Rummaging through past journals as I usually do at the end of the year, I found this passage which might have marked any preliminary attempt towards thinking seriously about art, expressed in the form of an open-ended analogy: “If film is painting, then video is—?” I try to decipher some of the words I had hesitantly placed to complete the statement that were subsequently crossed out, and saw that one of them said “(video is) writing.”

I wrote this particular entry nearly two decades ago, back when I was still a student studying film. I have forgotten what I had heard or read during that time which might have prompted me to write such line, but nevertheless, I find my attempt to search for a logical analogy quite telling. First, it has put into motion a nearly obsessive preoccupation with trying to advocate the differences between video and film, which during that time was still worthy to pursue; and second, it made me aware about the idea of equating these popular media with other art forms like painting and writing.

The rest of the pages which that entry had preceded were filled with lines that continued to complete the analogy, with more suspect terms and words crossed out. Until finally, it reached the last entry to which I might have resigned myself with: “If film is to painting, then video is to seeing.”

Seeing. Mere seeing. At that time, I was coming from the fact that in film (and photography), images are printed directly on material surfaces like rolls of celluloid strips to which their form achieves a kind of finality. While video and other related technology, on the other hand, though more accessible (home video systems, VHS, consumer camcorders, discs), are essentially formless—just bits of data and signals which are not manifest until we decide an output for a specific objective (as a recorded image, as a broadcasted image, or as closed-circuit images in surveillance monitors). Video, unlike film, does not need any absolute form in order to justify its existence. It does not need any resulting print or image. It need not necessarily be projected or recorded and can be stored in different formats. In other words, video does not have an essential trait. Thus prompted my enthrallment with the tool, as well as what I would like to think of as a paradoxical relationship between an artist and his medium.

I have, since the beginning, chosen video as a medium because it represents everything I believe about art: open-ended, ever-changing, unbound to any definite structure; and also primarily as an eye ‘looking’ at the world, which I believe what art essentially is—a seeing subject. And though I am tempted to consider this as an essential trait of video, I have to constantly remind myself that it has none, especially in this age where technology quickly re-defines previously accepted definitions. Yet, my practice has continually revolved around this ‘search’ for an essential quality (infrared video, digital manipulation, loss of data in analog tapes, and self-reflexivity). My present works go back to that principle—of the role of ‘seeing’ in representational art—and into understanding that representation is an evolving and complex system. “Liberation from the tyranny of representation is a terrible responsibility,” as one media critic has put it.

Rather than manipulations or reconstructions of reality, I would like to believe that what I am trying to do is only to augment reality in order to reveal a passage of thought, keeping in mind what Maurice Merleau-Ponty once wrote: “To ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking.” Video is one such medium which, I believe, has the capacity to go beyond merely recording what is visually real to record what is also real during thought processes, since the unfolding of a video image is firmly embedded in time the same way the act of thinking is.

In one of my latest works, I tried to approximate the representation of thought with the help of video’s properties channeled through the act of writing, or more specifically, through the process of typing down one’s thoughts. Whether it is effective remains to be seen. Video, after all, is such a floating and open-ended medium to the point that it pervades the intentions of the author in the same way that artists’ ideas are dictated by the difficulty or ephemerality of their chosen materials.

One of my favorite books about the subject, Sean Cubitt’s Videography, seems to have surmised it best and appears to have at least made my initial analogies about film-versus-video partly acceptable when he wrote, “Video is nothing but process,” or more accurately, “a signal processing” and nothing more. For me, this theory justifies my constant enthrallment or fetishisation of a phenomenon such as video mainly because the opening of an electronic aperture, whether through a CMOS chip or a digital SLR, is the beginning of a process whose return is yet to be defined. Moreover, it may not even guarantee a return. “Nothing is happening…,” as one of the usual responses my works generate, for me, is most telling. This zestlessness, this uneventfulness, the mere fact that most of us are prone to raise this question about art (including myself, being guilty of it several times inside cinemas) means that Christian Metz’s apparatus theory is truer than ever. That we, as an audience, are conditioned to the desires of the device, conditioned to what media has continued to feed us: that there should be something happening, that something should unfold. And this desire (ideological or psychological) is one of the biggest notions I find comfort in—enough comfort in order to challenge that no matter what or why or how something should simply be.