“Video Art on the Edge” explores the creative potential of videotape degradation through manipulating documentation of an historical video installation exhibition from The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1984), turning the material failure of video into an abstract, generative force. Video is a medium with a long but limited lifespan. Although the primary components of a legible image and audio endure for many years, the process of playback and reproduction inevitably produces degradation of videotape’s material substrate, producing distortions, particularly at the bottom edge of the image, upon playback. “Video Art on the Edge” explores what may be made of examining these distortions closely. What in the video of a video of a video remains? What is lost? What—perhaps more importantly—is gained? 40 years ago, “The Luminous Image” was an international programme of video installations by 22 significant video artists held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The video document of the show is comprised of short artists’ descriptions of their video installations with brief documentation of their work in situ. The current official DVD was transferred from an aged—likely duplicated—VHS from the original 1984 version. One tell-tale sign of an aged/copied VHS tape is evident in the image degradation: the deterioration of data-storing, magnetic particles causing a few rogue, quivering lines at the bottom of the frame. This is considered to be a “failure” of the medium. The various ways in which video as a medium “fails” are opportunities to explore generative possibilities, as is the way in which digital media such as DVD are able to preserve and examine these degradations (for a time). As the exploitation of the edge of the frame in Michael Snow’s seminal film “Wavelength” (1967) shows, action takes place at the edge of the frame, creating a technical and aesthetic basis for exploring this territory in material terms much further than conventional videography would allow. “Video Art on the Edge” pursues this goal of making the edge of an image the centre of our attention. In “Video Art on the Edge”, 10 artist interview clips have been selected for intervention. The documentation of the actual video installations is edited out, leaving in only the moments where the artists describe their work. Preserving the original audio, the degraded lines at the bottom of the DVD are isolated and repeated to encompass the entire frame. The video’s purported “failure” becomes the central and the visual force of the piece. Movement is created three ways: the trembling video noise, camera movement and the speaking subject moving at the edge of the frame—capturing and losing the gestures of the artist as they describe their work. Freed from the need to watch the centre, the viewer may indulge in the prepossessions of the artists themselves: the medium of video itself.
