Thus in the first chapter Philippe Dubois allows himself an historical sidestep which could cause a heart attack in a too Cartesian person. ‘It is not because someone has a new tool available that they will create a new art form,’ argues Philippe Dubois. ‘Art can be very archaic when new tools are used, and conversely very innovative using old tools. In the first text in the book, which I wrote thirty years ago, I am aware that I am playing with a certain provocation through the wonderful anachronism in stating that the photo and the video are at the origins of painting. It was a way of saying that I am against teleological thinking in the arts and in images, as a construction of an evolution in thinking. The value of this text lies in demonstrating that there is no teleology in aesthetics. It differentiates itself from technology. Of course at certain moments they are linked, but they are also distant from one another. In putting forward this postulate we can bring together procedures and ways of thinking which a priori have nothing in common. For example, a hand painted on the wall of a Lascaux cave, in terms of thought processes, already leads us to the question of photography.’ From a technological point of view, the two processes have nothing to do with each other. But if we linger on the thought processes which lead a person to want to fix the real in time, in an image…

A person places his hand on the wall and blows a coloured powder which is inscribed on the stone and rock support. It is a template technique. The hand has preserved part of the wall of coloured powder and the image thus resembles the negative of a photo and it fixes a precise image for eternity, like a photo, thanks to a projection onto a support. In the case of prehistoric paintings, it consists of projecting powder, in the case of the photo it is light which is projected and inscribed on a support by physico-chemical processes. But there are obvious links in terms of procedure and the system of thinking.

Video confusion, from the impossible intrinsic definition to transversality

‘I believed for a long time that it was possible to find values specific to video, a specific aesthetic, for example,’ admits the theorist. ‘But I have since put this belief into perspective.’ This ambition, which springs from the author’s groundless assessment, criss-crosses the whole of the first part of the book, devoted to video and the theory of images. It nevertheless indeed allows a valuable observation framework to be established, to set up video as a concept and to place it within its history. This first part lays down the signposts of video, its roots, as a technology, as an aesthetic, as marked by its filiation with painting, the photo, cinema, as well, but equally with shadows, mirrors and the image.

One of these texts, ‘For an aesthetics of the video image’, also enables it to be distanced from cinema, in skilfully trying to establish for it an aesthetics which is, if not specific to it, then more appropriate. When talking of video theorists in effect utilise the codes of cinema. They blithely talk of shot, editing, field and depth of field. Certainly video offers moving images which are similar to it, but is it the same mode of creation? The same end product? It is worth asking the question. Where the narrativity of cinema through shot and editing is constrained by the temporal linear development of a story, video instead bears witness to a simultaneous construction and display of ideas. It systematises other techniques and aesthetics used sporadically by cinema.

Philippe Dubois analyses three of these techniques which set up a new relationship with time, and which are rendered possible by the electronic signal: superimposition, the wipe and incrustation.