Karl otto gotz biography of martin luther

In this edited extract from her new book The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Ina Blom examines the memory and history of early analog video, and investigates how the medium, heralding new forms of technological and social life, prehended the forms and forces of painting.

Memories of Painting

‘Someone started talking about video history: “Video may be the only art form ever to have a history before it had a history.”’ This is Bill Viola, recalling a dinner scene at Chinese restaurant in New York on a February evening in 1974. Only a few weeks earlier—by most accounts an early date in the history of video art—the Everson Museum in Syracuse had opened the first retrospective exhibition of the work of Nam June Paik, accompanied by a catalogue with Paik’s reprinted notes, letters, and published writings in a messy facsimile format that at once managed to give the impression of instantaneous access to a work in progress and of archival findings attesting to some hallowed moment in the past. At the time, Viola was deeply immersed in questions pertaining to memory. Having spent years focusing almost entirely on technical hardware, he realized he had missed out on ‘the human half of the equation’—notably, human ‘hardware’ such as ‘senses, perception