Antin - Video

In Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium, Antin discusses “video art” and it’s difficulties due to the established standards of broadcast television. One example of this is the limited choice and interactivity of television in regards to the receiver, all lies within the transmitter or sender. Schneider and Gillette’s 1969 Wipe Cycle, which attempted to turn the “receivers into transmitters” by repeatedly recording the audience and immediately playing it on a single screen of a series, allowing viewers to literally “watch” themselves and eventually attempt to interactive with this cycle. Yet this piece resulted in a failure because it intimidated an unprepared audience which was used to another standard of television, preparedness/professionalism. Monetary difficulties were also brought up, with equipment used for broadcasting and transmitting video being expensive because the primary clients were professional television broadcasters, the result of artist’s attempting to make do by using lower quality or black and white video, resulting in a dissonance to viewers used to the professionalism of television.

This overall sense of professionalism and preparedness seems to clash with television’s attempts to adequately represent reality. Antin writes that the television industry “wishes, or feels obligated, to maintain the illusion of immediacy…what one sees on the TV screen is living and actual reality…” due to the audience’s enjoyment of production errors and other mishaps that add a degree on spontaneity and naturalness. I can personally attest to this in a recent viewing of the Daily Show, wherein host Jon Stewart accidentally bungled a skit, the result was unintentionally funny and showed the humanity that lies under the general preparedness of television.

Considering that this article was published in the mid 1970s, I wonder how relevant some of this is today. There are many forms of transmitting video that are available to the public, such as handheld cameras and online video-broadcasting services. This ease of access combined with people’s greater familiarity with non-professional recordings and their generally unprepared natures, would remove some of the former difficulties that video art previously faced from comparisons to professionally broadcast video that were given to it.