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seen today on permanent loan from the editors in the ZKM Mediathek collection. This magazine in cassette form, founded by Gábor Bódy, operated in galleries as well as at film festivals, art associations, book fairs or other opportune venues. A complex and constantly changing network of editors and artists effectively promoted claims to their ‹own› forums. Here again the simultaneity and the ‹morphological› field are remarkable. Most of the video festivals, which were mainly European, were founded between 1980 and 1982 in Locarno, The Hague, Bonn, and Montbéliard and at Ars Electronica in Linz.[29] These festivals functioned as exhibition, cinema and market, often not very clearly different from a trade show in character, but without ever achieving any kind of commercial significance. It was only in the 1990s that the mass spread of events, conferences, exhibitions and other activities relating to media discourse made it possible for some of those involved to survive financially as artists. Thus one important result was that the practice of independent video production was linked with a utopia of free, two-way information exchange. This was problematical to the extent that the general

 

public felt its image of a commercially ‹worthless› product confirmed. The consequence was: no one wanted to pay for video art, at most it might be offered a free forum on television, for example. This conflict repeated itself in the case of another technological platform in the first phase of the Internet[30] and the current discussion about incentives for collectors and museums to acquire Internet art.[31]

The museum format

Until now the focus has been on production and distribution formats. For the museums, the problem lay above all in the link with the question about presentation forms that ran counter to traditional practice: the monitor type, for example–is it part of the work of art or not?–or the soundtrack volume, which was often turned down on the monitor by the attendants as a practical measure anyway. From the point of view of the 1980s and the culture of narrative or visual single-channel works in the form of a videotape for monitor reception (whether on television on in the gallery), the present use of large-format

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