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DISSERTATION WORK: Introduction DRAFT 3: Summer, 2011 (do not quote) Dissertation Supervisor: Professor George Smith

Videosthetics: why a philosophy of video is necessary?

I. A. LOCATING THE PROBLEMATIC: WHAT IS VIDEO?

At the core of my research prevails a simple yet fundamental question: what is video? Or in other terms, what is the essentia of video? How can we reformulate the new paradigms of the medium? How has the aesthetic discourse changed from video art in the 60s to video practices nowadays? How do we locate the tenets of exchange between the artist and viewer, content and production, under the rubric of the moving image? In what follows I will explore and evaluate some of these important questions, and I intend to do so throughout a Heideggerian phenomenological methodology, a manner of inquiry, a pursuit of the matter.

Just over three decades since his death, Heideggers philosophy of technology still exerts great influence on contemporary theories. In his influential essay, first given as a lecture in 1955, The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger suggests that the foremost distinctiveness of technology as he comes to call the realm of revealing is that everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.[1] Technology is a challenge

which places over nature the unreasonable demand of its supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. And he concludes his essay by saying because the essence of technology is nothing technological, decisive confrontation must happen in a realm that is akin to the essence of technology. Such realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth.[2] Heidegger dodges the instrumental definition of technology, and suggests a more humanized, refined theorization of technology as a form of revealing.

In TQCT, Heidegger seems to shift his fundamental ontology and the analysis of Dasein towards a more cultural-historical project conceiving of world disclosing as Dasein receiving of a succession of clearingstechnology understood as Enframing, Gestell, and the related notion of nature, as standing reserve are the determining of modern scientific culture. Heideggers work is notoriously difficult to penetrate, but essential to a phenomenological method. For him, the importance of practical engagement is essential, even prior, in any relation to and within the world. That is, Heidegger firmly stands opposed to the notion that primordially Dasein confronts a world of objects in and of themselves, as understood by early Greek philosophers. Rather, he imagines Dasein as continually absorbed in practical activity. This kind of being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way they look. Daseinbeing, each of us constituted by our own temporality illuminates and interprets the meaning of being in the horizon of time.

In the following essay I will argue the possibility of video as another answer to his question. Video as a medium not only allows for technological potentialities but also artistic expressions away from the traps of technological determinism. Video as the embodiment of technology and art frees us from the technological circular confines pointed by Heideggerin this sense, such technology allows anyone to become an artist. Now, just as the essence of tree is not itself a tree that can be encountered among all the other trees,[3] so the essence of technology is not itself something technological. Borrowing from Heideggers assertion, I suggest that the essence of video is not video itself. So would the question on video also be a question on truth, and freedom?

Unarguably, we live in an era of technology, and information overload. The racing tempo of our century greatly affects all aspects of our lives. The question of video, subscribes to more than just a tension between art and technology, such inquiry also points out to a participatory medium, where the resolution between art and technology resides in the creation (revealing) of being itself. Technology, art, and normal life activities have become intrinsically fused, so that the artists output is, in the largest sense, a compilation of living experiences. What I am primarily interested here are the conditions of videos relationality and the possibility for thinking technological and artistic production as they are articulated within the respective works of Heidegger, Benjamin, Bakhtin; and video artists such as Dan Graham, Acconci, Viola and others.[4] In video, there is no single author, no artistic genius. There is no hierarchy; there are no predisposed outcomes. The conditional situation determines the final form. There is no

attempt to re-create or represent an authorial insight; there is no interior. The conventional linear, part-by-part reading logic is eliminated.

In art video installations, attention to the process and experience of visibility transcend beyond the limits of representation towards a poetics of seeing and becoming. Video is relative when seen beyond the sensory eye of the body, but with the eye of consciousness. I am also prompted to investigate, at an elemental level, how videos mediated relationality is experienced by the existent in each of those lines of thought. Likewise, in the work of each artist, there is a focus upon drawing out (or withdrawing) the conditions in which the subject finds him/herself in relation to being in the world.

[1] Martin Heidegger, Basic writings : from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964) (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), The Question Concerning Technology 318. [2] Ibid., 340. [3] Ibid., 311. [4] Relationality is a concept that enables us to understand reality as plurality and unity at the same time, or rather, reality is a unity of plurality. It enables us to intervene controversially in the debate on art institutions and their audiences, restoring political density to a concept used to defend a soft pseudoarticulation of the artistic and the social that creates a simulation of participation by trivialising and making a spectacle of the concept of antagonism as constitutive of the social. Joseph Kaipayil, Relationalism: A Theory of Being (Joseph Kaipayil, n.d.).