4.10: Time-Based Media

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Overview

This chapter covers the medium of the moving image in its various formats, including film and video. Interactive technology, for example, video games and serial television, is addressed as a distinct artistic product that also incorporates moving imagery. As soon as photography was invented, people sought to extend its capacity to capture motion.

Eadweard Muybridge

With traditional film, what we see as a continuous moving image is actually a linear progression of still photos on a single reel that pass through a lens at a certain rate of speed and are projected onto a screen.
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.

Twelve film stills showing a horse and rider jump over a gate.

Eadweard Muybridge, Sequence of a Horse Jumping, 1904. Image is in the public domain

Video Art

Video art, first appearing in the 1960s and 70s, uses magnetic tape to record image and sound together.
Video art allows artists to work with time-based media at less expense than film requires
However, video art often suffers from the threat of rapid technological change, quickly rendering media extinct.
Unlike filmmakers, video artists frequently combine their medium with installation, an art form that uses entire rooms or other specific spaces, to achieve effects beyond mere projection.

Nam June Paik

South Korean video artist Nam June Paik made breakthrough works that comment on culture, technology and politics. By the mid 1960s Paik altered TVs displayed images altered by magnets combined with video feedback and other technologies that produced shifted patterns of shape and color. He produced large scale video installations.
He exhibited modified or “prepared” television sets that upset the traditional TV-watching experience. One example is Magnet TV, in which an industrial magnet is placed on top of the TV set, distorting the broadcast image into abstract patterns of light. ²

Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965, modified black-and-white television set and magnet (Whitney Museum of American Art) © Nam June Paik Estate

Nam June Paik – 'My Crazy Uncle' | TateShots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RE1ueYnSVc

Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway" - American Art Moments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_6HAMtqW3Y

Preserving Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway https ://youtu.be/G9M8MEJIaFI

Bill Viola

He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach.
Contemporary video artist Bill Viola creates work that is more painterly and physically dramatic, often training the camera on figures within a staged set or spotlighted figures in dark surroundings as they act out emotional gestures and expressions in slow motion. ¹