David Antin - Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium

In this article, Antin starts out asking about what video art is. He goes on to talk about how shabby and low-quality video art is compared to "high class" television. But he also suggests a bright future for video art. He goes into detail about commercial television being controlled by big corporations.
He compares television to telephones (transmitters and receivers).
Antin then writes about live television. If we see video from across the country, even if an event happened a few hours beforehand, we still accept it as a live occurrence.
I like what he writes about "boring art." He basically says that we see a work of art as boring if we expect it to be something else. If we see the art as accomplishing a goal, it isn't seen as boring. A lot of video art I've seen has been boring to me, but maybe I was just expecting it to be something else.
Antin then breaks down television programs and commercials into intervals. He even breaks down sports events into specific parts to make a comparison between sports and other television programs. He sees no definite stylistic distinctions between commercials and programs.
It was interesting to read about the costs of some of the early video recording and editing equipment. I have more respect for early video art because of the costs of some of that equipment, as well as the apparently difficult early editing techniques.
This is an interesting article. Started off a little slow but then got pretty interesting.

David Antin - The Distinctive Features of the Medium

This article focuses on the two main disclosures associated with video arts young life thus far. The first is a sort of enthusiastic welcoming prose that stands for the parameters of culture and what allows one to express that culture through technology. The second is more of an attempt to locate the properties of the medium that is video art and find where artists fit in, which is a stupid way of saying the difference between art and film. It would be much simpler to discover the difference between video and art without the modern day television. Television is neither video nor art because art and film are rarely if ever represented within that medium. As the article says, "the politics of the art world is, for good reasons, rather hostile to pop." And television represents the popular cultural through and through. Yet television is undoubtedly a part of the video culture, which is somewhat paradoxical. The article proceeds with a basic and very bias history of the television industry. Basically what was meant as a marketable, expensive technology, transformed seemingly overnight when the camera became readily available to the average working man or woman. Because the transmission of the images is more costly than actually receiving them on a television, a generic social hierarchy was unofficially created for the television industry. One of the more interesting pieces the article talked about was wipe cycle, which takes video of the viewers without them noticing for 16 second time lapses at first followed by an 8 second time lapse second. The article really seems to focus on the "fact" that the current social and economic distribution of technological resources that come out to date have a major effect on the semiotics of the technological resources that are available in that time period. Point to fact: a camera is still a camera whether the user is an artist or not. Film is by no means the same thing as television as film focuses on the world of illusion rather than "real time" as with television.

Sergei Eisenstein - Film Form

In contrast to Lotman, Sergei Eisenstein seems to think that montage is the central element in film, or rather a sort of collision of two given factors that create a sort of concept. His friend and peer, Pudovkin on the other hand states that montage is a linkage of pieces in a film, or rather the building blocks of the central idea. The author of the article mostly seems to think that Einstein is more correct than Pudovkin in this discussion of montage (which it looks like they discuss a lot). Einstein will have us think that montage is absolutely not a simple matter of stringing shots one after another like a building block, which is much different from Lotman's way of thinking. Also according to Einstein, Montage is a "collision" of singular shots that are often opposite each-other that tend to generate significant responses from viewers. But he could never fully explain how any sort of real concept arises out of this collision for the sake of montage (which he seemed to really be into). The simple approach to portraying a collision followed by a concept is to make a sort of conflict for the viewer to follow along and get attached to. By which this said spectator "would either strengthen how political and social consciousness or jolt him out of his ideological preconceptions to look at the world anew."
Einstein apparently abandoned his belief that montage represented a "series of explosions in a combustion engine" and turned his definition to a sort of combination of ideas with shots that focus on one idea, and shot and framed in a a way that are meant to stimulate the viewers minds. Or that by simply cutting up the images of everyday lives and stringing them together a sort of story and thereby emotional response is the result. This article was interesting because it asked very hard questions. Einstein argued cinematography to be montage itself, and that the social arrangements we obtain in our social society are where the cinematographer gets his work material. We live in a materialist world that shapes our very consciousness. Therefore social backgrounds make up the way that film-makers put their shots together to create a sort of higher meaning or even a story.

Yuri Lotman - Semiotics of Cinema

From what I gained from the article, Yuri Lotman was a semiotician who taught at Tartu University in Estonia who wrote a book that came out in Russia in 1973. Because he was a semiotician, he tended to see the different film shots as the building blocks of the cinema world. He claimed that the different shots that made up a scene are kind of like the words that make up a sentence, and that the "syntax" or rules by which we go about using to make up and then speak full sentences is in some respects like the different shots that make up a specific scene.
If Cinema is a representation of what we see, then the shot itself carries a certain amount of information that can have multiple interpretations. Lotman's central argument was that semantics that are used in cinema in order to give scenes meaning, or rather allow them to generate meaning. Every viewer in cinema brings their own home-grown education, socioeconomic class, and own brand of cultural upbringing, so interpretations of a film will always be different. But because everyone interprets things differently, there is a percentage of the audience that will "skim off" several layers of meaning throughout the film/text based on whether or not he or she truly understands it. This notion has many applications for modern day media. And it partially explains why children and people of less physical/mental development enjoy simple shows and movies that aren't terribly difficult to comprehend. Furthermore, it directly implies that texts and films effect our different intellectual and emotional stages of development.

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