1. The Audiovisual Image and Its Boundaries

When in the 1960s, German and American artists used video as a new form of expression, the term "video artist" was applied to all those who resorted to this technical support and presented their specificity in the form of films, installations and even video-based sculptures.

It seems that the production of video-based artistic works has been undergoing substantial changes because artists now have the means to produce high-quality videos using only their personal computers or smartphones. Technological breakthroughs in these areas and the relative availability of high-quality production equipment have promoted major growth in the independent video movement and launched video and MPEG4/DVD production into mainstream culture (^{Wands, 2006}).

According to current indications, digital technologies embrace a huge extension in their components, making the distinctions between video, television and cinema media rather imperceptible, especially in defining their boundaries. In other words, "it no longer makes sense in terms of technology to continue using the term ‘video’" (^{Schmidt, 2006}, p. 34).

For Sabine Maria ^{Schmidt (2006}), this statement shows a failure in appropriating new terms and how artistic productions are circumscribed compared to art historical contexts. Video and cinema are still often used as analogues, especially in art films as a genre. Hence, the term "video" will be referred to in this article, despite its imprecision.

Overall, the use of terms such as "media art", "visual culture", or "digital media image" is meant to classify much older genres, which need to be distinguished in all their facets. According to Dieter ^{Daniels (2006}), current reflections around electronic media and classical media gravitate "between the iconic media including video and digital photography on one side, and the processual, interactive, algorithmic or communications-linked media art on the other" (p. 45). In the last two decades, the context of their different origins and history is paramount when classifying video aesthetics or filmic works. Until the late 1980s, the meaning of "video art" and the term "video artist" defined a social identity and aesthetic program that clarified critical distinctions between video art itself, mainstream (commercial) art and mass media.

Today, as a medium, the film is seen as the most important reference of the 20th century. However, for artists, this reference was initially television.

Alluding to painting, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell explicitly related models stemming from it. The television monitor was once considered the "new screen". However, "in terms of its status as work of art, video art should be compared with concept art rather than painting or photography" (^{Daniels, 2006}, pp. 46-47).

The proliferation and evolution of portable equipment and devices have turned the video into a practical alternative to film, mainly as a medium for the documentary. Never before have there been such diverse forms of "moving images" as we have seen in the last two decades. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, video art developed into an art form of "moving images".

Meanwhile, "moving images", namely in their association with expanded cinema, "seems to suggest that categories are dynamic and that the dynamics of art practices themselves always create new relationships between ideas and materialities" (^{Carvalho & Lund, 2015}, p. 61). On the other hand, we also identify other categories¹ such as "cinematism", proposed by Sergei Eisenstein, and "poetism", a term forged and theorised by Karel Teige. These categories seem to derive from expanded cinema.

Apparently, the term "expanded cinema" is not only merely a name among others to describe forms of work and artistic practices whose nature is hybrid and cuts across media, it also "refers to a dynamic field made up of struggling concepts and objects" (^{Carvalho & Lund, 2015}, p. 39). For ^{Balsom (2017}), "the rich tradition of expanded cinema performance has often depended on live manipulation of the apparatus, transforming cinema into a performing art" (p. 134).

According to ^{Export (2011}), expanded cinema is also "a collage expanded around time and several spatial and medial layers, which, as a formation in time and space, breaks free from the two-dimensionality of the surface" (p. 290).

We thus observed that it is challenging to articulate the relationship between a given space and the artworks to keep viewers engaged with the moving images. This consideration points to another factor to take into account when displaying this medium, which is the behaviour of sound: "an artwork emanating sound occupies a space that goes beyond its physical margins" (^{Foresti, 2021}, pp. 84-85), that is, an ephemeral space occupied by the sound emitted by the work of art.

From this reflection, trace some criteria and define the sketch of a theory on exhibiting moving images, a theory essentially concerned with space: firstly, the space delimited by the movement within the artwork, which is either centripetal or centrifugal; then, the temporal space, that is, the time the image demands its reception (^{Foresti, 2021}).

Against the restrictions of theatrical cinema, the “artists and film-makers were in fact belatedly following a much longer tradition of expanding cinema of using mobile projection to relocate film experience" (^{Rees et al., 2011}, p. 114). Stan VanDerBeek (as cited in ^{Balsom, 2017}) envisaged expanded cinema not as involving the non-traditional deployments of cinema devices, but as a "new form of world communication in which the moving image would become an educational tool taking the form of 'an experience machine' or a 'culture-intercom'" (p. 164). Computer monitors replaced television screens, and software and peripherals for storing information replaced videotapes.

The constant change of audiovisual genres shows that each medium is endowed with its own characteristics, which are inherent to themselves and identifiable as such. However, these media are open to changes introduced by historical conditions; they are not exclusively technology-based. The influence of external factors (both in conceptual and content terms) can give rise to a specific media effect derived from technological influence. As such, ^{Meigh-Andrews (2013}) suggests that the participatory project, which evolved from the 1970s expanded cinema to the 1980s video sculpture, was extended through the interactive potential between viewer, artist and image technology.

During the 1990s, the easy accessibility of digital image production technology increased creativity in media environments exponentially. We have seen the expansion of digitally manipulated and generated images, which have become part of contemporary living and can be viewed in commercial videos, films, television, animation or music videos, and as scientific demonstrations or technical simulations. We can also verify that the spaces for the exhibition of video art forms, such as museums, have been replaced by galleries, bars and parties, introducing a new figure in the video environment (the video jockey² or VJ).

Concurrently, video art is developing its contexts for galleries and museums³, while some groups of producers are trying to discover new possibilities for distribution, new ways and new forms of influence. These forms involve the internet, which tends more and more to be a meeting platform for video art as data transmission systems expand in capacity.

Currently, it is possible to download video artwork from the internet. To some extent, we can state that "the internet becames a kind of transgeographical exhibition space" (^{Frieling & Herzogenrath, 2006}, pp. 36-37).

The thematic spectrum of video and film seems extremely diverse in that both genres have expanded and complemented each other in the tension between art and film (^{Frieling & Herzogenrath, 2006}). Since the 1990s, we have witnessed the emergence of new narrative strategies, fluently demonstrating transitions into theatre, performance, sculpture and literature.

With the expansion of the internet, telepresence⁴, whose application was limited only to the military and industrial sphere, became available in the family environment. Most webcams do not allow true telepresence - they can take images from a remote location but not act. Other images work as true telepresence links, allowing the user to perform actions from a remote location. The user's ability to choose hyperlinks also allows them to teleport from one server to another, from one physical location to the next (^{Manovich, 2001}).

Brenda Laurel (as cited in ^{Coyle, 1993}) defines "telepresence" as

a medium that allows you to take your body with you into some other environment. That's kind of metaphorical. What it really means is that you get to take some subset of your senses with you into another environment. And that environment may be a computer-generated environment, it may be a camera-originated environment, or it may be some combination of the two. (p. 162)

According to this definition, telepresence encompasses two different situations: being "present" in a computer-generated synthetic environment (usually referred to as "virtual reality") and being "present" at a remote physical location through a live video image. Apparently, telepresence is a much more radical technology than virtual reality or even computer-produced simulations; this is because, like fake reality technologies (computer image manipulation), virtual reality offers the subject the sensation/illusion of presence in a simulated world, allowing them to alter that world actively.

Therefore, we can state that the subject is given control over a false reality⁵and has the power over a virtual world, which exists only within the computer. Telepresence allows the subject to remotely manipulate physical reality in realtime through their image⁶. Thus, it is not strictly necessary to be physically present in a location to affect reality at this location, that is, "the essence of telepresence is that it is anti-presence" (^{Manovich, 2001}, p. 167). Video, like computer-generated animation, promotes the introduction of an ontology in the audiovisual domain and retains the designation of the structure of the work itself on the reception process that characterises cinematography since the art of interactive multimedia seems to offer new methods for the organisation of audiovisual artistic communication processes.

As we know, video and television share the ontology of the image. The underlying aspect of the two, as devices, bears a similarity to each of them.

In the case of the image applied to video - as media - it aims to achieve its sense of fundamental importance to the extent that, according to ^{Grau (2007}), video is a medium of intimacy, of close contact, encouraging interpersonal communication. In the initial phase of the media, the confrontation with individual experiences of perception was less prominent than the interest in the general possibilities offered by video for aesthetics and communication technologies. Due to its technological proximity to television, video art was often seen as an intersection between art and commercial communication (^{Helfert, 2007}).

The ambivalent relationship between video and television was often explored by many artists. As far as television is concerned, the substance of the image and sound, as well as their ontic structure, serves the function of transmitting⁷ audiovisual information concerning events occurring in distant locations but made manifest in real-time or of presenting previously prepared programs (^{Grau, 2007}).

The innovative spectrum introduced by video proves to be much broader, considering the reception processes⁸ rather than the structure of the work and the poetics of film. In light of the cinematic performance, video has been replaced by a process that can be called "reading" of the film. The condition of the cinema viewer has been compared countless times to the sensation of immersion in a dream state. Now, this idea refers to the specificity of the cinematic identification processes as projection. In contrast, the reception of films in domestic circumstances is characterised by the dispersion of attention because it does not offer such a high sensation of immersion, like what occurs in the cinema projection screen.

Nowadays, video-watching devices offer an increasing multiplicity of controls in their menus, that is, the viewer is an active player in the multifunctional processes of perception and understanding, which causes the film to lose its inviolable character to a certain extent - a situation totally opposed to the classic visualisation of projection cinema. This makes us consider that video art seems to offer another level of transformation processes, which tends towards the territory of interactive art.

New critical dimensions of interactivity have also been added to the works produced using multimedia computers⁹. Artists work in computer graphics, animation, digital video, interactive cinema, interactive multimedia, and even hypermedia, producing essentially technologically rooted works based on 2D, 3-D, the world wide web, and installations. These performance processes mean that "artistic experimentation with computer-influenced media is an important part of the contemporary context of art and technology's mutual influence" (^{Wilson, 2002}, p. 665).

In contrast to film, the image information is based on electromagnetic information that is only available to human perception by means of technical apparatuses. The video image offers thereby significant possibilities of manipulation (^{Helfert, 2007}). Besides the real-time playback possibilities it offers, video's meaning for the changed perception of the world is based on the possibility of real-time manipulation, allowing an intervention in the image already during recording. Direct manipulability of images has challenged artists to experiment with new techniques in visual interpretation.

With the evolution of electronic technologies, the opposition between synthetic production and aesthetic material has played an important role in several artistic areas. In the visual arts, there is an opposition between film and synthetic images, while in the acoustic field, the opposition is between concrete music and electronic music (^{Helfert, 2007}).

The mainstream industries' assimilation of experimental approaches to digital video and computer graphics has complicated their consideration as art, raising issues such as the distinction between art, design and media.

Video artists were among the first to explore the aesthetic, technical and cultural implications from the standpoint of artistic freedom and have created a wide range of conceptual works around video. Some of these experiments had exceptional aesthetic relevance, such as the works of Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci, Douglas Davis, John Baldessari, Bill Viola, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Doug Hall, Ant Farm, Dan Sandin, Diana Thater and Tony Oursler, among others. Many of these artists' works invoked the action/intervention of viewers in their works, thus integrating interactive electronic art. Many of these creators, who, to a certain extent, were pioneers in these areas, now channel their work supported by contemporary technologies.

The history of video is really connected to sound, and in a successful video work, sound and image are very hard to differentiate, or perhaps better: it is hard to imagine the presence of one without the other (^{Vitiello, 2004}). The soundtrack is deeply connected to the images, editing and all. Many artists come from electronic music, especially those working with image processing. Nam June Paik was a musician before he was a video artist, and Steina Vasulka was trained as a violinist.

Even if the concept of video art may not play a relevant role today, digital recording media, video installations and projections have become so ubiquitous that their interest is evident in art schools, media faculties and museums.

However, we feel it is pertinent to ask the question about the ageing of analogue or digital artworks: what happens to electronic images when they endure the passage of time?

We know that electronic media have a very limited lifespan, which even causes many collectors and many museums to face a dilemma about preserving the works.

According to ^{Frieling and Herzogenrath (2006}), anyone who collected the right photograph in the 1970s now owns a work of value. However, anyone who collected a video¹⁰ in the same era now struggles with the problem of preserving the work.

Hence, we raise the question: "will video art become a completely ephemeral medium because of its possible extinction as a fragile and physically degradable material over time, which can be transformed into white noise, that is, disappear in a blur of noise?" (^{Castro, 2022}, p. 306). According to ^{Frieling and Herzogenrath (2006}), "if we do not think about a better way of handling of videotapes, all we will have left of video art soon is white noise" (p. 8).

In any dimension, be it documentary, cinematic, graphic or conceptual, the artistic treatment of what is now considered an established medium is certainly open to more than just the notion developed during the 1970s and 1980s. To describe what artists currently do, the term “video art” cannot be limited to exploring the technological medium.

As ^{Frieling and Herzogenrath (2006}) note, "there are actually very few video artists in the strict sense of the word, ( ... ) most artists work with a wide range of media and use the unique qualities of each of them as a vehicle of expression" (p. 14). It is worth noting the cross-pollination of notions of video art with television, film and traditional media art - including photography - which embraces not only the technical aspects of the medium but also its specific forms of presentation and distribution. According to ^{Huber (2006}), the discussion about the presentation of collections and the preservation of digital artworks must be considered on two different levels:

Unlike traditional media images such as paintings or drawings, digital works seem to exist in two completely different forms - the state of notation and the state of performance. To ^{Frieling and Herzogenrath (2006}), "video only exists in the form of a notation, which is an analog or digital code on a tape or on a disk" (p. 59). One cannot discern the content of these media by looking at them alone. In video, notation consists not only of code but of numerous original material objects, and this is because there is no form without matter, and code has a certain materiality. The materiality of a video is the historical form of embodiment, defined through the image and sound it carries¹¹ and which the code has physically stored.

Regarding the incorporation of video, if we go back to the beginning of video production, the recording of sound and image material largely depends on the respective medium device (apparatus) used to produce the video. It depends on the type of camera used to record, its optical system and its sensitivity to light, the structure and reading of colours, which is converted into an electrical signal and subsequently stored in an analogue or digital medium.

In this sense, and despite the multiplicity of video transport systems, the system that indicates originality, historical period, and authenticity of sound and image (used to produce the work) will be the most advantageous for its museological preservation. Therefore, we can state that video art can exist on a cassette or a disc as original elements and non-replaceable materials. In contrast, all the specific components required for the performance of this type of notation, such as players, monitors, amplifiers, speakers, computers, light systems, operating systems, software or connecting cables, do not belong to the organisation of the work; instead, they represent the respective temporary incorporation of the code. The abstract organisation of a media artwork, regarding the form of its installation instructions or notation, "corresponds with its concrete embodiment in the form of its performance and representation at a particular location at a particular time for particular viewers" (^{Frieling & Herzogenrath, 2006}, p. 60). An embodied performance or presentation is always an interpretation of the work. The same notation corresponds to several possible interpretations and different types of performances. This difference between presentation and notation can be found in all magnetic or digital sound or image recording systems. Hence, each binary numerical sequence initiates a meta-code, written at the beginning of the sequence and describes its interpretation. How data becomes visible or audible depends on the concrete incorporation of the ASCII binary notation. The same binary numerical code can be interpreted as an image, a sound, or a text document. The software assumes the role of "actor". The meaning and significance of binary numeric columns depend on the hardware and software, which presents the numeric notation in a certain location, at a certain time, for a certain type of viewers.

Thus, we can say that hardware and software are also systems of embodiment, performance and representation/presentation, giving a physical, concrete body to the abstract organisation of data, making that body also exist in a certain location, in a certain time and for a certain type of viewer.

In the presentation of digital artworks and their hardware components, it becomes evident that changing or replacing these components influences the form, the meaning, and the aesthetic experience of these works.

The operating systems are also key in the effects produced by their replacement; as we know, since Windows, Apple Macintosh, and UNIX are the main systems used, they are also the most influential in the software's appearance, form and behaviour, as well as the various versions that produce different aspects, functions, and performances.

Experts suggest that the decisive parameters in recording an image and its representation are the lens systems, the conversion, and the form of data storage. Thus, we understand that the concrete incorporation of image and sound in a recorded image or sound format always depends on the corresponding media device used to produce the video. On the other hand, the media device, which produces the concrete incorporation of the code, proves the originality of the material object, the transport of the image and the sound. Therefore, the devices seem to be an important factor in incorporating the code.

We can underline two different media devices:

There are, therefore, many ways of presenting the same video due to the specific materiality of the media systems involved, but not only. Location, the surrounding visual, acoustic, institutional, cultural space, and economic conditions significantly influence the same video's appearance, embodiment and meaning.

In collecting¹³ video artworks, they are chosen from various materials to give future generations an exemplary idea of this field. In doing so, the works that will be preserved will not only be pieces of video art material but documents representing social and cultural values. The materials to be preserved can be subject to direct interventions on the object itself so that the ageing process is delayed, or the environment where the materials are to be conserved and preserved can be controlled, namely lighting, temperature, humidity, dust or magnetic fields. In some senses, interrupting the medium's degradation processes lacks technological know-how.

2. Final Considerations

After the novel and the subsequent privileging of cinematographic narrative and video as a major form of cultural expression in the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate - the database¹⁴ (^{Manovich, 2001}).

Different types of databases, such as hierarchical, networked, relational and object-oriented, use different models to organise the data. A common use is the CD-ROM in museums. It includes the museum in a database of images, which can be accessed either chronologically, by country, or by artist.

Digital storage media devices have proved particularly receptive to traditional database genres as a structure, such as a photo album, video and biographical database. As such, might a device like a USB stick be a work of art? This question seems inevitable in light of the success of this device's current use and application in the context of audiovisual artistic creation and points to some extent to the limits that terminology induces us to review in this very medium. We also note that, since the beginning of the last century, art is not about "being" but about context ("when"). That context is related to the spaces and times of aesthetic reception.

So what is an aesthetic reception or experience? Aesthetics is a word that derives from the Greek aisthesis, which means "sensitivity". It refers to the sensibility we may experience from a first impression of something. As such, in aesthetics, the forms of things resonate more than their contents.

We can perhaps say that we are currently experiencing a greater aestheticization of existence, as the societies we are part of are characterised by having transformed aesthetics into a determining value. Hence, we can say that the aesthetic has become the place of access to any experience. For ^{Arthur Danto (1995/2013}), art is produced in a certain context. That context is the context of the art world, without which a work cannot be classified as an artistic object. Therefore, there must always be a context that gives it meaning and attaches significance.

According to ^{Frieling and Daniels (2005}), genres and categories strongly influence aesthetic perception, which makes it difficult to achieve an interdisciplinary aesthetic, which is claimed by multimedia art forms. As is well known, 20thcentury art was strongly influenced by (and in some cases even had its origin in) the mixing of genres.

It seems that before the advent of electronic media, media art resented the ubiquity of media and tried to rely on the sculptural and physical (spatial) presentations that characterised all intentions to find new forms of artistic multiplication and methods of art distribution through new techniques. The success of electronic media is apparently based on the fact that its contents are present simultaneously in multiple places.

Thus, the development of video art is usually related not only to the technology used but also to cultural conditions. It is worth noting that in the 1960s, video artists struggled with the resistance of television, which was already institutionally and commercially established long before the video was invented. Therefore, the works of video artists did not have the possibility of penetrating the mass media.

In the early 1980s, the advent of the home video market as an alternative to television allowed the development of video art to take different approaches.

The idea of publishing art on digital storage devices or the internet entails the will to transcend limits to overcome borders. In this way, audiovisual art can become an integral part of the omnipresence of electronic media. In this way, audiovisual art can become an integral part of the omnipresence of electronic media.

As in the 1960s, when the artist's book and the object book played an important role in the search for new forms of distribution, the same applies today with the transfer from analogue to the digital format of video artworks, leading to another form of transportation. Moreover, as we know, the form can influence the technique. Therefore, with the introduction and distribution of artworks through digital, a modification of technical content originated a new artistic form.

Meanwhile, this new art form is more and more in the field of interface configuration, allowing a dialogue between humans and machines. That leads to an intuitive relationship with the user, and developing new forms of non-linear representation for audiovisual environments, which is simultaneously one of the few places where artwork can still play a role in the evolution of media (^{Frieling & Daniels, 2005}).