One day, while staring at my computer screen, I asked the question: “What is video?” The query was inspired by the visual comparisons between the monitor screen of a Television CRT set, and an Apple MacBook GUI. Although all graphic representations on a computer are expressed and visualized with a video screen, we still refer to generated windows, objects, and coded elements as a “video.” The objecthood of analog video carries over and hides the video medium of interactive media and graphic programming of computers.


Since having these thoughts, I keep returning to interrelations of cinema, television, and computers shared through the interface of screens. As video technology has gone from analog signal to digital encoding, several electronic signals can be outputed to a screen. Digital video reveals that signal not tapes, disc, or broadcast are at play which define medium. It is a variety of source inputs that make up the audiovisual quality of elapsing events that happen with every cycle of a video frame. To answer to the question of what IS Video? We must examine the process of what video DOES.


Video IS, an electronic signal, and it is always a signal. Video is not really a physical object like videotape cassette or digital video disc, or even a digital file. These media objects are access containers of recorded content that are often associated as being “the video.”  These media objects activate and inform the signal output of a media player, but are not the source format itself. What video the signal DOES, is host the appearance of things. More than just “re-presenting” events and subjects, the electronic image of video also forms a literal space for hosting of activity. The active space of the video screen is a place to be populated by numerous incoming signals, which gives video its spatial character as a scientific, entertainment, marketing, and military uses.


The idea of video as an “active space” came to me reading the musings of Villem Fluesser. I was drawn to his written philosophy about the way in which a video monitor bonds everyone involved (technicians, operators, and performers) with the output of a TV screen, informing them how to work to build the picture. Fleusser also wrote that video began with television but was later discovered that the screen was useful for spying. Not the camera per say but the way in which the screen is watched indicates video surveillance. The desire for total control (totalitarian power) through mass surveillance is the real purpose of video. Like Panopoticism, the proliferation of cameras throughout industries, institutes, homes, and public space turns the world into a laboratory of power for systems to observe behavior, and implement corrective changes.


But my own thinking about the controlling power of video became limited to just thinking about surveillance. The video screen itself is alluring. The screen attracts and engages the curiosity of a viewer, and keeps us watching to see what kind of imagery unfolds. If the purpose of video is to be a tool for total control as a messenger and surveillance apparatus then it is the space on both sides of the screen which generate a video environment. To commune and interact with screens enables systems to observe activity happening within and outside of the screen. This video environment of watching and being watched is too difficult to grasp when video space represents reality (real spaces) but is in fact still a separate reality which overtakes modes of communication, action, and movement. Since television, video has become the dominant cultural form. Video no longer supports culture but is culture itself.


At this point, I answered my own question, but is that enough? There is still my interest in the way that video forms both constructed and incidental apparatus. There’s also the aspect of thinking about liveness that goes beyond differences of real-time and recorded media, and more so as liveness being how image is compiled and generated repeatedly. These aspects of video still that gnaw at me. Video art after all is useful for exploring what video is and what it can be, and the spatial possibilities of video are still developing further. Space, time, perception, and culture all collapse into the other when the virtual and physical spaces are bounded. As physical structures support the screen space, the video screen hypermediates physical space.


Video screens make physical space into immersive places. The active space of the screen extends the confines of physical space with a live information stream. Just as a windowed opening in a building lets in the visual information of the outside world, video screens are taking on such a role less as perceptual metaphor, and more as built-in technology. TV was originally just a furniture object and later became a mobile device. The 3-Dimensional box of TV screens we gather around are now nearly 2-Dimensional flat panels, wall paper, partitioned walls for homes, offices, movie production, events, and a sphere for Las Vegas. The television tube of video has merged with architecture, which returns to the immersivity to the past tradition of murals and painted ceilings in building interiors. 


This deepening relationship of video with architecture shows just how necessary video is for systems in our society. The apparatus of video cameras and screens operate openly without protest. As Video has made physical spaces more immersive, video-based Virtual Reality technology is enabling new opportunities for viewing, interaction, access, and experience in a disembodied way. Spatial media is happening both within and outside of screens. Yet the screen is still a visual spectacle that is to cinema and television, which were common space for an industrialized society. And since new media remediate old media, the 3D video space of VR is seen through and by a virtual camera. Virtual Worlds turn into a just another activity space for surveillance that is embedded in 3D architecture and truly invisible for the human eye.


Critical theorists such as DeBord and Baudrillard have established the proliferation of virtual experience and hyperreality. Guy Debord and the Situationists in France, framed their current time as a society who was losing public space, eroded by consumerism. The new or actual social space of industrialized nations was formed from the social space of mass media. A common for people that was founded through shared experiences with news, entertainment, and advertising. Debord’s vision of society is an all-consuming theatricality treatment, one in which the spectators are as much a part of producing the spectacle as they are seeing it. So immersed are modern people in the world of “commodified imagery” that they cannot step away from and separate from spectacle as it would be possible. The mass media environment of printed magazines, broadcasting, photographs, films, radio, billboards take up as much space as do the actual commodities they symbolize, but these image commodities in turn take on their own meaning. Jean Baudrillard was also keen on billboards, going further by claiming that the “billboards are watching us.” This metaphor has taken on a real shape, as surveillance cameras monitor human reactions to advertisements. Today, surveillance capitalism is carried out with video with screens, when the act of using and looking at them are recorded inside-out. The conflation of the real and the hyperreal cannot be disentangled, just as the physical and virtual intermingle becoming one in the same experience. Physical and the virtual worlds inform one another’s cultural production, but the virtual has the upper hand as always being available globally.



But neither of DeBord or Baudrillard could provide an answer to a solution to capitalist realism beyond describing the implications. That the state of affairs in which progress is repetitive instead of a breakthrough. This modern world of sophisticated architecture, energy, and communications is so old and familiar, it seems to have naturally sprung up, when in fact it only exists because of human decisions. To not acknowledge human agency in construction of machinic world, is to render reality as phantasmagoria – fitting since logical systems perplex and frighten us. It is a world whose communication cannot be ended until as Ted Turner put it “the world ends.” The answer is to assign oneself a role in global communication.


We instead should stop recycling knowledge and information. A post-modern project never tosses away and only saves things. For capitalism to keep extracting value nostalgia, formulas, models, and stories need to be resurrected. The difference between post-modern intellectual and capitalist pursuits is type of discourse. We should made video be communication about a reality that is unlike the real world. The copying of reality only leads to the extraction and copying of the real into a commodifiable forms. And digital media has its own limits for translating the natural function of physical reality. What makes virtual worlds passable is how it makes us feel they are real. Digitally created virtual worlds will enable exploration and play, an activity space for mapping out new possibilities, observed by cameras that are watched by…