'Art should not be different from life, but an act within life. Like all life, with its accidents and variety and disorder and only momentary beauty.'
-John Cage

In 1994 I participated in my first time based performance at The Kitchen in New York City with a video collective called 77Hertz. My job was to manipulate miniature sets in front of video cameras. I was responsible for dumping a carton of live giant ants on top of a plastic toy village. Instead of taking over the village as intended, the ants decided to disperse, run off their set and escape into the real world. The video mixers, camera people and musicians improvised as I frantically gathered the bugs back to plastic toy land. This was my entrance into media art and the beginning of a passion for live video performance.

By 1999 the video spectacle transformed into a circus of cameras, props, projection screens and cables with a performance trio called, The Poool (Eng, Nancy Meli Walker, Benton Bainbridge). My medium expanded from Hi-8 video camera to mini-DV format, tube and surveillance cameras. The Amiga was replaced by digital video mixers combined with the Fairlight and in-camera video effects. The 17-inch video monitor became multiple projection screens build within a set. Video artists rehearsed moving images and objects with the sound of improvised electronic and acoustic musicians. Everyone based their creative direction by a video score. Hence, the term, ‘video band’ was sometimes attributed to the group. Demystifying the process of cinema making was a parallel concept with the reoccuring theme of a fantastic voyage and/or an escape from reality.

Soon afterwards I changed my position from video juggler to video conductor. I traveled from place to place like a nomad, capturing experiences, sights, smells, shapes on tape. Movement became my focus.
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The fundamental difference between cinema and video lies in their respective treatment of time. Video is real time. The video artist can relate more to happenings, chance operations, action theatre which made efforts to demolish boundaries between art forms and practices. Random Adventures/Chance Operations (Duchamp, Cage) challenged the presumption that making art is active and viewing passive. Working in real time produces a chaos characteristic of nature which gives the artist an opportunity to create open ended structures.

'The very act of viewing a captured image creates a distance from the original event. The captured image becomes a relic of the past. Life is a moving target and any object that is isolated becomes history.'
Heisenberg's Theory

Experimental video tends to be an exploration of aspects of time unique to the medium- its instantaneousness, intimacy, immediacy, and simultaneity achieved through multiple cameras and monitors. With multiple views, the video performer offers a series of comparisons between different points of view of images to dislodge the spectator's habitual perceptions. This fragmentation or decomposition of events is common in performative video. Early performers, such as Joan Jonas and Dan Graham used video to de-synchronize vision and destablize the viewer.

'You only get the future by your memories of the past... in a certain kind of way... which you are constructing in present time.'
Dan Graham

Other trends include playing video using video synthesizers as an instrument treating rhythm and color. Like experimental film, early video broke away from established story-telling grammars. Use of edited repetition and juxtaposition to build pyschological parallels create a different visual structure.

Two prominent approaches to cinema split into two:

1) Platonic idealism in search of purity of form and idea
2) Aristotelian of how we go about doing things in the real world

Artists such as (Paik, Etra, Siegel, Vasulkas) approached video as a dialogue between tool and image. Whereas Ulrike Rosenbach's live video performance the spectator follows the video beginning and end of a temporal process to discover subtle details that kindle a sudden interest and create a revelation. Eventually, Post-structuralist cinema reconciled the two with its plasticity and interactivity of cinematic image-events made possible with the computer.

With computer programs such as, Max, QuickTime, MotionDive, Isadora, Octamed, etc. video artists are able to expand cinema with a marriage between image and sound. Artists working with sound, visual triggering and sampling are able to play cinema as one would play music.