The screen became a doubled world, which reflects ours and builds it own at the same time. Reproduction, simulation, and lies go hand in hand when we discuss the impact of one of mass media’s most powerful instrument. Of course, due to the digital revolution, also video had to change formally and contentually. Though, nevertheless, for over 60 years now, film’s little brother shapes the reality as we know it. 

Since Paik’s, Nauman’s, Graham’s or Viola’s first artistic attempts to work with video as a production tool, it became a part of the art world. At the beginning, researches of the new medium’s possibilities have lead to rather experimental or performatif works. Today, video art is one of the cores of the global art scene, and it stands right in its centre as one of the leading disciplines. In its short history it already developed various formal and contentual approaches varying between being experimental, fictive narrative and documentary. Currently, artists can freely choose between poetics and politics in order to find the right way of expression in a pool of uncountable formal and conceptual ideas. In a short time it became a very rich field of art.

So, why and how did video art become so popular? How did it become so strong that it could supersede painting out of the centre of art, in which it has stood for over 500 years? I believe that video art quickly spread due to its multiple and pluralistic character among contemporary artists. In a video piece, the artist can play with images, sound, and time. Obviously there is no sound in a painting or photograph. As sound has a different impact on our reciprocal system, combined with visual data it forms a more complex net of emotions and thoughts in our mind.

Also, there is no time in a painting or a photograph. Time is frozen, and captured there. It is represented, and illustrated. In a video work, time proceeds in fictional, represented or real time. There, time based processes can be shown, and that is why the work is closer to reality experience than a traditional picture. 

Due to the triangle of image, sound and time, video art is multi-dimensional and therefore can respond to the complex syntax of our reality. As reality and its representation became increasingly diffuse for the last fifty years, video gives the artist an instrument, with which he can capture, represent and comment on given events as well as shape his own version of reality in a pluralistic way.

In the end, video art became popular due to the wide and massive distribution of TV and the since the Millennium drastically increasing web-videos. The impact became so fundamental, that we speak of a second reality when we refer to the world of media. 

So, as our reality is deeply influenced by video images anyway, artists have to deal with it, work with it, and critically respond to it. Think about it: How many hours do people watch TV, and how many hours do we observe a painting or sculpture? It is obvious that video had to become an important field. The same will happen to computer art, net and web art since the computer and the internet became so common and fundamental in our professional and private life. In the future, when hardware, interfaces and programming become easier and more user friendly, the number of digital art works will increase, so that one day it will stand next to video art in the centre of the art world, most probably form new ways of video art, as video art is already deeply influenced by digital technologies anyway!

The last issue I would like to discuss is the relation between producer and spectator. In the past, when the art world only existed of painters and sculptors, there was a hierarchy between artist and spectator. The technical and formal skills plus the exclusive medium itself has set up a barrier between artist and spectator. When you never did a painting, or formed a sculpture in your life, all the paintings and sculpture seem at least special, maybe magical, often astonishing. In times of digital cameras and Smartphones, everybody shoots photos and everybody makes videos. As the production and post-production of videos became very cheap and easy, everybody’s media-role changed from being a passive receiver of images to being an active producer and sharer. Therefore, the video artist today competes with three different groups of image producers in order to reach his audience and leave a mark on the mind of the spectator.

Video artists have to deal with the media world. Television, graphic design and advertisement agencies throw out videos and images 24/7. Besides this, the pool of video art strongly grows. Every day, more artists play with this medium, and the number of video pieces increases drastically. So, the artist has to question his practice during every moment of the conceptual as well as actual production of the work. In the end, as everybody produces and share videos, he has to ask himself: What is my difference? And this is where the interesting journey into the world of art begins!