Walk into the American Art Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and you will encounter a wall of light that stops you in your tracks. "Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii" by Nam June Paik is a map of the United States made from 336 television monitors, 50 DVD players, and approximately 575 feet of multicolored neon tubing. Each state plays video clips that reference its culture, history, and identity — flashing, looping, and overlapping in a dazzling cascade of electronic imagery. Created in 1995, it predicted our current reality of information overload with eerie precision. It is also one of the most important works of video art ever made.
Video art is art that uses moving images as its primary medium. Unlike commercial film or television, video art is not bound by narrative conventions, entertainment values, or commercial pressures. It can be a single continuous shot lasting hours, a multi-screen installation filling an entire gallery, a loop projected onto a building, or a tiny screen embedded in a sculpture. Since its emergence in the 1960s, video art has grown from an experimental fringe practice to one of the dominant forms of contemporary art, shown in every major museum and biennale worldwide.
This article traces the history of video art, explores its key practitioners and works, and explains why moving images have become such a powerful artistic medium.
What Is Video Art?
Video art uses moving-image technology — originally analog video, now predominantly digital — as an artistic medium rather than a commercial storytelling tool. It differs from cinema and television in several important ways:
No narrative obligation — Video art does not need to tell a story. It can explore rhythm, color, movement, time, and space purely as visual phenomena.
Gallery context — Video art is typically shown in galleries and museums rather than theaters, often as looped projections or multi-screen installations. Viewers enter and leave at any point.
Experimental approach — Video artists often manipulate the medium itself — distorting images, slowing time, layering footage, or combining video with sculpture, sound, and performance.
Conceptual depth — Like other contemporary art forms, video art engages with ideas about perception, identity, technology, politics, and the nature of the image itself.
Origins: The 1960s Video Revolution
Nam June Paik: The Father of Video Art
Korean-American artist Nam June Paik is universally recognized as the founder of video art. Trained as a classical musician, Paik became involved with the Fluxus movement in the early 1960s and began experimenting with television as an artistic material. In 1963, he exhibited "Exposition of Music — Electronic Television" in Wuppertal, Germany, featuring thirteen television sets displaying distorted images created by manipulating the sets' internal electronics with magnets.
Nam June Paik, "Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii" (1995), 49-channel closed-circuit video installation. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Paik saw television not as a passive entertainment device but as a sculptural material and a canvas for artistic expression. He built "TV sculptures" — assemblages of television monitors arranged in shapes (a cello, a robot, a garden of screens) — and created some of the first works using the Sony Portapak, a portable video camera that made video recording accessible to individual artists for the first time.
His work anticipated our current media-saturated environment with remarkable prescience. "Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins, and junk," Paik wrote in 1965. He was right.
Early Pioneers
Other artists quickly embraced video as a medium:
Vito Acconci — His "Centers" (1971) showed the artist pointing at the camera for twenty minutes, turning the viewer's gaze back upon themselves. His "Theme Song" (1973) featured Acconci lying on the floor, speaking intimately to the camera as if seducing the viewer, exploring the false intimacy of the television screen.
Bruce Nauman — Created video installations that used surveillance cameras, corridors, and closed-circuit systems to make viewers aware of their own bodies being watched. "Live-Taped Video Corridor" (1970) placed cameras and monitors in a narrow corridor so that viewers saw themselves from behind as they walked — a disorienting experience that made surveillance physically tangible.
Joan Jonas — Combined video with live performance, mirrors, and props, creating layered works that explored female identity, mythology, and the relationship between live presence and mediated image.
Bill Viola: Video as Spiritual Practice
Bill Viola is widely considered the most important video artist of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His works use extreme slow motion, water imagery, and religious iconography to create meditative experiences that evoke birth, death, transfiguration, and the passage between states of consciousness.
Viola's "The Crossing" (1996) shows a man walking toward the camera on a large double-sided screen. On one side, he is gradually engulfed by rising water; on the other, by flames. Both elements consume him completely before receding, leaving nothing. The piece — shown in slow motion that stretches a few seconds of real time into twelve minutes — transforms a simple image into a profound meditation on destruction, purification, and renewal.
His "Tristan's Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall)" (2005) shows a body lying on a stone slab as water cascades upward around it in reverse — the figure appears to dissolve into a torrent of ascending water. The scale (projected on a wall over fifteen feet high) and the overwhelming sound create an experience closer to religious ecstasy than to watching a video. Viola's work demonstrates that video art, at its best, can achieve the spiritual intensity of the greatest religious paintings — but with the added dimensions of time, movement, and sound.
Video Art Since 2000
Contemporary video art has expanded in multiple directions:
Multi-Channel Installations
Artists increasingly use multiple screens or projections to create immersive environments. Ragnar Kjartansson's "The Visitors" (2012) uses nine screens showing musicians performing a single song simultaneously in different rooms of a decaying mansion. Christian Marclay's "The Clock" (2010) — a 24-hour montage of thousands of film clips showing clocks and watches, synchronized to real time — won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and became a cultural phenomenon.
Social Media and Online Video
The explosion of online video has given artists new platforms and materials. Hito Steyerl's essay-films examine how images circulate, degrade, and accumulate meaning in the digital age. Her "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013) uses the aesthetics of tutorial videos to explore surveillance, visibility, and the politics of image resolution.
Connection to Gaming and Interactive Media
Video art increasingly intersects with video games and interactive media. Artists like Ian Cheng create "live simulations" — real-time, AI-driven ecosystems that evolve continuously without human intervention, blurring the line between video art and artificial life.
Where to See Video Art
Major museums with strong video art collections and programs include:
Tate Modern, London — Extensive video art holdings and regular screenings
Museum of Modern Art, New York — Comprehensive media art collection
Centre Pompidou, Paris — Pioneering new media acquisitions
ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany — Dedicated to media art and technology
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. — Home to Paik's "Electronic Superhighway"
How to Watch Video Art
Give it time — Video art is not designed for quick consumption. Commit to watching a piece for at least its full loop (if short) or a substantial portion (if long).
Let go of narrative expectations — Do not wait for a plot. Pay attention to rhythm, repetition, color, sound, and how the images make you feel.
Notice the installation context — How the video is displayed — projection size, room darkness, speaker placement, number of screens — is part of the artwork.
Sit down — Most video art spaces provide seating. Use it. Comfort helps you engage more deeply with the work.
Final Thoughts
Video art has evolved from a radical experiment with television sets to one of the most versatile and powerful mediums in contemporary art. It can create intimate psychological portraits, vast immersive environments, political provocations, and spiritual experiences that rival the greatest achievements of painting and sculpture. In a culture saturated with moving images — on our phones, our computers, our billboards, and our walls — video artists are the ones who ask us to look at those images differently, more carefully, and with greater awareness of what they do to us.
The next time you encounter a darkened room with a projection in a museum, do not walk past. Walk in, sit down, and let the moving images work on you. You may be surprised by what you see — and by what you feel.
Want to explore related topics? Read about digital art as a creative frontier, or discover how installation art transforms spaces into experiences.
