Aesthetics of Narcissism

After building up the argument, "...video art is the the psychological condition of the self split and doubled by the mirror-reflection of synchronous feedback," Krauss makes an interesting comparison between Acconci's Centers and Jasper John's American Flag. Where the nature of the painting is to compare itself to the wall as well as the history of painting, Centers has a meaning that thinks upon the history of itself in its own time. Vito Acconci not only interacts with a camera in his peice, but he also is performs alongside an image of himself while the viewer can see this world of mirrors.

Overall I get a sense that the article argues that video art uses moving images of the world to abstract and separate itself from the world. The screen doesn't really mater in the grand scheme of things because the video lives somewhere between the camera and the screen. All we can do is look in on the representation of that recorded world.

Steina

I found the article to be a little lighter on the concept than I would have hoped. I learned that Steina as an artist is 'playing' a lot, but I feel like concepts were not expressed well in this article. For example, Borealis(1993), has a very technical and environmental description, but then it states, "The images are mostly of rivers, oceans, stream, and spray."

What I did get from the article, is the communication style of Steina. I was really happy to read that she was interested in communicating to people in a real way, instead of to a mass audience. The old man who watched Tokyo Four may have not had her identical reading of the piece, but it did communicate deeply with him. He saw the piece. I also liked the quote, "But the primary motivation for all art is the desire to communicate with oneself." I find this idea to be very central to my art practice. There are many times when I have made pieces, that show imagery from my dreams and my imagination that communicate something unexplainable to others that communicates something concrete to me.

My question to the class is would you rather communicate to a mass audience, a few others, or yourself in your art?

Vasulka's Video

This article makes me think a lot about the difference between the analogue and digital electronic signal. Both of them are very different, and I feel like digital signals can lose the magic of an analogue wave. Digital signals are always sampled, approximations of what is being seen at that moment. In photography, pixels try to approximate the color in one little piece of an image, but it still cannot capture the minute detail of the surface of film. This makes me think that time based works should be divided into multiple categories; film, analogue video, digital video. Programs like jitter and processing, can never do what Vasulka's machines could, they can only try to mimic them.

I guess this post is going to be a highly technical one. I read a few weeks ago that the human eye can see roughly 550 mega pixels of data if you took an instantaneous screenshot of our visual field. It makes me think of how far away any technology is from replacing the magic of vision. It makes me wonder what the future of the time based image will be.