Introduction: Video: Between Technology and Performance

Summary

Abstract: In the introduction to this book, I engage video art and activist practices to understand how they confront and modulate the effects of image technologies on contemporary life. By means of the concept of the “performative image,” I present a new regime of the image with the qualities of operation. I define the performative dimension of video technology as its capacity to act as an agent of reality. This introduction presents a methodology founded in performance studies and the philosophy of technology to show how video technologies are shaping psychic and social life due to the various operations they perform on cultural practices and historical realities.

Keywords: activism, art, installation, performance, technology, video

No longer the passive objects of traditional art history, artworks now figure as performative forces to which are attributed heightened capacities for action.

– Ina Blom

Interpretation is first and foremost a form of making: that is, it depends on the willed intentional activity of the human mind, molding and forming the objects of its attention with care and study.

– Edward W. Said

Video Practices of Knowledge and Technology

You are on the C train near Paris—the yellow line. You know you are going to a wealthy suburb because the train is here on time and there are still covers on the chairs and see-through windows to contemplate nature while you ride. You hold on to your train ticket and your professional invitation. You also have your self-written authorization explaining why you are on this trip. If some surveillance agent asks, you have a speech ready in your head. You can explain why it is an essential activity to go see Kitso Lynn Lelliott's video installations in Chamarande. It is March 2021, and the French government is prescribing what counts as an essential activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. You are on your way nevertheless, and an hour into the ride you arrive and walk the village-like streets. You enter the Domaine Départemental de Chamarande—a park with a seventeenth-century castle. A sign on the Orangerie cottage building and an open door invites you into a dark room. A woman sitting at her desk is expecting you and asks to scan your QR-code. You observe the space while she reminds you of the sanitary measures.