The question arises: where is video (the Videoformes Festival 1992) going, and above all how are things going with it?

Not badly, one is tempted to respond. With the passing of time, now that the path blazed by pioneers like Paik and others such as Emshviller has become a veritable highway, one can genuinely say that there is new blood circulating in the video world. Have not more and more artists of all fields signed provisional agreements with video that have since become transformed into solid marriages, possibly to the detriment of their original disciplines? Not at all! With Paik and Robert Cohen, music is there at the heart of their images, in their quasi-au- dio-organization, disorganization - the soundtrack has never been as imaginative as it is in video.

So why this feeling of sickness, this ennui that beats down upon us like the misery of the world, in the vision of so many of the "works" in the festivals? Because the works are young? Because video itself is a young art? Undoubtedly so. But not only. The video image rests upon a certain lightness - to the extent that, as Jean Paul Fargier has said, the image flees from its frame (as in installations, for example, or when it "turns its back on us" in cutouts). It seems to me that precisely this lightness is the only true emblem of the technological arts and one of the values which is being sacrificed more and more in our age - and that this lightness is nonetheless lacking in something. This particular "something" informs a remark by Calvino in which he also adopts the value of lightness: "If I wanted to chose a vofive symbol with which to greet the next millenium, I would choose this one: the unforeseen and agile bond of fhe philosopher poet who supports himself on the weight of the world, demonstrating that his gravity holds the secret of lightness." "Who supports himself on the gravity of the world": this is something that video artists do not always perceive, for in a certain respect they have not been adequately informed that, despite its lightness, the world has not ceased to remain a place of gravity. When the works in video are good, when they impress us with the same force as a painting of Velasquez, which is of course rather rare, one feels behind the lightness of the images what the artist has been thinking and feeling. One feels how he has allowed the processes to settle - the processes which lead from gravity to tightness -, and that he has understood the game of complicated relationships bet-ween depth and surface, bet-ween sound and image, simul-taneity and successiveness, which can disconnect, relink, and thus engender richer, lighter forms. At the same time, however, these forms are based on the weight of their original "parti-ti- on - on the strange disconnections and recontextualizations of images and words, images and sounds, of images and images within other images which have different levels of meaning. The artist owes much to the firework of science and technology, to the musicians, philosophers' and their very, very long work of building and improvisation (whether it be a matter of the Golden Mean, the space shuttle, the vowels of Rimbaud, or the flying carpets from "A Thousand and One Nights") - those who have spent centuries ceaselessly trying to liberate themselves from the weight of things, from their apparent disorder and their complex order, in the effort to create a new and different image. This image always tries to escape infinite weight and monotony and to subvert the boredom of differentiation which usually shows us the way out of boredom by means of art. However, freeing oneself from boredom and weight still required those always self-repeating, monotonous instruments: the machines. And yet, that which often disappoints us in works of video art is a certain quality of amnesia, a certain forgetting of that which provides them with their basis - of history, of the weight that preceded them and was the only thing that gave lightness to its meaning: how boring and confusing are those works which reveal their lightness in advance, as a fact and not as a slow, patient conquest; such works induce us to feel the weight of the patient experiments of the past and the "awkwardness of God“ (as Artaud put it). The great ruptures, such as Duchamp, only have an exact, and thus relative, value in relation to previous eras: every standard always contains another standard which locates it in a particular time , and which assumes various, multidimensional, even reversible forms in relation to this segment of time. A perfect condition ari-ses where the two standards pre-cisely coincide. Video images are based on sciences and technologies more sophisticated than any others so far known to man, based on the results of the weightiest and most serious improvisation, on visions of the universe, space, and time which are the most difficult to construct and to bear ("hard to bear" means here that man, always understanding less and less according to his own standards, will have to let machines do the "hearing" and seeing in his place - the molecular time of the femtosecond, for exam- ple (a millionth of a billionth of a second), before the time of the attosecond (a billionth of a biilionfh of a second), which will be "available" in the year 2000). In view of this fact, certain works convey the impression that the line has been broken, that their contact with the "background," this weighty and often unhappy history that preceded them, is cut, and that it is now burying itself in the numerical editing centers and their computers.) It is true that every technology is designed for increasing miniaturization, aspires towards a form of use that deserves the attribute of “so ft". How-ever, the fact that the machine is now hiding itself, and not spreading out its entrails as it did in the era of the first industrial revolution (the viewing of a robot-eguipped assembly line in an automobile factory would probably still be quite an exciting experience for the successors of César and Tinguely, assuming There are such successors), this fact ought to disconcert the artists and simultaneously reassure them. The bad works I am discussing are precisely those which betray no sense of "unease," that is, those that do not speak the common language, do not conduct a contradictory dialogue with their technical bases and are content with the technical visual effects they make possible without ever making anything visible, without ever penetrating beneath the surface of the philo- and heterogenetic process that orders and enables them. If there is no opening in the direction indicated here, even if we know that it is already being practiced here and there and will increase in importance, it is to be feared that the lightness of some works of video art (there are already many of them nonetheless) will no longer have anything to do with that lightness desired by Caivino as one of the values that might survive the jump into the third millenium.