50 Years of Video Art

I am currently working on a one minute video commissioned by CQAM for the 50 years of Video Art, event organized by Les Instants Vidéos. It will take place in Marseille next November. Here are some photos of the shooting, for which I could beneficiate of the Oboro facilities, an art center in Montreal...

The contemporary dancer is my good friend Claudine Hébert, with whom I already made some short dance videos HERE and HERE. I wanted to push further the exercise and experience working in a real "pro" setting. One minute is very short, so I might use the footage for more than one video! It was also a good opportunity to pay hommage to the great video artists who worked with dancers and technology like Erkki Kurenniemi , Ed Tannenbaum, or with humans (Ed Emshwiller) and body parts like this video of Woody Vasulka...

Here is the official version of the birth of video art taken from Les Instants Vidéos website:

The year 63 was chosen as the starting point of this great history (which is far from being finish) in reference to a founding act made by the Corean artist Nam June Paik who exhibited his 13 “prepared” TV sets in the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal in Germany, in the frame of a Fluxus event (Music/Electronic TV). The same year, the German artist Wolf Vostell screened his famous “Sun in your head” and the french Jean-Christophe Averty caused a scandal on television when he put a baby in a mill (“The green grapes”, October 63). These 3 artists give the proof of the international dimension of video art, its hybrids forms (video, television, computer, cinema, visual arts, music…), its insolent attitudes regarding the artistic rules in effect then.