Art in General, New York, January 12, 2008.
Part of the 10th Anniversary Video Marathon, organized by Hanne Mugaas.
Dan Sandin, Nam June Paik, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Matthew Schlanger, Jim Wiseman, and Bill Etra represent a generation of pioneers who explored video and moving image synthesis. These artists developed hardware instruments as technological advancements in an era of idealism and utopian views of communication, where video and television were regarded as the ultimate new creative medium, able to elicit widespread cultural and social change.
At the screening, their work was shown alongside that of a new generation of artists returning to hardware-based video instruments, like Billy Roisz (NTSC), noteNdo, Jon Satrom, Paul Slocum, Karl Klomp, and LoVid. Departing from their predecessors, the latter set approaches technology with personal and global nostalgia as well as a romantic infatuation with the media-generating object. Inspired by noise, extreme music, glitch and hacker culture, as well as the fragility, unpredictability, and limitations of technology, they choose to work with decades-old electronic components for personal aesthetic reasons and as a reaction to the dominance of technology and media in mainstream culture.
