Video art

Video art became a practice of its own in the mid-1960s, when portable consumer recording equipment let artists work outside television studios. Nam June Paik showed altered television sets in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1963, and many accounts date the start of video art to 1965, when he filmed Pope Paul VI's procession in New York with his new Sony Portapak and showed it the same day in a Greenwich Village café. Video art often sets aside the conventions of cinema and may have no actors, dialogue, or plot. Labels say which kind a work is: Wang Ya-hui's Still Life in Daylight (2005) is a video installation of 4 minutes 36 seconds, and her Notebook (2020) a single-channel video, in colour and silent, of 9 minutes 1 second.

Check the running time on the label first; if the work loops, you can start partway and stay until it returns to what you first saw.

If these moving images tell no story, what are they asking you to look at?