Video

Video: The Reflexive Medium is a 2005 work on the aesthetics, technologies, and cultural uses of video by new media theorist Yvonne Spielmann. Spielmann breaks down video as it is seen by the casual viewer – as a moving pattern of light – into its technical components. She argues that the viewer’s psychological relationship with continuous video (unlike its discrete and frame-based predecessor, film) consists in a constant cycle of feedback, in which one’s perception gives way into continuous transition akin to the visual sensations of ordinary life. Given this feature of video, Spielmann contends that video deserves its own genre, rather than the classification as a “stage” between digital and analog. She situates video within contemporary theoretical frameworks, showing how it can continue opening up possibilities in new media technology.

Spielmann begins her work by distinguishing video, which is an electronic medium, from film and other visual media, which rely on recordings and are bound within individual frames. Video is more similar to a computer, because it requires no recording, no frame, and is fully processual; that is, it is produced by synthesizing electronic signals. Unlike frame-based technologies, video is in constant movement: the content registered by a video recording device is virtually identical to the reality it observes. Spielmann argues that video is, therefore, a reflexive medium, more similar to the human eye than anything else, and does not belong on a continuum between analog and digital media.

Next, Spielmann describes early examples of video works by artists who illuminated the connections between video and computers. Among these names are Woody and Steina Vasulka, Jud Yalkut, Stan Vanderbeek, and June Paik. These artists introduced digital components to video, using the result to comment on society and culture. Spielmann believes the cultural and aesthetic potentials of video have been augmented by new electronic tools, breathing life into a new “electronic vocabulary of image.”



Spielmann warns not to conceive of video as an evolutionary step beyond film; rather, she views both as their own evolutionary branches, which will continue to bear fruit forever. Video is distinct from film in that it incorporates experimental film techniques and explores the phenomenon of organic vision, while film remains a succession of frames with its own aesthetic affordances. Spielmann also describes film’s “spatial order,” or the ordering of spectator, projector, and screen, that results in the illusion of continuity. Video has no such order, but emerges instantaneously in both camera and screen, as well as whatever other devices the artist chooses. Moreover, video has no “image” at its heart but rather a stream of electronic signals. Video, therefore, simulates via the instantaneous transition between images, while film projects an illusion.

Finally, Spielmann contends that contemporary critical debates about new media need to give video proper recognition for the concepts it has added to the field. To her, video has its own emergent set of languages, which are already in dialogue with other genres. Among these languages is the language of viewer-video interaction (made possible with user interfaces or new kinds of receivers of sense data), and hybridization (the synthesis of video and non-video media into single works).

Spielmann’s Video is one of the first works to make both a technical and aesthetic distinction between video and film that is both relatively simple and theoretically compelling. Since its release in 2005, it has paved the way for many other works investigating the potential of video in new media.