“The ultimate art is copying and pasting the contents of your Cartesian Theatre to someone else’s”
I fell in love with videography on a crisp September morning in 1998. While watching a rollerblading VHS (Espionage) with my brother before school. I experienced the face-numbing ecstasy of videography (from the Latin videre ‘to see,’ and the Greek -graphia ‘writing.’); I had a ‘peak’ experience, in which the peripheral boundaries of the world melted, and my mind entered a flow state. Millions of years of evolution have led humans to delight in particular shapes and colors, in sounds and perceived motion. On that transformative morning, the neurons of my 10-year old brain interweaved and collapsed with the notes and light waves emanating from the television. Over the years the emotional impact of this hybrid art form left an enduring impression on my psyche.
At present I think videography is the most potent artform, owing its power to advances in technology. Technology condenses and makes things powerful that in the past were less powerful. As advances in physics led to the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the discovery of Vitamin D led to enormous suffering on industrial chicken farms, so too has technology increased the power of art in conscious minds. In the future there may be even more powerful forms of art, like if we could directly share our internal experience with someone else’s mind, or reliably trigger drug-like euphoria through sensory mediums. Until then, videography is the best thing we got.