Video Performance: An Electronic Theatre of (Dis-)Illusion

From Video Art to Video Performance The medium of electro-magnetic video recordings became first available in the early 1960s in an enormously expensive and cumbersome TV broadcast format. Artists began to avail themselves of the new technology when Sony released its first ponapak in 1965. Although not cheap, these new machines were offering unlimited possibilities of image transformation and manipulation in the recording or post-production process. Immediate live feedback meant that the recording and playback of the image occurred simultaneously and that the time lag between recording and viewing of images was cut to zero. Compared to celluloid film, the portapak was simple and flexible in its use; it rendered recording crews and operators superfluous and allowed individual work to replace that of large teams.