Video Party: Early Video Art in Italy and the Essence of Network Culture

Abstract

This dissertation investigates Italian artists’ experiments with analog video in the early 1970s as they now inform network culture, through an exploration of the ways in which their surrounding practices and aesthetic sensibility anticipate those of social media. Expanding upon the observation of Italian art historian Marco Meneguzzo that early video technology anticipated the internet by allowing users to be both emitter and receiver of an audiovisual signal simultaneously, this dissertation explores the unique perspectives the Italian artworld offers in this regard during the first years of video’s widespread availability among artists from 1968-1974. This cross-cultural approach is especially valuable from an Anglophone perspective because the surrounding critical discourse in Italian consistently frames so-called “new media” in a historical continuity whereby the resulting paradoxes have profound implications for our perception of time and memory. This is made obvious through the project’s predominant, though not exclusive, focus on the electronic medium as used by artists associated with Arte Povera. Referred to as an "Informale tecnologico" given its unique posture with regards to technology, the artists associated with the movement saw themselves as working within, rather than solely in reaction against, the technological development that characterizes the post-war period. Moreover, their use of video is remarkably insightful in hindsight given that their poetic was phenomenologically driven and, in the case of Michelangelo Pistoletto whose work provides a fil rouge throughout the dissertation, also emphasizes social inclusion. While the artists of relevance sought to move past concerns about medium specificity, the dissertation is divided into three chapters structured as a series of comparisons between analog video and other media – respectively, the mirror, photography (the “mirror with a memory”) and film - allowing for a historical contextualization that sets the stage for a rethinking of today’s definition of social media understood as both digital and user-generated. To close, the dissertation suggests that the way Italian artists explored the first electronic media anticipated the phenomenon of network lag, or “sfasamento” in Italian, thereby inviting a historically nuanced appreciation of one of the defining experiences of the digital age.