CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

Stephen Partridge , University of Dundee, Scotland.
Convergence; uniting, or merging tendencies that were originally opposed or very different.

Continual and changing, convergence places us (artists and audience) in a post-film and -video era, where digital forms (mostly) replace, substitute, or simulate the previous media. This process of substitution and simulation explains the current lack of perceived distinctions between forms or media. For instance, it is common for us to say that we are going to watch a film on video or a DVD when what we actually mean is that we intend to watch a recording of a film or movie (without recourse to celluloid). It is possible that this lack of distinction is likely to erode even further with the advent of high definition television (HDTV) for broadcast and DVD with the improvement in picture quality and adoption of movie-theatre aspect ratios. It may be worth asking whether this matters and why in the process of convergence, video has been substituted, while film has been simulated by digital technologies. To answer this question, there is a need to re-examine the development of video as a medium and its incorporation into digital form, while making some comparisons with film, and in turn, its simulation within the digital domain.

The convergence or incorporation of video with digital forms could be considered as almost complete. In any case, video as a term has had many definitions and uses, both culturally and technologically, and has become a generic word for a number of different things. As a specific term it refers originally to an electrical analogue waveform produced by scanning the light (the latent image) focused onto a photosensitive plate in the video camera, which is then re-created into the pattern (or raster) of horizontal scanning lines made by an electron beam onto the photosensitive surface of a cathode-ray-tube, which in turn creates the image that appears on a television. This waveform in the digital domain is now essentially bit-mapped or sampled to appear on a contemporary television, computer screen or flat display panel. This converged analogue/digital use of the word can be referred to as the video-plane and as such was (and remains) incorporeal like its cousin, the audio waveform or sound sample, with which it is usually incorporated. This distinguishes it from the photographic and material-based medium of film, even though both film and video strive to produce one similar effect - a moving image as perceived by the human brain.

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