The Glasgow School of Art

Yvonne Spielmann
'Video: A New Technology & a New Medium' Listen to audio recording

Yvonne Spielmann discusses the emergence and properties of the electronic medium of video in relation to neighbouring media such as film, television, performance, interactive and computer arts. Using prominent examples of early video experiments, she argues that video is the first truly audiovisual medium and that it has more applications in common with computers than with film. In this respect the focus on video artists, who together with engineers develop and explore new tools, will highlight how the aesthetic vocabulary of this new medium contributes to the electronic culture of contemporary arts and media practices.

Professor Yvonne Spielmann (Ph.D. habil.) is Chair of New Media in the School of Media, Language and Music at The University of the West of Scotland.  She has written extensively on art, media and hybridity and has received numerous awards and fellowships for her research from major institutions including the Getty Center (1989-90), Cornell University (2000/1), Rockefeller Foundation (2002) and Japan Foundation (2005). Her publications include: 'Eine Pfütze in bezug aufs Mehr. Avantgarde' (1991), 'Intermedialität. Das System Peter Greenaway' (1998), and 'Video: Das reflexive Medium (2005). The Engish edition 'Video: The Reflexive Medium' will be published by MIT Press in  2008. She has also edited 'Kunst und Politik der Avantgarde' (1989), 'Image-Media-Art' (German and English, 1999, together with Gundolf Winter), 'What is Intermedia?', special issue of Convergence, winter 2002 (together with Jürgen Heinrichs), and is editor of 'Hybrid Identities in Digital Media', special issue of Convergence, winter 2005 (together with Kerstin Mey) and the section 'Forty Years of Video Art' of Art Journal (2006).

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.