Jean Otth and video art networks: Exhibitions, festivals, open encounters – About the agency of a medium

Abstract

In the early 1970s, Jean Otth played an active role in the constitution and development of a video art scene in French-speaking Switzerland. The art critic and museum director René Berger described these pioneers in the use of a new medium as ‘musketeers of the invisible’. Based on the notion of agency theorised by Alfred Gell, we show in this article how Otth’s work, as well as his curatorial and pedagogical activities, allowed the development of a videosphere (to take up and displace the meaning of a term proposed by Gene Youngblood in 1970). We also propose an analysis of Otth’s early videos and installations, which are traversed by a phenomenological interrogation on the mechanisms of perception and a deconstruction of representation and its conventions. Finally, we integrate Otth’s reflections on television and video from his personal archives to reveal his creative intentions.