An excellent and welcome book


A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function. This book is a welcome addition to the contemporary writing on video art. It has what a lot of the other books are missing: much more detail on the technology behind the cameras, editing systems and installations; it situates video art in relation to the other art movements; and it offers an in-depth discussion of video art's links to experimental music. If you (or your students) have access to the Video Data Bank "Surveying the First Decade" tapes this book is a great compliment to many of the videos featured in this collection. It provides detailed accounts of many key works and is particularly strong on figures like Woody and Steina Vasulka, British video art and European video art which a lot of books ignore entirely. I would recommend this in tandem with Illuminated Videos.