Early video art was characterized by experimenting with the possibilities of the new technology. Artists used video technology to extract, collage, and manipulate images and thus create a new visual idiom. But it was never just about the level of image processing but always also about the question of the effects increasing technologizing could have on future social developments.

Since the first Videonale in 1984, the constant technological development has clearly been reflected in the videos submitted to the festival. Whereas in the early video work of Bernd Kracke virtual reality was still an analog dream of a distant future, and in the work of Mateusz Sadowski the still clearly outlined real and virtual worlds flow together, in Stefan Panhans’s Freeroam À Rebours the boundaries between human being, avatar, and machine have already largely vanished in the world of gaming. What can in mean in the future when the boundaries shift even more in the direction of an increasingly realistic form of virtuality?