Signals: How Video Transformed the World

(Paperback)

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Description

Having become widely accessible as a consumer technology in the 1960s, video is ever-present today-on our phones and our screens, defining new spaces and experiences, shaping our ideas and politics, and spreading disinformation, documentation, evidence, fervor. Signals: The Politics of Video charts the ways in which artists have both championed and questioned the promise of video, revealing a history that has been planetary, critical, and activist from its very beginnings. The Museum of Modern Art has been at the forefront of bringing video into museums-pioneering the collection, conservation, and definition of a new artistic medium. Signals aims to renew and revise our understanding of art and video, both within and outside the museum. A companion to the exhibition, this catalogue-the Museum's first major publication on the subject in twenty-five years-includes an introductory essay by the curators and six thematic texts by leading scholars and artists that investigate the range of artistic engagements with video, media, and the public sphere. Here, video is posed not as a traditional medium but as a pervasive and fluid media network that is thoroughly global, social, and interactive: a means of politics.

Reviews

Gets to the heart of what video art is all about: the sense that we need no longer be passive viewers who are force-fed a one-way stream of information.--Alex Greenberger "ARTnews"
The variety of material - collected over six decades - shows the myriad ways in which artists have used and misused video and its broadcast technologies to create their own networks, insert themselves in existing networks, and overtly resist or critique them.--Matt Shaw "Guardian"

Author Bio

Stuart Comer is the Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art. Michelle Kuo is the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King's College London. Aria Dean is an artist, writer, and curator living and working in Los Angeles and New York. David Joselit is Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker and independent film producer. Ravi Sundaram is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.