Articles, Essays, and Reports

This in-progress section will bring together hard to find or out of print scholarly articles and essays that address the exhibition and reception of single-channel video. The following texts have been made available with the permission of their authors and publishers.

Graham, Dan; Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., ed. Essay on Video, Architecture, and Television. Video-Architecture-Television: Writings on Video and Video Works 1970-1978. Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.
Publication cover | Pages 1-4 | Pages 5-8 | pages 9-12 | Pages 13-16

Graham explores the many ways in which architecture, video and film can define, enforce or challenge existing power relations among classes of society. Film and broadcast television, as he describes them, are asymmetrical impositions of information by capital. Video, by contrast, may redefine cultural and psychological boundaries such as public and private, Graham argues. He describes various ways that glass architecture reinforces capitalism: reflective display windows, for example, are a metaphor for the way capitalism uses the consumer's lacking self-image to promote goods; modernist corporate buildings create the illusion of transparency to distract from their ideologies.