Currents: Video’s Aqueous Aesthetics

In 1975, video artist Shigeko Kubota linked the nascent technology of video to the primordial role of water in human society. "In preindustrial times,” mused Kubota, “rivers connected communities and spread information. Now electronic signals perform this function: charged electrons flow across our receiver screens like drops of water.” Beyond metaphor, Kubota’s poetic description is indicative of how, since the 1970s, video has been perceived as an aqueous media, storing and transmitting information akin to water and its global flows. Video is frequently imagined in liquid terms: “waves” of electronic signals, broadcast “channels”, “immersive” environments, “streaming” content, and “snow”-filled TV sets.

This panel seeks to explore the generative, yet overlooked role of water in video art history, as well as the continued confluence of water and video. We invite papers that examine how water was not only the subject of the work of early video artists like Kubota, Steina, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, and others, but also a formal and conceptual framework for video’s fluid, mutable, and connective characteristics. Papers may also consider how, as screens have become more expansive, contemporary artists like John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and Wu Tsang use immersive video to plumb historic traumas and more-than-human encounters within oceanic depths. We are especially interested in papers that take water as a lens through which to rethink both video art’s history (where video may be understood as a form of land–or water–art, for instance), and its future as a media art form with ecological significance and decolonial potential.