Video art dominates the international art world to such an extent that its heady days on the radical fringes are sometimes overlooked--often unknown. This book is an essential and highly entertaining guide to video art and its history. Elwes, herself a pioneer of early video, traces the story from the weighty Portapak equipment of the '60s and '70s to today's digital technology, from early experiments in ""real time"" to the ""new narrative"" movement of the 1980s. She also examines video's love-hate relationship with television, from its literal destruction in ""scratch"" video to its...

Film and video create an illusory world, a reality elsewhere, and a material presence that both dramatizes and demystifies the magic trick of moving pictures. Beginning in the 1960s, artists have explored filmic and televisual phenomena in the controlled environments of galleries and museums, drawing on multiple antecedents in cinema, television, and the visual arts. This volume traces the lineage of moving-image installation through architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, expanded cinema, film history, and countercultural film and video from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Sound is...