Video needs art history like a TV set needs a plinth
College Art Association Annual Conference, Dallas, Texas, 20–23 February 2008
Call for Papers (issued 2007, now closed)

As the traditional public space of art is increasingly intersected by its own video-mediations — on TV, online, by information and advertising screens, by video surveillance and the public’s own portable devices — the challenges to established relations of representation become clear. For artists, video provides no security of artistic identity and no reliable means of instructing audiences how to look. For institutions, video offers new means of communicating with audiences and monitoring visitors’ behaviour, but threatens the basic fiction of the museum: that culture exists independently of its reproduction. For art historians, video offers no surface for inspection, nor necessarily any depth. Meanwhile, everyday viewers are highly discriminating interpreters, continuously decoding the claims of rival channels and multitudes of screens. While the power of this technology to propagate norms is far from exhausted, video practice continually escapes disciplinary boundaries. This session invites papers for a cross-disciplinary discussion of video practice and interpretation in a disputed, unstable field.