Emergence of Video Art in Europe (1960-1980): History, Theory, Sources and Archives – EMERGENCE1960-1980

To date, no Europe-wide history of video art exists. This research project seeks to address this gap and offer a counterweight to the decades-long America-centric slant of specialist literature in this area. The project seeks to assess not only the very rich and varied video production in Europe but also the development of this medium internationally. This reassessment is all the more timely insofar as the situation in Europe is substantially different from that in North America, given this continent’s wide diversity of political, social and cultural contexts (Europe is home to a variety of nation states and was, at that time, divided into two blocs) and country-specific artistic and technical contexts.
This Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and French National Research Agency (ANR) collaborative research project brings together the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis and the ECAL (University of Art and Design Lausanne), as well as the Film Department at the University of Lausanne where a doctoral thesis will be supervised by the swiss applicant. The principal partners in this research project are the National Library of France (BnF) and the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe). It follows an initial research programme pursued by Labex Arts-H2H (2017-2018) and later EUR-ArtTeC (2019-2020), already entitled “The Emergence of Video Art in Europe: history, theory, sources and archives”, which sought to pinpoint, map and provide national chronologies of the main pockets of video activity in Europe. It gathered a collection of factual data on the artists, works and events that facilitated the visibility of the emergence of this new art practice in the 1960s, or which contributed, over subsequent years, to its development throughout Europe. This information is now largely contained in a database.
The next step is to take a resolutely transnational approach to this research and delimit and analyse in greater detail the data from this mapping exercise and present its findings within a theoretical framework. The project can now count on the support of a network of some fifty national and international specialists, researchers, archivists, artists, witnesses that the previous programme had brought together. Over the four years of the project, we intend to organise six-monthly seminars for researchers from a variety of countries to share their expertise and debate their theoretical perspectives. The database will continue to be supplemented, partially by a variety of archive material (text, works, images and original video-recorded interviews with the leading characters in this history). It is planned to mount an “historic” exhibition, that will showcase the restoration of neglected corpora carried out as part of the programme and with the technical help of the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems at the ZKM. This exhibition will offer a theoretical framework for the actual reconstruction of the works, the diversity of modes of presentation in the past and the more global discourse used to describe European video art. An online journal will accompany the database. This is intended to help establish contacts between the researchers on the programme and their works and international specialists.
At the same time, two books will be published offering considerable bibliographical information, which will mark a major contribution to the historiography of video and the electronic image. An initial work, comprising an annotated timeline of the emergence of video art on an European scale and theoretical essays, will offer a multifaceted, closely argued history of European video art and put the commonplace belief that the development of video art in Europe is peripheral to that of North America into perspective, noting indeed that it, in fact, emerged first. An anthology of source material will bring together, for the first time, writings by video artists and artists working in Europe (texts being translated into English).