Sean Strelow- Video and Intermedia Response

I won’t lie, this reading confused me a bit. Foster claims that “video enables and has a high potential for intermedia it, as a medium, compels. Video is spontaneous because spontaneousness only makes sense with reference to fixed expectations” (64). I feel like if video has expectations, it is through similar ways to other mediums. How did audiences develop expectations of film? Directors started making films and through audience reaction and their own innovation developed storytelling and continuity conventions to what we see today. So how does Foster think that video developed expectations? How is it magically separate from other mediums? Video came out of film, and it shares many of its conventions with film. If it has its own unique set, at least some crossover is evident.

I think Foster means to assert that a specific kind of experimental video is in its own artistic realm, which is up for debate and slightly different than a “video as a whole” argument. Many directors in movies today shoot video but make full length movies just like film ones. Are those “videos” as artistically enlightened as the video he refers to? I can’t really tell.

Regardless, Foster’s assertions about video in the modern age hint at how it is a pervasive form, possibly an art form (and maybe not), one that inherently connects other mediums in how it emerges from and engages what we think. Foster posits that “video, if one uses it as an extension of one’s self rather than as an extension of one’s notions of art, cannot avoid confronting areas in communication, information and meaning” (64). For example, I found a video by Aleksandra Mir called The First Woman on the Moon, documenting a real event where a beach was transformed into a moon-like landscape and a woman placed an American flag on it. The event itself pokes at JFK’s speech that references getting a man on the moon. The video, then, documents this event and becomes its own work separate from the event in how it records it and pieces it together. It incorporates the history of the JFK speech along with new events, which makes it socially relevant, and creates its own work from that. These aspects combine to make it an intermedia production.

Here's the link: http://www.aleksandramir.info/projects/first-woman-on-the-moon/