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balance and amalgamation of differences, their common sources are not directly to be perceived.»[31]
Our possibilities of perception in the media are dependent on the state of media technology. This influence on our visual habits, molded by experience and technology, is also emphasized by Dieter Kiessling in his installation «Pendelnder Fernseher» (1983). Usual relationships of representation are here apparently reversed. In a feedback situation between camera and monitor, which displays its technical construction quite openly, he poses riddles on the mechanics of perception. In order to understand what he or she is seeing, the observer must confront both the difference and the mutual dependence between the physical situation and its media depiction.
Our visual habits change analogously with the technical alteration of the media of reproduction. Besides the real time playback possibilities it offers, video's meaning for the changed perception of the world is based in the possibility of real-time manipulation, allowing an intervention in the image already during recording. The
interest in the direct manipulability of images and thus in the visual interpretation and production of the world has challenged various artists to a series of technical experiments and inventions.
With his video «Artifacts» (1980), Woody Vasulka systematically summarizes the results of his experimental studies and presents the vocabulary developed in the process. Here, the foundation of these studies of video technology is no longer the image as a whole, but a half-image as a structuring unity. Seen from the standpoint of current visual habits, themselves based on a constantly improving technological foundation, the revolutionary character of these images only becomes clear in a historical context. By developing electronic image tools and using these technologies, Woody Vasulka, often together with Steina Vasulka, has been developing technologically and aesthetically new kinds of forms of digital image production and manipulation since the 1970s.[32] In part, these anticipate an electronic image language that ten years later is part of everyday television. Often, these developments would emerge in collaboration with engineers and technicians.