Video: Latin, verb: “see, behold, understand.” This course is a survey of the history of video by artists. The course examines video as a technology and a medium, as a category of electronic devices and a modality of aesthetic experimentation. Chronological in structure and international in scope, the course engages historical and cultural contexts in which video is a primary component, from the 1960s to the present, from the Portapak to the internet. The course addresses the material and social conditions of video art alongside contemporaneous events in film history and theory, as well as developments in art and media history such as fluxus, neo-dada, minimalism, conceptual art, performance art, and installation art. The course provides a comprehensive engagement with the diverse purposes for which video was used by artists. Select case studies include: television as sculpture in the work Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell; alternative media production collectives and centers such as TVTV, the Raindance Corporation, the Experimental Television Center, and the Emergency Broadcast Network; performer-spectator relations in the work of Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Chris Burden; closed-circuit installations by Bruce Nauman and Peter Campus; discourses of theater in the work of William Wegman and Tony Oursler; feminist critiques of representation by Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, and Martha Rosler; artists’ use of computer generated images and effects from Steina and Woody Vasulka to Pierre Huyghe; analytic video essays by Todd Haynes, Marlon Riggs, Jean-Luc Godard, and Harun Farocki; Hito Steyerl and discourses of surveillance; and techniques of appropriation in the work of Peggy Ahwesh, Arthur Jafa, and Sondra Perry.