video is a perceptual prosthetic - Centre for Art Tapes

the early 1980s) were ultimately successful inturning the media environment upside down.Artists and independent media producershad a vision of a world where the productionand distribution of video data would be in thehands of everyone. Early in the 21st centuryvideo transmission is not confined to the topdown,one-to-many communications modelof television. We now live in a one-to-one,many-to-many transceiver culture.Marshall McLuhan, the literary historianand media environmentalist extraordinaire,once said that the greatest invention of the20th century was the instant replay. McLuhanwas fully aware of the groundbreaking workof Norbert Wiener, resulting in the birth ofthe field of cybernetics, the science of controlthrough feedback. McLuhan understood theunparalleled cultural acceleration that wouldoccur through feedback at electronic speedvery early. Artists and independent media producerssimultaneously understood the powerof video through their hands-on work withvideo systems. Video magnified the powerof learning for all those who used it. Videomemory permitted the quick objectification ofexperience and established aroused expectationsas automated pre-perception (again,video can be seen to ‘perceive’ and transcribefaster than bioelectric human perception)and with its transmission and transcription ofreality to low-cost memory, a new era in theexchange of data, the sharing of experience,was initiated. We literally chase video recordingscognitively while they are being made.Video thus speeds up cognition, the recognitionof pattern, and assists us in distinguishinginformation, those differences that make a difference,from massive fields of data. The videoinstrument lures us to experience the worldwith electronic speed and machine-enhancedfocus.Other prior media technologies had suchcataclysmic impacts. Photography, phonography(music recording), film, radio andtelephony, were, and continue to be, huge,transformative technologies. Photography,born in the mid-19th century, became andremained the people’s personal archival mediumthroughout in the 20th century. Film andcinematic storytelling were the predominantcultural form of the 20th century. Televisionswept through technologically advancedsocieties reaching levels of saturation at anunprecedented speed in the late 1940s, earlyto mid-1950s. But video was the first accessibleelectronic audio/visual technology.Video was the beginning of the devolution oftelevision. Television had provided access tohuge audiences for corporate broadcasters ina rigid one-to-many, top-down communicationsstructure. Video was a decentralized,off-air, audio/visual technology. It allows the‘reading and writing’ of video data and in itsubiquitous presence and utility, facilitates amassive dispersal of video data, encouragingthe development of multiple points of viewand the ‘banking’ (in memory) and exchangeof same.Video exceeds the influence of photography,phonography, telephony, radio and filmbecause of its real time audio/visual sensorybase. Video ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ the way we doas a species, engaging the senses of sight andhearing, describing actions and environmentsin visual and acoustic space simultaneously,in real time, in the exact same time it takesthings to happen outside the domain of video.Video engages the two primary ‘windows’ ofour sensorium and also resonates with oursenses of time and balance. While it is truethat video is no less synthetic a reality thanphotography, phonography, film, telephony,radio or television, we perceive the immediatesonic and visual display of video as an augmented,enhanced reality, not as a mediated,7