- emphasis on presence of video screens in our lives: Times Square, computers, televisions, and mobile phones.
- "No beginning/No end/No direction/No duration - Video as mind"
-Bill Viola
I am confused by this quote. Videos have duration. unless you replay them. How could one say that other art forms have duration? Surely Viola does not mean other art forms (painting, sculpture, dance, fiber, theatre, etc) grow old and inapplicable while video does not; or that video art 'lasts' longer than other art, for all art is subject to both temporal and physical decay. The last part of the sentence: "Video as mind" conjures analogies to consciousness. Human consciousness is more easily likened to video than a painting or other 'stagnant' object, as the mind is described and describes itself as a motile 'object' in time and space. Metaphor is language, and this simile provokes one to conceive of oneself as a stream of images flashing quickly on a screen. (That's a very stupid idea. What is the screen? What are the images? What is producing/editing them? What is projecting them? What is watching them? "video as mind" implies passivity on the part of the viewer, I interpret this viewer as the 'ego', or, better put and with less Freudian baggage, 'attention'.Maybe I'll stop this analysis of consciousness, because if I don't, I'll not complete what I assume I am assigned, and I'd rather not get zero credit on an assignment because I wrote something tangential to your intentions.
But I don't want to write any more about the intro, because the rest of these quotes are (like Viola's) initially intriguing, and, upon several seconds reflection, completely ridiculous.
Except:
- Bertolt Brecht is cool, he points out "the risk of enforced conformity and indoctrination". This kindled discussion of media from a philosophical and sociological perspective.
More will be posted, I do promise.
The 1960's
The 1970's
The 1980's
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