Home › Glossary › Letter V

Video Art

Art
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Art that uses moving-image technology—video, film, or digital media—as its primary medium; in poetry, it can inspire allusions to motion, temporality, and the mechanical gaze.

Detailed Definition
Video art explores duration, repetition, performance, editing, sound, surveillance, and the relationship between viewer and screen. It may resist conventional film narrative by emphasizing process, looped action, or conceptual tension. In poetry, video art can inspire time-based forms that revisit an image or sentence with variation. A video poem may use repetition, visual text, recorded voice, and montage to examine how mediated images alter memory, intimacy, and attention.
Example
Example in poetry:
A video poem can place a spoken poem over moving images, using pacing and cuts to emphasize particular lines; In videopoetry, a close-up of a mouth speaking a line can make breath, silence, and pronunciation part of the poem’s meaning; A poet might pair a poem about a changing city with time-lapse footage of construction, creating a visual metaphor for loss and transformation; Text can appear and disappear on screen while a voice reads different words, inviting viewers to compare what they see with what they hear; A video art poem may use silence, ambient sound, and abstract images rather than narrative footage to create an emotional response
Additional Notes
Video art uses moving-image technologies as artistic media rather than simply using video to document another artwork. Since the 1960s, artists have worked with monitors, projection, closed-circuit systems, recorded performance, installation, digital manipulation, and multiple screens. Video art may reject conventional cinematic narrative and focus instead on duration, repetition, perception, identity, or the technology of seeing itself. Poetry students can compare it with videopoetry and multimedia performance. Related concepts include moving image, installation, performance art, experimental film, projection, media art, duration, montage, and digital art.
Also Known As
Video Installation
Skip to main content