Introduction
Welcome to the Early Video Project Web Site!
The purpose of the site is to support the
community of people interested in early video with information
about early video and early video art, and current activities
connected with that topic.
In addition, we hope to announce news about seminars, conferences,
and archival programs, as brought to our attention. Also we intend
to publish on this site interviews, articles, and reviews from
a variety of sources.
We want to build into this site a collection of source material
about early video. This material will include lists of early
publications, lists of tapes, lists of exhibitions, lists of
early video art citations in periodicals; all subject to revision
and updating as information is made available.
For us, and perhaps for others, those early videotapes represent
a unique window on some origins of our present culture. In their
often shocking intimacy, their imaginative improvisations, and
floating human eye and ear representation of the world around
them, the tapes that the proto-video artists of the late sixties
and early seventies produced threw a privileged light on both
the countercultural and artistic world of that time. They also
influenced commercial media, of course. And it is, if you like,
where "reality TV" begins.
Early video often involved a strong element of prediction
and some of it consciously relied for its ultimate rationale
upon the future. For some it represented the first unrealized
vision of a connected world, a world where information flowed
freely, where everyone had access and no individual or institution
had ultimate control.
Media seem familiar in the present, but are always conditional.
For some artists the 'post-modern moment' began with the realization
that the conditions of life and art are always fluid.
For some, perhaps, it is a stretch to see continuity between
a portapak introduced in New York in 1965 and a personal computer
used for worldwide visual and audible communication in 2000 CE.
But not for us.
A new generation of scholars is interested in this subject
now. Scholars are only as good as their sources. We may not always
be able provide definitive information in this site, but if we
can help direct interested people to where it can be found then
this site will realize some of its purpose.
It's early days, of course, and this site is not complete.
It never will be, as we intend to change it and update it regularly.
If you have a suggestion as to how it can be improved, please
let us know.
Davidson
The Website is generously sponsored
by: Emily Harvey of the Emily Harvey Gallery, New York; and Francesco
Conz, Editions Francesco Conz, Verona, Italy. We thank them.
for all
matters relating to this website, contact: davidson@davidsonsfiles.org
© Davidson Gigliotti, 2000CE
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