc.), thus encouraging a synchronous dialogue between different practices, each medium nevertheless retains its distinctive qualities (opera, theatre, etc). Spielmann has described this multimedia practice as ‘accumulation’.78 An intermedial expansion, on the other hand, involves a ‘transformation’ – or conceptual fusion – of two traditionally separate media, as in concrete poetry, visual poetry. Spielmann defines such a fluid merging as ‘the exchange and transformation of elements that come from different media’:

Intermedia therefore is a formal category of exchange. It signifies an aesthetic encompassment of both form and content. In an intermedia work of art, content becomes a formal category that reveals the structure of combination and collision. The related meaning of content is to express such modes of transformation that are effected by the collision of painting and film, of film and electronic media, and so on. The contextual meaning of intermedia is to reveal the media forms themselves. The making visible of elements that are considered media specific can be performed by ways of comparing and transforming elements such as the interval.79

During its constitution period, video acted intermedially as a conduit that permitted the conceptual fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. In so doing, it mobilized ideas already under investigation by musicians and artists and thus encouraged the expansion (constitution) identified by Gaudreault and Marion. Such mobilization can be found particularly in the early work of Acconci, Paik, John Baldessari and Dennis Oppenheim, who were preoccupied with video as a physical medium that allowed other ideas to be more thoroughly explored. Early video technology, then, was most often used to create intermedial connections between several disciplines – music, sculpture, performance, interactive art and so on – and can thus be considered installational or sculptural.

Given the clear audio-visual nature of video, it is rather astonishing that sound is often ignored in critical discussion. The tendency has been to approach the area from one standpoint at the exclusion of others, discussing, for example, video's Fluxus basis, digital mastery, analogies with film or sculptural tradition, and its similarity to other intermedial forms such as happenings, performance art, site-specific installation, and so on. Usually this position is a visual one – rarely is music approached in a substantial manner. And yet an all-encompassing theory of video work requires consideration beyond its visual and sculptural qualities into its almost synaesthetic properties. If we relocate interest from video pieces as objects and re-envisage them as sites of communication, a visual approach to video, as we shall see, becomes nonsensical.

While the synergistic qualities of video encourage a double-channelled being (the artist-composer), these same qualities pose significant problems for the exhibition and/or performance of the format. As a mixture of moving image, sculpture, music and sound, video art-music contested both the neutrality of the gallery space and its viewing procedures, or rather, it exposed the neutrality to be an illusion, in three ways. First, a work could activate its surroundings by incorporating both installation space and the people within it into its composition. Secondly, the use of moving images placed the element of time into a space conventionally filled with static objects and, in so doing, presented the exhibition-goer with a dimension usually reserved for the concert hall or theatre. Finally, and yet most radically, video, as an audio-visual medium, introduced sound and music into the gallery environment, a space normally occupied by silent works.

As we have seen, the audience activation in Paik's ‘action music’ already challenged the traditional procedures of listening to and viewing music. In One for Solo Violin, for instance, the visual side of the action is all there is: you do not listen to this music, you watch it and, moreover, participate in it. If we now return to our previous discussion in which critics and artists alike claim that video art-music has no history, it becomes clear that such an assertion is inaccurate. Rather, because a single, traceable line of ‘constitution’ is impossible to find, video artists and composers are able to claim an ancestry of assorted disciplines. It follows that the technological art form operates within a zone of maximum hybridity that gives it, in the words of Julie Reiss, a ‘resistance to historicization’ that belies its clear dialogue with the past.80 This contextual and ancestral multiplicity can be simplified by channelling its diversity into two pathways, one visual, the other musical – two lines that echo the duality inherent in the technology. In this light, it becomes more productive to see video as a technology that offered to the world of twentieth-century music and art practices a new and syncretic way of voicing its ideas. Its revolutionary aspect lies in the ability to set ideas previously held in stasis or silence into motion and audibility; to combine audio and visual elements. The technology was revolutionary, in other words, precisely because of the expansion, rather than the rejection, it permitted in pre-existent disciplines. Video permitted an osmosis-like flow between disciplines, a flow particularly well situated within the multimedia sensibility prevalent during the early 1960s.

Nevertheless, any historical investigation into the origins of video art-music must acknowledge the desire for pastlessness espoused by many practitioners and critics. To put this another way: a theoretical approach to video's ‘culture’ must acknowledge these multiple yet elusive histories, while at the same time treating them with a suspicion similar to that of the video artists themselves. And yet, it is also important to note that these two positions are not mutually exclusive. Video was a new medium that facilitated advances in terms of audio-visual dialogue: but behind the promise of synthesis a dual aesthetic evolution is also traceable towards this point. Resituating video work at the intersection of music and art histories will recognize this double evolution without devaluing the unique syncretic ability of video. As a culture, then, video art-music becomes compromised if viewed from only one perspective: rather, it necessitates a criticism that is as interdisciplinary as its subject.

With this in mind, the study of video's ‘constitution’ and intermedial fusion need not centre on art or music as objects. In fact, if the form is decentred, this syncretic merging is easier to chart. During the 1940s, theories of architecture, mass media and literature were reformulated according to physical and social spaces by Siegfried Giedion, Clement Greenberg and Joseph Frank respectively: Giedion's theorization of the periodization of architecture as a sequence of spatial sensibilities, for example, postulated ‘space’ rather than structure or materials as the real architectural medium.81 Displacing attention from video object to its situation in a similar way allows for a more syncretic approach to the genre by treating it as the nervous system of audio-visual interaction.82 It follows that, in order to trace the development that led to video art-music, a theoretical relocation is required: one needs to investigate around the edge of art and music, to explore not the forms themselves, but rather the changing nature of the spaces in which they exist. As we have seen, video art rests, Janus-faced, at the intersection of these two spatially expanding disciplines, initiating an attack not only on the segregation between disciplines, but also on the embedded cultural memory of performance spaces. As seen in TV Cello, video's ability to highlight the porous distinctions between private and public spaces, to combine mental and physical spatialities, and to move the static arts into a temporal arena highlighted the nature of this merging and the fact that it required a different arena in which to do this.

So, to sum up: although video art-music appears to lack a history, this is illusion; rather, it harbours a double past, an excess of history. Arrival at the ‘new’ genre was achieved neither by progressing in any one direction, nor by developing a particular form, but by merging a musical and an artistic past, two strands that fully come together only during video art-music's ‘constitution’. Rather than a type of music developing into a musico-visual experiment, or a traceable art-history lineage evolving into video work, the genre is better considered as the child of performance-space experimentation; the result of an increased interest in the interaction of media with its spectators.

But once context is taken into account, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between them. A detailed interdisciplinary account in turn establishes video art-music as an audio-visual form with a rich and complex history, despite its appearance of ‘newness’. With this in mind, it is possible to rephrase Bartlett's enthusiastic exclamation that a ‘whole new story was about to be told thanks to the new techniques’. By relocating his emphasis from the tale to the telling, it can be suggested that during the 1960s there developed a whole new way of recounting two well-known stories.

Notes

¹See, for example, Nicholas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry, Installation Art (London, 1994), 13. This journey is charted in Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology and Art (London, 1973), 149.

²Curated by Christine Van Assche, Media Arts Curator at the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition, which ran from 20 September until 10 December 2006, claimed to recount ‘the history of this very contemporary field, punctuating the main phases of contemporary art from 1965 to 2005’: the exhibition notes can be found at < http://www.miamiartcentral.org> (accessed 24 January 2008).

³‘Whitney Film and Video: A History 1970–2009’, <http://whitney.org/FilmAndVideo/About> (accessed 21 April 2011); Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes (exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1987).

⁴The first video installation collected by the Whitney was Paik's V-Yramid (1982): see Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldische, ‘Keeping Time: On Collecting Film and Video Art in the Museum’, Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce Altshuler (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 65–84 (p. 69).

⁵Anna Bakalis, ‘It's Unreel: DVD Rentals Overtake Videocassettes’, Washington Times, 21 June 2003 (< http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=list&p_topdoc=11>, accessed 24 May2010).

⁶See <http://sabrinapenayoung.blogspot.com/> and <http://www.kathyhinde.co.uk/> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁷The Hugo Boss moving-image artist winners were Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004) and Tacita Dean (2006). Marjetica Potrč, an architect and artist, won in 2000.

⁸The manifesto states further that it aims ‘to provide new spaces for art forms new to Tate – including photography, film, video and performance’: <http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/transformingtm/whychange.shtm> (accessed 24 May 2010).

⁹Progress on the museum can be followed at <http://www.paiknamjune.org/ENG/DD/?M= D4&keyword=&searchitem=0&adminok=&page=2> (accessed 24 May 2010).

¹⁰Concert halls and opera houses are embracing video technology in a number of other ways: the San Francisco Opera has installed several high-definition video screens (known as ‘OperaVision’), for instance, to provide full and close-up shots of the stage for those occupying restricted-view seats; London's Royal Opera House has recently bought a video producer and distribution company – Opus Arte – to release and market film versions of its productions; and New York's Metropolitan Opera has begun to simulcast its performances in cinemas to those unable to acquire, or afford, its theatre tickets. See Jess Hamlin, ‘Grand Opera Gets Grander with State-of-the-Art-Screens’, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 June 2007, p. E-1. Of the Royal Opera House's purchase of Opus Arte, Marc A. Scorca, President of Opera America, said: ‘It again demonstrates the close link between opera and today's multimedia world. Opera is the traditional art form that translates most effectively to multimedia representation’ (Daniel J. Wakin, ‘Royal Opera Steps into New Act’, New York Times, 31 May 2007 (<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/arts/music/31roya.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>, accessed 24 May 2010)).

¹¹<http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?itemid=26>; <http://www.roh.org.uk/whatson/production.aspx?pid=13699> (accessed 21 April 2011).

¹²Charles Esche, for instance, explains that while the presence of Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych in London's Tate Modern underlines the achievement of video in being accepted into the art world, it also signals the loss of its early extremist sensibilities (‘Video Installation: Conceptual Practice and New Media in the 1990s’, Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, ed. Julia Knight (Luton, 1996), 195–206 (p. 196)).

¹³David A. Ross, quoted in Martia Sturken, ‘Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form’, Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York, 1990), 101–21 (p. 107).

¹⁴Nam June Paik, ‘Versatile Color TV Synthesizer’ (1969), Videa 'n’ Videology: 1959–1973, ed. Judson Rosebush (New York, 1974), [54–7] (p. [55]).

¹⁵Filippo Marinetti, The Variety Theatre (1913); quoted in RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London, 1988; repr. 2001), 17.

¹⁶Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York, 1970), 134.

¹⁷William Furlong discusses this free space in Audio Arts: Discourse and Practice in Contemporary Art (London, 1994), 128.

¹⁸Scott Bartlett, quoted in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 264.

¹⁹The passage continues: ‘An art for the eye that distinguishes itself from painting in that it takes place temporally (like music) and the artistic emphasis does not (as in the image) consist in the reduction of a (real or formal) process to a single moment, but precisely in the temporal development of formal aspects. That this art develops temporally is one of its most important elements of the temporal rhythm of optic events. It will therefore produce an entirely new type of artist, up until now only latently present, positioned somewhere halfway between painting and music’ (Walter Ruttmann, ‘Malerei mit Zeit’ (1919), quoted in Heike Helfert, ‘Technological Constructions of Space-Time: Aspects of Perception’, trans. Brian Currid, Media Art Net, <http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/overview_of_media_art/perception/1/> (accessed 24 May 2010)).

²⁰John Belton, ‘Looking Through Video: The Psychology of Video and Film’, Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 1996), 61–72 (p. 65). This is no new idea, however: as early as 1975, Raymond Williams pointed out that, ‘unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content’ (Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York, 1975), 25).

²¹This information comes from a behind-the-scenes documentary called A Passage to Middle-Earth: The Making of Lord of the Rings (The Sci-Fi Channel, USA, 9 December, 2001).

²²Michael O'Pray discusses Warhol's methods of filming in Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London, 1989).

²³Fred Camper, ‘Brakhage Wants to Make you See’, By Brakhage: An Anthology, The Criterion Collection DVD liner notes (New York, 2003), 15–17 (p. 16).

²⁴Ruttmann, ‘Malerei mit Zeit’.

²⁶Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994, ed. Robert Violette and Bill Viola (London, 1995), 159.

²⁵Belton has pointed out that ‘no technology develops autonomously. It is always a direct or indirect product (or by-product) of other technologies, which leave their imprint upon it. Video is no exception’ (‘Looking Through Video’, 61).

²⁷Belton, ‘Looking Through Video’, 63.

²⁸Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 63.

²⁹Viola explains: ‘The divisions into lines and frames are solely divisions in time, the opening and closing of temporal windows that demarcate periods of activity within the flowing stream of electrons. Thus, the video image is a living dynamic energy field, a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern such fine slices of time’ (Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 158).

³⁰Robert Arns, ‘The Form and Sense of Video’, Artscanada (October 1973), 15–24; quoted in Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 63. This notion was already prevalent in 1916: Hugo Münsterberg, for instance, explained that in cinema ‘apparent movement is in no way the mere result of an afterimage […] but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures’ (The Film: A Psychological Study; the Silent Photoplay in 1916 (1916; repr. New York, 1970), 29).

³¹Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 2000).

³²Paik uses these terms when he explains that ‘video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate “time-structure” […] which is the process of AGING (a certain kind of irreversibility)’ (‘Input-Time and Output-Time’, Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (New York, 1976), 98–103 (p. 98)).

³³Igor Stravinsky, ‘The Phenomenon of Music’, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (London, 1942; repr. 2003), 21–44 (p. 30).

³⁴Kevin Donnelly, ‘Performance and the Composite Film Score’, Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Donnelly (Edinburgh, 2001), 152–66.

³⁵See Rick Altman, ‘The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound’, Sound Theory: Sound Practice, ed. Altman (New York and London, 1992), 15–34.

³⁷Ruttmann's recollection, quoted from Standish D. Lawder, ‘Der Abstrakte Film: Richter und Eggeling’, Hans Richter 1888–1976: Dadaist, Filmpionier, Maler, Theoretiker (Berlin, 1982), 27–35 (p. 30); quoted in Barbara John, ‘The Sounding Image: About the Relationship between Art and Music: An Art-Historical Retrospective View’, <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/sounding_image> (accessed 29 July 2010).

³⁶Walter Ruttmann, quoted in Dieter Daniels, ‘Sound and Vision in Avantgarde and Mainstream [1]’, <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/sound_vision/> (accessed 29 July 2010).

³⁸Oskar Fischinger, ‘Sounding Ornaments’ (1932), first published in the Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung (8 July 1932); quoted in William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Bloomington, IN, 2004), 179.

³⁹John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 20.

⁴⁰ John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 30.

⁴¹ John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 24.

⁴²Steina Vasulka, at <http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_Orka/Orka.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁴⁴Vasulka, ‘Description and Technical Specifications of the Performance of Violin Power’ (1992), quoted in Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2008), 334 (n. 110).

⁴³Vasulka discussing ‘Violin Power : The Performance’, <http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_ViolinPower/ViolinPower.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁴⁶Cahen (details of original source not given), quoted in Chris Meigh-Andrews, ‘Robert Cahen: Passage’, Art Monthly, 326 (May 2009), 39.

⁴⁵‘Robert Cahen: Passage at Preston Harris Museum and Art Gallery’, <http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art64388> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁴⁹Viola, Knocking at an Empty House, 151–2.

⁴⁷Tony Conrad, ‘LYssophobia: On Four Violins’, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (London, 2004), 313–18 (p. 316).

⁴⁸Conrad later wrote several essays on musical topics, including an exploration of non-Western scales and Schenker. See his ‘Preparing for the Propaganda War in the Time of Global Culture: Trance, Form, and Persuasion in the Renovation of Western Music’, <http://tonyconrad.net/bard.htm> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁵⁰Yalkut, in an email message to Spielmann (18 April 2004), quoted in Spielmann, Video, 79.

⁵¹Spielmann, Video, 8.

⁵² Spielmann, Video, 60–1.

⁵³Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 4.

⁵⁴Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York, 2009), 3.

⁵⁵Critic (1826) quoted in Margaret Notley, ‘“With a Beethoven-like Sublimity”: Beethoven in the Works of Other Composers’, The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge, 2000), 219–39 (p. 235); Igor Stravinsky, quoted in Lucy Miller, Adams to Zemlinsky (New York, 2006), 44.

⁵⁶Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, IL, 2003).

⁵⁷Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913), repr. in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE, 2001), 205–11 (p. 208).

⁵⁸Edgard Varèse, quoted in Gunter Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, Perspectives of New Music, 3/2 (spring–summer 1965), 32–7 (p. 34).

⁵⁹Christopher Stephen Kerse, The Law Relating to Noise (London, 1975), 8.

⁶⁰Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d'une musique concrète (Paris, 1952), 22, quoted and trans. in Hegarty, Noise/Music, 32.

⁶¹John Cage, ‘The Future of Music Credo’ (1937), Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961), 3–6 (p. 3).

⁶² John Cage, ‘The Future of Music Credo’ (1937), Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961), 5.

⁶³Hegarty, Noise/Music, 4.

⁶⁴Fontana, ‘Sound as Virtual Image’, <http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/sound%20As%20Virtual%20Image.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

⁶⁵Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York, 2007), 13.

⁶⁶ Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York, 2007) 14. Interestingly, the term ‘Sound/Art’ was first documented in America by the Sculpture Center in New York City in 1983. The exhibition, curated by William Hellerman, included the work of Acconci, Les Levine and Carolee Schneeman, artists also involved in video work. Such inclusion highlights the multidisciplinarity of many of those working with video.

⁶⁷One recent exception is the winning piece for the 2010 Turner Prize: for her sound installation Lowlands Away, Susan Philipsz sang a sixteenth-century Scottish song; in its original setting, recorded versions of the song could be heard from speakers situated underneath three bridges over the River Clyde in Glasgow. See <http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/> (accessed 21 April 2011).

⁶⁸Licht, Sound Art, 35.

⁶⁹ Licht, Sound Art, 13.

⁷² André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18, 14.

⁷⁰André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18 (p. 12).

⁷¹ André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18 (p. 12).

⁷⁴Allan Kaprow, ‘Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle (1974)’, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1996; expanded edn 2003), 148–53 (p. 148).

⁷³Spielmann, Video, 87, 117.

⁷⁵Jean Baudrillard, ‘In the Shadow of the Millennium’ (1998), trans. François Debrix, quoted in Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Bill Viola: Buried Secrets (Tempe, AZ, 1995), 57.

⁷⁶Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London and New York, 1991), 1.

⁷⁹ Spielmann, ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34/1 (2001), 59.

⁷⁷Dick Higgins, Horizons (New York, 1998), 9, 27–8.

⁷⁸Spielmann, ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34/1 (2001), 55–61 (p. 60).

⁸⁰Julie Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. xv.

⁸¹Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1941).

⁸²Youngblood describes intermedia as ‘the nervous system of mankind’ (Expanded Cinema, 41).