(EVA 13) Experimental Video Art Exhibition, Thai - European Friendship 2016

EVA – document of cultural transformation
by Evamaria Schaller

“Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures …”

Pictures that move and move you! Since the 60ies the way of using technical equipment and the quality of the video-material changed whole generations. Instead of huge video cameras with magnetic tapes we shoot with our mobile phones in full HD-quality. All latest art- and scientific technologies are used for Video-Art-productions. In the past everything which had to do with technologies mainly men were working on. The medium video and the free usage of technology changed a whole art-system. It is a gender-free medium which gives freedom as well as political influence. A lot of female artists use/d this way of artistic expression like Joan Jonas, Ana Medieta, Ann Hamilton, Pipilotti Rist, Dara Birnbaum just to mention some women who became art history. “Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sounds;.[1]”

Although Video Art arrived in the art-market it is still treated as minor little sister of the Fine-Arts. Videos like other art-products always raise questions of: How to sell it? How to present it? But the main question is: How to preserve it? It is not like a painting you hang up. You can upload it onto the web or let it die on an external fire wire drive because the technology develops so fast that the way of how to encode or store digital material becomes a major question. But there are some notable video art organizations who focus on presenting and preserving it. Because of the vast amount of mobile phones with great implemented cameras billions of videos are viral. The amount of moving images we are able and forced to see every day grows every second. Important and non important stages of our lives are spread out into the WWW, the biggest brain which never forgets? Most of the latest wars and rebellions where captures through mobile-cameras and we take every propaganda as true proof. So how can we distinguish between Video-Art or a viral tweet in a microblogging service? We are trained to perceive and judge in a very quick way, scroll through movies, don´t watch them fully because of our impatience and time pressure. We read the headlines and not whole article. It is the same everywhere: Everybody wants to grasp an art piece in seconds and is irritated when consumption and processing takes time. Video Art is about time and timing. It has the strength to reflect our systems, political influences, own wishes and dreams in the process of watching. So why don´t we take time to share the visions of the video artists in the EVA-project. EVA is a kind of time-capture in itself. After 12 years of existence it preserves a great amount of video art-production. It shows cultural transformations in different parts of the world. Video is one of the quickest mediums to reflect society and EVA is one of the longest continuous existing Video-Art-exhibitions worldwide. It is showing different needs and cultural transformations in these last decades. Artists who showed their first works in EVA are showing new ones and even that is another way of transformation – it shows artistic process and progress in this huge video-archive collected by Komson Nookiew and other.

The Experimental Video Art Exhibition EVA highlights the Thai-European friendship. It understands this multicultural platform not as a tool for showing the differences between cultures and languages, but as a tool of encountering and exchange. The desire to produce a meeting point keeps it moving. The Video-Art flows on between zones of misunderstandings and at the same time redefinitions of society.