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sely the obstacles, anachronisms and reflections in the interaction between different media
that fascinate contemporary artists. 93
The genealogy of the media, therefore, should not be described as history but as
changing configurations, with new media simply allotting a different place to the old
(Friedrich Kittler), shifting their value, but not evolutionary.
Is there a Specific Videocy?
If video is merely used as a transmission device for electronically generated images, the
video is not the artistic original. This is precisely the dilemma of video (art) aesthetics,
as the jury of the 10th International Video Festival in Bochum experienced recently, in
A/lay 2000. From the jury's introduction to prize-giving in the competition:
With a number of works, we found a clear tendency towards film. This caused the
problem whether we should judge video [simply] as a medium for recording, production
and projection or [more strictly] the specific aesthetics and media quality of video.
Would the aesthetic delimitation of video against other optical media on the basis
of its formal-technological qualities be justified? 94 Is there a specific videocy 95 ? Is it the
techno-aesthetic pictorial untruthfulness of video compared with the apparent veracity of
television images whose constant broadcast criterion is that they must not be blurred? 96
The initial fascination with the techno-properties of video - the "skandalon of the medium"
(Irmeta Schneider) - increasingly lost its importance compared to the (mostly narrative)
contents; once again proof of the rule that media archaeology ends where contents
- as a diversion from the medium in the sense of Boris Groys (the "submedial") -
begins. Where does that leave videomathesis, the specific knowledge and memory of video
images, the specific options for time-axis-manipulation in video editing, being and
time in time-based technological images?
The Analogue Document of the Original and its Differences to Digital Space
Instead of reproducing originals, originals are now sampled - a molecularisation, even
atomisation of the original. Digitally, there is no original at all: not even an "image". Let
us assume the difference of digital - basically photographic (Flusser's hypothesis) -, ie
discrete quantities of pixels to the physically analogue picture.
Somewhere between scanning a document that can be experienced haptically, for
example an oil painting, und the representation of the readings on a storage medium,
the original materiality of the picture or (simpler:) object seems to get lost. This is also
[already] true for analogue, electronic recording processes. 97
In the medium of video, the coupling of original and archive is a given: in the storage
medium video, although its stored images - in contrast to an oil painting on canvas
- can be detached from its concrete carrier (the magnetic tape). "The photographic can
only be determined from the reflection of the image carrier and the production procedures
that generate it." 98 ; by contrast, the point with digital videocy is (and this is the media-archaeologically
crucial difference between analogue and digital video) that it can be
transferred onto other memories without loss, and therefore extends, with Derrida (Dem
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