Video painting: A hybrid between the still and moving image

The use of new technologies has almost inevitably led to the blurring of established definitions, roles, and taxonomies of visual art. The ‘video painting’ is a new form of contemporary video expression based around the latest developments in High Definition Video and flatscreen displays providing a high-quality platform for the presentation of the moving image. It is a hybrid concept between the still and the moving image using traditional patterns of film narration and painting practice, quoting different genres such as the still life, landscape, portrait or the abstract painting. As Jim Bizzocchi of Simon Fraser University in Canada suggests, ‘It is a smooth temporal flow, always changing, but never too quickly. The piece is an exploration of concepts of ambience, time and the liminality of image and of narrative’. Importantly, one of the most interesting questions it poses is with regard to how time is performed in these video paintings. As an example, I present my project ‘Still life in motion’, which I created in 2005 as a German media artist in cooperation with SONY Germany as part of the SONY BRAVIAmotionart project. The canvas is replaced by a large high-resolution flatscreen expanded by perspectives of time and space, simultaneously reconstructing and deconstructing the issues of the still life genre. Other examples will discuss video works by artists such as Bill Viola, Robert Wilson, Sam Taylor Wood, etc., who have downplayed the temporal nature of their images so much, that they often become nearly static in their effect.