Video from the Margins

Video from the Margins repositions early video history beyond a canon dominated by major artists and commercial galleries, instead exploring its disruptive potential in the art world. Early video art was envisioned as a tool for decentralizing institutional power through networks and collective experimentation. The 1973 Matrix International Video Exchange Conference at Vancouver Art Gallery embodied this potential by making its only entrance requirements the deposit of a tape to the event library and the promise to take a copy of another tape home. Through such actions, video archives developed in unexpected locations, only made accessible recently by new archiving and digitization efforts. Inspired by this early vision of video that relied on personal interactions rather than corporate-regulated social media networks or gallery promotion, Video from the Margins foregrounds collaboration, exchange, and intermedia experimentation: practices that sit uneasily with conventional narratives of “video art” proper.

This panel solicits papers that explore practices exceeding the medium-specific lens, approaches that unsettle institutional art perspectives, and methodologies that allow for the complexity of video's role within the art world to come into view. Contributions focused on practices beyond the New York art world, experiments that took place in public schools or farming communities, events in which video brought artists working in radically different media together, or video exchanges that coalesced new social forms are particularly welcome. Given the expansive video archives that have become available over the last decade, what new perspectives can we coalesce around this now central medium of artistic production?