Insight into "The Video as Seen at the End of the Video Age" ‘The video as seen at the end of the video age’ is a critical work that warns of the danger of an auto-legitimate culture of spontaneism.
Today everyone can afford videocameras, recording and editing systems and the advent of ‘personal media’ is already a reality. With the arrival of web 2.0, this material is pouring onto the web with quantities of video content of dubious edits.
‘The End of the Video’ piece was realized during a workshop held at the 2008 Venice Biennial, Beyond Architecture. Visitors, unknowingly, were directly involved in the filmmaking process which involved throwing a ball, which concealed a micro-camera, to other random visitors in the different pavilions of the exhibition, creating an architecture of media exchange. The ball symbolizes the death of video in that whoever happened to catch the ball automatically became a video maker, signifying that today it is possible to realize videos with the same degree of ease as required to throw a ball. In our piece, throwing the ball equates to recording a video: what is left is just the gesture, emptied of its significance.
The fact that the ball’s direction, once thrown, is not entirely predictable, and the filmmakers are also unaware that the ball is a recording device, points to the yet-to-emerge future of semi-autonomous mediums. The video explores how the accumulation of video content seems to respond more to a techno-narrative bulimia rather than to the research of quality or standard.
