The history of avante-garde film and video, ranging from Cezanne and dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British video artists in the 1990s.

Covers the period from the early 1960s -- when video art first appeared as a distinctive medium -- into the 1990s, when digital technology merged video's distinctive practice with that of independent film-making and photography. This artistic history is also a technological and a cultural history that sets its analysis of artistic practice firmly within the context of both the development of electronic imaging technology and the changing political and social climate.