Daniel Berndt: Beyond the exhibition space. Embeddedness and circulation of digital video art online

Digitization changed the technical characteristics of video drastically. The flow of scanlines has been superseded by numerical images composed of pixels, the magnetic video tape by digital storage devices, the TV-monitor by flat screens, tablets or high-definition projectors. Moreover, the Internet, smartphones, the rise of social media platforms and the so-called clip culture they foster, altered our relationship to the moving image fundamentally. In short: digitization and the internet made video omnipresent and has through technological developments both in hard- and software “widened the spectrum of its visual expression”.
Consequently, digitization of video also had an immense impact on how artists employ the medium today. It opened up a new range of possibilities to produce, edit, playback, present and circulate moving images. Digital video not only offers more options in manipulation, the internet also extended the space for the display of video art into “virtual and global spaces”, which in return triggered a shift of how video art now often embedded in an expanded field of multimedia components is perceived.
My paper will focus on this “widened spectrum” and “embeddedness” of digital video. Discussing works by artists such as Meriem Bennani, whose 2 Lizards (2020) was first presented on her Instagram account and was acquired shortly after by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, who in her work Ankersentrum (2019) on the occasion of the 59th Venice Biennale used digital video and social media both as a tool of dissemination and decentralization as well as to create a narrative around her installation at the German Pavilion, I aim to examine different strategies to circulate digital video art beyond an institutional framework and the exhibition space.

Daniel Berndt studied art history, philosophy, and social anthropology at Free University of Berlin. He was a PhD Fellow of the Photographic Dispositif graduate program at Braunschweig University of Art. Since 2019 he is a postdoctoral research assistant at the Institute of Art History, University of Zurich. From 2009 to 2012, he worked for the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut as its Research Center Coordinator. His writing has appeared in Springerin, Aperture and Frieze amongst other publications. His book, Wiederholung als Widerstand? (Repetition as Resistance?) on the artistic (re-) contextualization of historical photographs in relation to the history of Palestine was published in 2018 by Transcript Verlag.