Crossing the Screen

Ausstellung: Crossing the Screen
Candice Breitz. Becoming

Since the discovery of video as an artistic tool, the new art form has been concerned with transformation of the traditional concept of the image and experimentation with the perception of space and time. The development of media art can be traced from early performance documentation and single channel videos up to current cross-media installations and has been consistently perceived to extend the limits of images in 3 dimensional space.

While many artists in the early seventies concentrated on the limited size of the TV set, this was extended at an early stage with the inclusion of sculptural video objects and closed-circuit installations. The new technology especially fascinated and impressed with the ability to simultaneously record and play back, which was implemented to question the relationship between subject and object and body and perception.

This already illustrated a distinctive feature of video art, namely the ability to combine real areas of space, temporal sequences and constructed realities. This fusion of spatial, temporal and reality planes was then further enhanced in the eighties with the integration and experimental application of new interface technologies in reactive and interactive art works. Computers and new technology enable a re-implementation of the concepts of the sixties and seventies for the spatial and action-oriented integration of the observer in the art work.

From the early nineties media art installations have continually filled all available space with ever more optical and acoustic possibilities to transform the space into a sensual environment. Video art has long since left the constricted area of the screen and has become a virtual experience. The exhibition Crossing the Screen  traces this development with the aid of selected artistic works.