LOOP PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS Title: Paradoxes of Video Art Transmission and Circulation in the Digital Era1 Lead by: Menene Gras Balaguer Director of Cultura y Exposiciones, Casa Asia Participants: Beomyun Jung Artist / Technical Supervisor, Seoul International New Media Festival Dr. Linda C. H. Lai Artist / Historian / Program Leader, Bachelor of Arts in Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media Isaac Leung Artist / Curator / Director, Videotage, Hong Kong Jen Yannho Kim Art Director, Seoul International New Media Festival Kenichi Kondo Curator, Mori Museum, Tokyo Kim Hyung Kyung Cultural Events Manager, Centro Cultural Coreano en España Imma Prieto Curator / Art Critic / Professor, Escuela Universitaria Eram de la Universidad de Girona Elke E. Reinhuber Researcher / Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media | Nanyang Technological University Rachel Rits-Volloch Founder, MOMENTUM Héctor Rodriguez Digital Artist / Program Leader of the Bachelor of Arts & Science in New Media at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Creative Media 2
Meeting report by Lucila Piffer and Victoria Sacco
TOPICS: Transmission and circulation of video art, exhibiting conditions, challenges for the future. 1. Video art as a particular art form. Video art it’s usually thought as an accessible form of art, but presents at the same time difficulties. Can we think about it as a global art format? How simple results its production and/or distribution? Some paradoxes. •
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Video art is an accessible art format to see and produce, but it also involves difficulties for its transport and distribution, not only in terms of copyright but also in the sense of its perception. It’s difficult to display video: it demands a lot of effort, although it may seem simple. Cinema is traditionally the best place to screen video. What happens with video art in exhibitions? People usually pass by and give very few attention to what there’re watching. One of the biggest challenges is to create a new context for video art. There is also an excessive trust on its flexibility: people think often that through video they watch and have access to other cultures, but they actually don’t. There is an interest, but most of the times we don’t get to understand the whole culture behind it, the way each production implies certain environment, history, geography.
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The meeting was held on Thursday 4 June 2015. The present report aims to provide a summary of the discussions that took place during the meeting. It does not aim to be a a transcription of the conversations, so we emphasize its summary character.
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There is the belief that there are no distances nowadays, that we are close and share a common culture. This mistaken idea installs the impression that a video art piece can be watched similarly in different places. This so called global world is not as uniform as we might think. There’s the need to overcome the distances: somehow we’re still far. The cultural, economic or political common past of different countries makes it easier to find a common language and share codes: for example, the case of colonization. Geography has a fundamental role too. In terms of results, there is a kind of elimination between the process and the final work in video art, especially when it comes to mathematic or software as an artistic media. The work is shown, but the entire process of producing the work is completely invisible and almost gone at that point. This elimination is very painful; one of the biggest problems which need to be solved. There is also a question raised about the term ‘‘new media’’, which is used a lot in the west: What is it? What is new about it? Do we need a new term? Some think ‘‘moving image’’ is a more proper expression.
2. Curators, exhibition conditions and technical issues There are big difficulties when exhibiting in museums or galleries and working with curators. What problems show up frequently? How could they be solved? What strategies can be developed to compensate the lack of spaces or buyers? •
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It happens very often that curators are hard to convince about including video art. They use to consider it very demanding, and it’s also a fact that many requirements are hard to negotiate or replace: from this point of view it has to do more with economic considerations. Unless there is continuity in the relationship between artists and curators nothing happens later, so it’s also a matter of encouraging collaborations and exchanging programs. The cooperation evolves in archives organically. It’s easy to maintain contacts by having a collection and videoregistering as much as possible, so the material can be available as a resource online to which people can have access whenever they want. This allows galleries or museums to maintain a relationship with the artist as well. Many exhibitions have education programs that can be also documented. The permission of the artist is needed, but this issue presents usually no difficulties. The promotion of the international exchange of video art can somehow enlarge its importance. Long term collaboration and dialogue deliver a positive perspective. Concerning to technical issues, it can be sometimes difficult to explain an artist who was working for years in a video that maybe the conditions during an exhibition weren’t the best ones. Anyway, it’s important to notice that in some cases the political and/or social objectives of an artwork could be above the technical requirements, which justifies the flexibilization of the exhibiting frame. This ought be analyzed and decided with the artist.
Nevertheless, many difficulties can be fought with creative or collaborative initiatives. • •
In some countries, strategies were developed to compensate the lack of buyers: for example, pieces are played in art cinemas instead of being sold. An interesting way of giving prices to the artist is to finance his next production, so he can keep on working.
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When introducing single channel videos to show a new culture to a specific public, a whole structure should be built around them (microexhibitions, symposiums and performances) to create the proper context. Budgets are a big reality check, but there are ways in which ideas can organically evolve. It could be interesting to create a package that can easily travel and allow new partners and collaborations, so it’s possible to send it somewhere else and keep it going.
New technologies also influence the way people approach art. What difficulties does video art face in relation to audiences? •
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Video art is also combating a cultural situation in which everybody is used to see 30 seconds videos on phones, personal displays, etc. Our brain is trained to have very short periods of attention. Anyway, it still exists some trust in the role art can play in relation to this. Sometimes is very hard for audiences to understand the work. That’s one of the biggest challenges: if it’s already complex to have specialized public watching three-hour experimentations, it’s obviously even harder for bigger audiences
3. Challenges and strategies for the future. What aspects of the way artists and curators face video art could be changed for better? What ideas should be modified to help this art form reach new and richer horizons? •
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Some are convinced that the core issue is computation. We use to look at images as if they were just the same kind of images as old analogic cinema. They are screened as we screen cinema, they are described and thought in the same terms: we use the vocabulary of classical analog cinema. The major crisis that confronts image is how to realize that what we are seeing isn’t translation of concepts, nor a copy of nature, but a set of numerical codes. We have to talk about computation, but people get scared and run away. Sometimes it can be harder to talk about curating art in an art context than in a science context. We need to stark concentrating on the mathematical processes: it’s also a political issue to make out something that can be shared. It also results very important to abandon the mainstream narrative, which is killing a lot of works that could be great. The essence of the Hollywood mainstream is that the look is subordinated to narrative information. People are told that something is important for the story, so the story drives the visual experience. Instead, we need to worry about how we can we generate images or narratives from mathematic concepts, about how the artistic ideas can grow from something which is mathematic. Video art could be very liberating because it’s about time and seeing. There is no need to put anything together (i.e., to find the story). This should encourage everyone to be more human, to make video art without narrating all the time. People of any kind, of all ages and social backgrounds, can be attracted to this kind of direct seeing. It’s important to keep video as a liberalized media to receive the attention of the world. It’s fundamental to keep crossing projects, ideas, conversations that go beyond meetings, to build a real network. It’s also about finding the right partners to distribute and show the works.
CONCLUSIONS •
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Video art seems easy to transport, but there are many difficulties to display and distribute it. It demands very specific technical conditions and a certain context. We tend to think there are no distances nowadays and believe we share a common culture This so called global world is not as uniform as we might think. This mistaken idea installs the impression that a video art piece can be watched similarly in different places, which is not true. There’s the need to build long term collaboration and exchange programs. It’s interesting to think in non-narrative terms to find new, independent ways of creating video art. There’s a need to stop looking at art video in the same terms of cinema, and start thinking of computation.