Video History Project

Video History Project

Welcome to the Video History Project.

Browse the site for articles and information pertaining to the history of video art.

Since 1994, over 300 volunteers contributed research, documentation, tapes and other ephemera.

Many citations in the bibliography will take you to pages that include the article's full text. Others marked with the keyword bibliographic are citation only.

Video History Project conceived by Sherry Miller Hocking, Mona Jimenez, and Dave Jones.

The Video History Project is a service of Experimental Television Center. Please support our mission with a tax-deductible contribution.

Cite this record

"Video History Project." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-history-project.

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Summary

Video History Project is a website of articles and information on the history of video art; it was conceived by Sherry Miller Hocking, Mona Jimenez, and Dave Jones and operates as a service of Experimental Television Center. Since 1994, over 300 volunteers contributed research, documentation, tapes and other ephemera; the bibliography includes links to pages with articles' full texts while items marked bibliographic are citation-only. The site solicits tax-deductible contributions via a PayPal donation link.

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Changes will be reviewed and integrated as time permits. For major changes, feel free to email [email protected].

Last modified 15 September 2026

Related records

  • Credits

    Conceived and directed by Sherry Miller Hocking, the Video History Project has operated since 1994 as a collaborative effort; acknowledgements include Ralph Hocking and William Joseph Hocking. Kathy High and Mona Jimenez collaborated with Hocking on the book The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued (Intellect Press, 2014); Matthew Schlanger redesigned the site in Drupal and migrated the databases while David Jones assembled the original vhp web database. Listed funders and partners include the Andy Warhol Foundation, Daniel Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Everson Museum and Visual Studies Workshop; Visual Studies Workshop Summer Institute participants worked 1992–1998 on A Natural History of Video Art. Contact [email protected].

  • About the Video History Project

    The Experimental Television Center’s Video History Project, begun in 1994, is an ongoing research initiative documenting video art and community television as they evolved in rural and urban New York State and spread across the US; initiatives include research, conferences and a website. The Project aims to identify, locate and make accessible tapes, artists’ instruments, writings and ephemera from early portable-media practices introduced in the late 1960s, and to cultivate research and public programming that situates independent media within broader cultural contexts. Thousands of tapes are held across New York State in libraries, museums, media arts centers, artists’ spaces, universities, video collectives and private collections; the Project invites public contribution and collaboration to assist preservation and access.

  • Saving the Images: A Report from the Looking Back/Looking Forward Symposium Preservation

    On May 31 and June 1 at Downtown Community TV Center in New York, over 50 media arts professionals convened for Looking Back/Looking Forward, a symposium on moving image preservation organized by the Experimental Television Center with IMAP and Bay Area Video Coalition. Sessions addressed physical preservation and remastering (including 1/2" open reel), economics, formats, collection assessment and capturing related histories; participants included representatives from museums, archives, media organizations and artist groups. Outcomes included transcripts for the ETC Video History site, a NEA-funded BAVC DVD (due late 2002), two commissioned papers (Video Preservation: The Basics; Reel to Real) and the Video History Project website (launched 2000) holding nine databases and about 3,500 records.

  • Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews Bibliography

    The first printed catalog of the Video Data Bank's complete holdings, Feedback offers readers essays on the history of media arts, the Video Data Bank, video activism, experimental performance art, and the On Art and Artists Collection. It includes 325 frame grabs and stills from some of the collect…

  • Video History: Making Connections - Seminars

    Video Rewind: A Seminar on Early Video History (October 16, 1998) was a day-long seminar introducing curators, critics, librarians, archivists, funders, artists and students to independent video in America (1965–1980); it offered screenings, lectures and discussions on video art, documentary tapes and topics such as portapaks, closed-circuit video, collectives and cable TV. Seminar leader Deirdre Boyle (The New School) presented alongside Barbara London (Curator of Video, MoMA), Paul Ryan (McLuhan fellow) and Parry Teasdale (Videofreex). A full-day Video Preservation session, co-sponsored and organized by Media Alliance and Mona Jimenez, gathered representatives to report on preservation initiatives and funding trends.

  • Background and History Preservation

    Experimental Television Center produced this guide and organized the Video History Project, documenting early video art and community television in upstate New York (1968–1980) through oral histories, a website and the Video History: Making Connections conference (Syracuse University, October 1998). The text cites Media Alliance and publications such as Deirdre Boyle's Video Preservation and the Magnetic Media Preservation Sourcebook, and notes IMAP's 1999 formation with New York State Council on the Arts and Rockefeller Foundation support. It outlines archivist functions, videotape deterioration modes and chronology of preservation activities through 2002.