KVT – Muses on Video Art
Goethe has a brilliant exhibition screening on multiple flat screens this week and it deals with the re-recording of some of the best German video art since Video art came to have its own genre with the work of Nam June Paik in 1965 on his new Sony Portapack.
A talk on Sunday by the exhibition’s curator pointed out that due to the ever changing technologies in video cameras and projection devices (technologies that nowadays become passe and obsolete in the blink of an eye), most videos that have been and are being made are archivally unsound and will probably just disappear. (There was more to the lecture than this but it was this info that set my cogs creaking.)
Now after being forced to watch some awful wedding videos, I think that the relative ephemerality of videos may be for the best, but as far as family histories and memories go, these may become more oral than visual. And just think about how much commercial video deserves to be emptied onto the rubbish tip of excruciating memory.
A professional photographer friend believes that although, in this digital age, trillions more photographs are being taken than at any time in history, future generations will only be able to access a relative handful of them. So unsound or unknown is the archival ability of digital technologies!
