Grayscale video and the shift to color

Abstract

As Paul Simon once sang, “Everything looks worse in black and white.” Metaphorically speaking, at least, I have to agree. When we begin the process of working through a significant artistic change like the movement from grayscale to color in artists’ video works, there is an overambitious temptation to speak in terms of the relations among technology, art practice, institutional policies, and critical discourse for a period of more than a decade. There, in black and white, is the problem. There is simply too much data We also believe that the significant change was the move from analogue to digital video cameras and editing. But as Marshall McLuhan skips over the shift from volumen to codex in the rush to printing, so media-art historians risk missing an essential step in the race to computer generated imaging. The solution in black and white: monochrome, and the arrival of color.