How peter campus Changed the Video Art Game

A major work of video art is turning 50 this year: “Three Transitions”(1973) by peter campus is now on view at Cristin Tierney Gallery for its monumental anniversary. The early 1970s marked a pivotal moment in the development of video art, as many of its key practitioners — including campus himself — began experimenting with the medium. Just as the invention of lightweight, portable film cameras revolutionized photography in the 1920s, mobile video cameras increasingly allowed for an entirely new way of accessing the moving image a half-century later. For the first time in history, human beings could see themselves instantly reflected in motion on screen, giving early video pioneers new tools with which to push the limits of self-representation. campus, like many of these artists, used this new technology to blur the distinction between subject and object, viewer and observer, in a way that has rippled forward into our own era.