Abstract

Video is an electronic and audiovisual medium based on signal processes. Since the mid-1960s, it has been primarily artists from the areas of music and film who have explored the audiovisual and processual features of video. With their video experiments, the composer Nam June Paik, the violinist Steina Vasulka, and the trained filmmaker Woody Vasulka, for example, intervened in the internal structure of electronic images and sounds, exchanged sound and image signals, and in the 1970s edited video signals with auxiliary devices such as the processor and the synthesizer. Video artists have used the special features of media in order to make multifaceted variations of image-sound connections by means of electromagnetic manipulation as well as interfacing analog and, later, digital devices. These features allow the possibilities of variation in the medium of video to emerge in correspondence with principles of musical composition. Since the 1980s, the audiovisual medium of video has also proved to be continuously upgradeable through the use of digital processes. Since the 1990s, large-format video installations in particular have been introduced into the art and museum context, and video has been employed in mixed media environments such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.