Net Video, Black Box @ Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

The exhibition ‘Net Video, Black Box’ is a show compiled from the DVblog.org web site. Started in 2005, the site has borne witness to the rapid expansion of video art on the web (especially video art intended directly for the internet). It functions as a daily online video magazine and an archive for videos in the QuickTime format (the insistence that any piece posted must reside on the DVblog server has meant it is now unparalleled as an archive of the first years of art video on the web.)
The site has also tried to situate the new flourishing of video on the web in the context of the rich experimental film tradition of the 20th century, and although this is now becoming a commonplace, was one of the first to do so. DVblog has also been alert to the connections between art video and “applied moving image” such as the best of advertising, music videos and comedy.
We chose “Black Box” to refer to the cinematic presentation of moving image in a gallery space as well as a metaphor for the recording device installed in airplanes, a closed set of components that aim to document a different and vital kind of data.
‘Black Box’ refers also to the fact that ‘video art’ on the web has largely been ignored by the art establishment and the art market, perhaps because it is difficult to “marketize” work that is so freely reproducible. That such a view bears no relationship to the actual quality of the work will be amply clear from this show.

Doron Golan / Michael Szpakowski