Skip to main content

invisible empire

next gen video

The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...

Video so pervades contemporary society as to be rendered almost invisible. Today, the omniscient presence of televisual imagery dominates the home, workplace and public domain alike. The unprecedented efficacy with which electronic imagery may now be accessed worldover is blurring the boundaries between the broadcast and the actual, the innocent and the sinister and the for-sale and the free. For these reasons, writes Don Delillo in White Noise , screen culture is at once 'all the more impressive', and yet 'all the more disquieting to deal with '. For years, art video's proximity to television-a medium whose sole, degraded purpose is to promote capitalism- has proven problematic. Many still experience video's utilisation of TV as a blow to its artistic integrity, and its predilection to mesh disparate communications media as its pitfall. The nineteen artists involved in Next Gen Video, however-by positively celebrating video's capacity to traverse the diverse visual forms of today's multimedia space, that is, of art, design, advertising, computer graphics and entertainment media-help debunk this archaic concern. Their work wears its proximity to television on its sleeve, embracing video's unique chameleon capacity to exploit all kinds of visual technology. It is this eclecticism, this punk-rock-DIY -ethos that makes much of the work included in the exhibition so vital. The forty-odd experiments included in Next Gen Video are indicative of contemporary society's obsession with technologies of vision, with how they are used, and the concomitant concern of how we are used by them. According to guest curator Mark Webb, these works imaginatively link the worlds of art, media, technology, pop and counterculture in a way that 'confront(s) the contiguity between commerce and art, education and entertainment, production and