"Video and Intermedia" response

Beth’s use of Dick Higgins’s quote really struck me.  I agree with her that Foster is saying something similar; something that suggests that what makes art in the form of video different from other mediums is its ability to be real and unreal at the same time.  Something obtainable, even familiar (perhaps because it moves, as Junne said), yet also something new and strange.

I also looked up some of Hans Breder’s interesting work, and I noticed that his use of mirrors fits in pretty nicely with the assertion that intermedia is a “place between.”  When you look at the photograph below, for example, you are seeing something very real…it was very much happening in the way it is presented to you: a woman holding two mirrors against her naked body.  However, the use of those mirrors turns this real event into something otherworldly.  But is it art? 

I don’t think I am really saying anything that Junne and Beth haven’t already touched on, but I want to take it a step further by arguing that video is perhaps even more of an intermedia than Duchamp’s “The Fountain” because things and moments captured on film are often choreographed and manipulated; therefore, an artist can use video to create a place where real and unreal can truly, without a doubt, meet.  Often, the viewer is unsure of what is real and what has been altered in some way because it is not that the events one sees in video are not occurring as one is seeing them, it is simply that the authenticity and the intention are unclear.  Static mediums, such as painting cannot always cause such a confusion because everything has been manipulated by the artist.  And maybe it is this unique trait that arguably only video possesses which makes it art.