videochameleon retraces the first years of video art in Quebec (1972-1992). The author bases his research on the PRIM collection deposited at the Cinémathèque québécoise, which puts several of the works cited online for the occasion.
Why did you make this book?
To write a story, to chronicle video art, as we said in the 1970s and 1980s. My object is not video as technology, but as a set of practices with a technology that was once a new media. I highlight the programming of Vehicule art (1970s) and PRIM (1980s) showing an energetic, even proactive, and avant-garde milieu.
The fate of the video is due to the difficulty of each other to predict his future. At one time, some even call the video a disease. Its main characteristic would be its ability to camouflage itself, hence this videochameleon ?
René Payant said in 1986: “There is the rumor of videophobes. But above all there is the insistent rise of video-mania. The term “videocameleon” was proposed by the videographer and filmmaker Luc Bourdon to pass off video works for cinema, failing to see them broadcast on TV. Funny idea. I use the term because […] that it was about the confluence of technology with artistic currents, social and political movements. Video blended with performance and dance, music and poetry, documentary or fiction, television or cinema. She was also involved with computer science and the ideas of cybernetics. “Videocameleon” allows me to qualify the fate of video, because from the 1990s, it faded away by becoming omnipresent in the media environment.
If its artistic value is no longer disputed, does the video remain current?
If we look carefully at the works of 40 or 50 years ago, if we go through this history, we will see many traits that, even today, partly define the role of video in the world of networks and soon metaverses. It promises ! Let us remember what the American critic Rosalind Krauss said in 1976: that video produces an aesthetic of narcissism! We can say that this dimension cannot be denied.