Videoart and infosphere: Alternative devices to the excess of the digital era in Spanish video creation

Abstract

The study of the accelerated perception of our daily lives in the digital era is now a common trend in many fields of research. The implementation of the Internet in our daily lives, which entails an infinite consumption of images, data and information, has led to a sense of fleeting, unrestrained temporality in this multi-screen universe. In the field of audiovisuals, this has been, if possible, much more potentiated than in any other. The feed on networks is now hundreds of videos -audiovisual products- made available to the consumer (or prosumer, in any case), who no longer surfs the net, but slips into the continuous loop of digital data that the network culture offers.

This fact leads us to ask ourselves what is the solution offered by the field of art and the field of audiovisuals for it. Video art, since its beginnings in the 1960s, emerged as a subversive and critical medium towards commercial television, among others. Today, in an analogue way, some video artists use this critical potential in response to the excess of images and accelerated temporality of the digital era. In this study we will take some examples of Spanish video-creators -such as Tete Álvarez, María Cañas, Marta Negre or Daniel Canogar- to study how, from our national sphere, there is also a critical -or at least a reflexive- side that points out these behaviours in the network era.