Video has become the most widely used time-based medium for artists since it's first appearance in the 1960s in the work of American Fluxus artist Nam June Paik.

The intimacy of the small screen monitor format, with its allusions to television, provided artists with new possibilities to engage with wider popular and political culture. Video equipment, despite being unwieldy in its early days, offered a new way of producing moving image that was not encumbered by the lengthy processing stages required by film. Artists were attracted to the immediacy of video play-back and the different viewing mode of its monitor format.

As technological advancements and art school provision made the medium more widely available, an increasing number of artists turned to video. By the mid 1970s the growing number of artists working with video encouraged the formation of London Video Arts, providing a space for screening, watching and eventually producing video. The sculptor David Hall produced many innovative explorations of the new medium, challenging its small screen relationship to television by his subversive TV Interventions at the Edinburgh festival in 1971. In The Tennis Dialogues Cate Elwes combines live video playback with performance to explore how the sensation of time and space are altered by video. Tina Keane's Playpen is an early example of video installation, where video monitors, almost like surveillance cameras, mirror the interaction of the audience within the gallery space. David Critchley also explored the formal qualities of video and the monitor, and poked fun at the seriousness with which many artists applied themselves to the new medium in his 1976 video Pieces I Never Did.

From pioneer David Hall's early engagement with the video image as a broadcast medium, television has provided rich source material for video artists. In videos like Yes Frank No Smoke, George Barber combines fragments of sound and image sampled from familiar TV movies and advertisements with video effects and ironic voice-over. Ian Bourn refers to the small scale intimacy of television within its domestic setting, in his roles as 'talking head' characters such as Lenny in Lenny's Documentary. Stuart Marshall was one of video art's most accomplished writers on the subject of television and video, his three part video The Love Show is an exploration of television's modes of address and representation.

New developments in digital technology mean that the poles of video versus film no longer define artists working with moving image. Indeed, in the double screen video works of Sutapa Biswas, Breda Beban and Jananne Al Ani we see a quality of image and projection that returns us to the conditions of film, but this time installed in a gallery space rather than a cinema. The high quality of digital projection is now seen as an equivalent to film in many art galleries and museums and for many artists. However, the specificity of the video medium; its relationship to the television image, its monitor-bound form and sense of immediacy has created three decades of artistic innovation.

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