From Video Art to New Media: The Case of the Locarno VideoArt Festival (1980-2001)

The analysis of the festival’s archives and the creation of an exhibition of the works presented there highlight its pioneering role for those who wish to explore the history of information and communications theory.
This research project seeks to refresh our understanding of video art and serves a dual purpose: as a piece of curatorial research to test the hypothesis that video art is characterised by its interactive quality, and a systematic enquiry into the nature and function of video art and new media.
The research work spreading out over a three-year period combines tools developed in information and communications science with contributions from the history of video and electronic art, as well as contemporary art theory, curatorial studies, aesthetics and critical theory.
As a result the project re-evaluates the place of Switzerland and Europe in the international video art network. Additionally, the previously unpublished festival’s archives, the audio-visual documentation of the seminars and our recorded interviews with the festival’s major artists are published on the project’s dedicated website.
The curatorial project, which takes place at the Elisarion in Minusio, is centred around the idea of a virtualisation of video art through computer-generated images and the internet. The core ideas behind the research are thus combined with the exhibition medium in order to assess their coherence.