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.