Unfamiliarity and difference: The challenges of supporting arts activity in a new medium

Video technology had a relatively brief lifespan, but like digital it was once a new media technology. This article revisits the newness of video in the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the challenges it posed for supporting and promoting video art in Britain – including developing and funding a video infrastructure, creating an identity for video art and sustaining a video specific identity in the face of technological and social change. Aspects of this history resonate with the more recent history of digital technology and the article concludes that video can be understood as digital’s forerunner.