Watch out! is a good slogan for the encounter of contemporary art. In the rarest cases, caution is truly required, but works of art increasingly demand from us a comprehensive attentiveness. Especially in the case of art that operates with technological media and reflects on the mediazation of society, it is important to pay attention to the surrounding, overwhelming wealth of news, opinions, fake reports, entertainments, and ceaseless self-promotion. It is tempting to take advantage of the ease everyday technological equipment offers everyone to produce and disseminate one’s own video images. More than ever, videos have become an international language of communication, a medium for finding identity and for interaction. Despite or precisely because of this do-it-yourself mentality, artists are challenged to counter the pragmatism of today’s video distribution with an artistic language of the moving image, to respond to it, and to create surroundings for circumspect perception. Ever since its emergence a good fifty years ago, media art has reflected critically on the aesthetic, technological, economic, and sociopolitical conditions of media society. Watch out! thus means that viewing deserves our undivided attention.
