Thesis for a scientific Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in specialty 023 "Fine Arts, Decorative Arts, Restoration". – Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, Kharkiv, 2024.
The thesis is a comprehensive study of the origin, development and formation of video art in Ukraine in the context of the regional identities creation by leading video artists, artistic communities and schools, considering the peculiarities of the visual language of the late 20th – early 21st centuries.
This process took place on the specific political background of independent Ukrainian statehood formation, changes in socio cultural factors and the traditional paradigm in art, the development of national self-identification, the search for modern stylistic solutions that influenced video art. Since the 1990s, video and media technologies have become an important marker of new communication with the viewer.
Ukrainian artists turned to video art as a means of artistic expression and manifestations of visual activity in regional cultural centers.
At the end of the 1980s, in America and Western Europe, video art was already established, in contrast to Ukraine, where free access to video equipment was somewhat limited. Artists first experimented with film and ready made, creating video works from borrowed images, video documentation and amateur films, like home video. It is shown
that Ukrainian video art in its genesis didn't imitate the world video techniques, but rather found unique stylistic solutions. The lack of visual experience explains the unprofessional use of technical means and the transfer of artistic techniques and analog technologies in video works.
Comparing the development of Ukrainian and world video art, we see a certain lag. Given the rapid convergence of video into the global media environment since the 2000s, we can talk about the rapid transformation of Ukrainian video art, from amateur video, the montage and synthesis with analog artistic practices – to modern digital technologies. In an effort to join Western trends, Ukrainian curators and video artists in the 1990s, with lack of exhibition space at the time, invented unique methods of video projection demonstrations. Experiments with video installation expanded the use of various video art forms in connection with modern and traditional art, thanks to which Ukrainian video art is currently in progress of development, catching up with world trends.
The analysis of numerous samples of video works, the use of video equipment technology, television equipment, and the properties of the moving image, speaks of a special Ukrainian way of developing video art. In accordance with the theoretical concepts of media art researcher S. Cubbitt, who considered the evolution from amateur video to computer graphics where video is a synthetic form of media art, the dissertation rethought and highlighted the factors of rapid transformations of visual
space in the Ukrainian video art development context.
The appearance of a new artistic tool – a portable video camera – has given Ukrainian artists interest in creating autonomous video recordings, documentation of their artistic activity, video recording of artistic manifestations from actionism to performative practices, collective actions and happenings to experiment in the field of new visuality. We emphasize the difference in video art representation, which depends on the techniques and means of video creation, so it is important to separate the features, methods of obtaining and demonstrating a moving image video. Highlighting the self-sufficiency of video in both original and montage formats is an important development in distinguishing video art from media art, which uses the entire range of modern computer programming achievements to integrate itself into the concept of "New Media Art". The introduction of Zoya Alforova, Doctor of Art Studies, to the concept of "transimage" (combination of video, computer and television image), also defines the moving image's digital nature, which influenced the emergence of new artistic forms of video art, when an active process of synthesis of various arts in combination with video installation, interactive video with object installations, etc., took place.
Key words: video art, Ukrainian video art, Kharkiv art school, Kharkiv School of video art, SOSka group, immersion, interactive, moving picture, video practices, video installation, video documentation, Contemporary Ukrainian art, media art, postmodernism, new media art, artistic practices, audiovisual art.
