The Mirror Stage

Video’s rapidly developing hardware and software technologies ensure that video makers have to relearn their craft on major software or hardware updates. This (bi)annual update of tools create a cycle where the knowledge of the tool needs to be rediscovered leaving the video makers in a perpetual state of not only potential technical but also conceptual exploration. These investigations are evident in most video exhibitions, the internet, etc helping this art medium to exponentially grow in the past fifteen years and allowing it – through the new internet technologies – to create an accelerated presence and an ever growing international audience. In spite of this focus, video remains in a nervous condition, in a perpetual state of flux, not defined by a theoretical framework which may contextualise it within the body of cultural dialectics and academia. Instead, it is mostly defined by the practitioners and the technological advances providing it with an “internal dialectic […] produced out of the circumstances of its […] multiple, ongoing invention“ ² or as Bill Viola noted: “No beginning/No end/No direction/No duration – Video as mind”. ^{3Silvia Martin, Video Art, 2006 – quoting a 19}