[Texto disponible solo en inglés] "Video art, perhaps, was born with Fontana, who was already talking about the importance of tools such as television and lasers for contemporary art in 1952. He talked about the idea of the relationship between art and science. We are, therefore, ten years before the official year of birth.


In the mid-1960s, however, there were artists who explored the world of electronic images and sounds with a very high awareness of cinema, photography, creative television and contemporary art.


These artists found in the new electronic media a possibility of new expressive languages, very different from the previous ones. The story of what should not be called “video art” but “electronic arts” was born this way. From this, then, the ambivalence of the word “art” emerges. Art that means manufacture (craft, workmanship), but also practice. Indeed, art is the construction of new languages, but also a material practice. It is a field that goes from the great audiovisual art, able to invent things never seen before, to practices such as the case of video mapping.


However, we must be aware of the fact that video art is not only a technological fact but also a relationship between languages, even the previous ones. Industry and web owners are interested in people using these tools in an irresponsible and consumerist way, without deepening their communicative and aesthetic use.


Since the mid-1960s, artists have a different idea, focusing on learning awareness. As a philosopher said, the illiterate of the future is not who does not know the language but who does not know photography and television languages.


It is also for this last aspect that Gazzano emphasizes the importance of the duty to preserve the audiovisual heritage. "What is lacking in Italy is a political and institutional reality that can catalog these works, tell this history, make it available to the public the same way it does with the material archaeological heritage. It is an heritage that must be preserved for the future."