Sean Cubitt: Timeshift: On Video Culture (1991)

“The book argues that video, rather than film or television, has the potential to become a uniquely democratic medium. Through electronic recording: video rental, off-air recordings, music videos, community, campaign or artists’ videos, viewers have found a new set of cultural relations, uses and practices. Testing current semiotic, post-modernist and psychoanalytic approaches in the laboratory of real life viewing, the book presents a perceptive analysis of present day video culture.”

Key terms: video art, postmodern, timeshifting, psychoanalysis, Wapping dispute, solipsism, metaphysics of presence, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, metonymy, atomised, television, pop video, portapaks, Electronic Arts, Chott El-Djerid, David Byrne, Lacan, diegesis, pop music

Publisher Routledge, 1991
ISBN 0415016789, 9780415016780
206 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Gene Youngblood: Expanded Cinema (1970)

“The first book to consider video as an art form, was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book he argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.” (Wikipedia)

Part One: The Audience and the Myth of Entertainment
Part Two: Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama
Part Three: Toward Cosmic Consciousness
Part Four: Cybernetic Cinema and Computer Films
Part Five: Television as a Creative Medium
Part Six: Intermedia
Part Seven: Holographic Cinema: A New World

Key words and phrases: Jordan Belson, expanded cinema, Nam June Paik, Buckminster Fuller, Stan VanDerBeek, videotronic, Ronald Nameth, Carolee Schneemann, John McHale, Expo 67, slit-scan, John Cage, light pen, Gene Youngblood, Otto Piene, Beflix, Howard Wise, KQED, Samadhi, WGBH-TV

Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller
Publisher E.P. Dutton, New York, 1970
SBN 0525101527
432 pages

Reviews: Paul Cowen (Leonardo, 1972), Thomas Beard (Artforum, 2020), Caroline A. Jones (Artforum, 2020).
Analysis: Adam Sindre Johnson (2010, NO).

PDF (45 MB, no OCR, via Internet Archive, added on 2016-3-2)
PDF, PDF, PDF (5 MB, OCR)
PDF chapters

Catherine Elwes: Video Art: A Guided Tour (2005)

“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 apparent absorption into the mainstream with works commissioned by Channel Four. Throughout its forty-year history, video has been allied to self-portraiture, landscape, painting and sculpture and has been co-opted as a political tool. Artists discussed include amongst many others Nam June Paik, Nan Hoover, The Duvet Brothers, Dara Birnbaum, Bill Viola, Pipilloti Rist, David Hall, Stuart Marshall, Shirin Neshat, Smith & Stewart, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood.”

Publisher I.B.Tauris, 2005
ISBN 1850435464, 9781850435464
x+212 pages

PDF (updated on 2022-7-23)