VT is not TV. Video is television (and what remains of television is video)

Abstract

In Argentina, TV history is hard to trace. Due to a diversity of reasons –disposal of material, scarcity of preservation actions and restrictive legal frames, among others-, this precious legacy has become almost inaccessible for the general public. During the 70 years of Argentine commercial TV life, its main stations have been administered by a mix of foreign companies and corporations, national communications oligopolies, and recurring authoritarian governments, in the context of fragile democratic processes. In this context, video has become a vehicle of those images, otherwise hard to trace, in a process that is undoubtedly intertwined with its relationship to TV, shaped by a profound critic of the medium. From this perspective, if television is video (for, after all, the records of its programs are all that remain), the analysis of some of these video works and its circuits of exhibition become essential to consider experimental video as a way (both involuntary and effective) of creating potential archives and to put the spotlight on an era that, otherwise, would only return to us under the shape of a black screen.