| This dissertation proposes a more adequate framework for thinking through a range of non-commensurable sites within which we find not a unified phenomenon, "Video Art," but a set of conceptualizations of video and electronic media that are heterogeneous, dispersed and institutionally variable. Taking as a model Michel Foucault's notion of an archaeology of knowledge, I have sought to analyze the stratified field of experimental television and video along two axes: along a diachronic axis, I trace debates in five institutional spaces---public broadcast television, experimental television centers, galleries and museums, the published record, and academic institutions---focusing on key disputes or "flash points" that mark significant shifts in the discourse on "video art;" while across the synchronic axis, I seek to map the discussions and theorizations of experimental television and video within these institutional sites that constitute the differential field of discourse on electronic, time-based media. By this means, I attempt to show that the ever expanding, institutionally dispersed field of electronic media practice cannot be grasped in the terms offered by the linear narratives that have until now shaped what has been labeled as the history of "Video Art." I maintain that the "archaeology" of video practice I outline is a prerequisite for any critical engagement with a field of practices that range from experimental performances employing live broadcast television to works using video and videotape. While an influential critical and curatorial discourse has sought to subsume these diverse practices under a single category of "Video Art," such homogenization elides the diversity of institutional sites and the incommensurable discursive frameworks that, in fact, have marked the development of experimental television and video media. A more adequate perspective demands engagement with the differential, discursive field and the various sedimentary strata across which multiple and irreducible conceptions of the video medium have been produced. |
