FAIR PLAY 2005 Video Art Festival have winners!
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VIDEO IS OLDER THAN PAINTING.

Prehistoric graffiti on the walls of caves were definitely not paintings or photographs. They were the first attempt at video. A prehistoric hunter could not think of ‘framing’ or ‘freezing’ an image, but instead he wanted to convey action. Prehistoric graffiti was the first attempt at television.

Everything is always new and yet somehow always old in the current explosion of historical re-elaborations, whereby the only real struggle is that of representation itself. Perhaps humankind has to represent itself and its world because is afraid of the void. Video could fill man's "black hole" if only it can remain truthful in the battle between the two sides. If it can’t, mankind will make this void wider, through boredom and fear.

Today it is not easy to catch up, especially with video. Previously there was film, then came video, and now there is HD digital and even high quality video available on the Internet. In many ways, videotape has already become a thing of the past.

Lately, film has been suffering from a lack of ideas, not least evinced by the Hollywood film industry, which has become similar to a Play Station, trying to make people believe they are heroes. Fortunately, video art is increasingly being presented in cinemas, at film festivals and at many other events related to the film industry. Lots of artists aspire to making real movies (Chris Cunningham, Christian Jankowsky and Daria Martin, to name just a few). Some of them succeed, such as Matthew Barney and Julian Schnabel. Even when they are presented in festivals or in theaters, the public treats these films as genuine 'films.’ Indeed, they are films, but they have that connection to the artist's world that still remains poetic and personal (sometimes naïve, sometimes psychedelic), which is something that many mainstream movies don't have because their aim is to satisfy the desires of the masses.

And what counts is the public, so that's why Play. Gallery for still and motion pictures has organized FAIRPLAY — a video art festival. The gallery deals with new frontiers within video art experimentation, and following the big success they had in 2003, PLAY is proud to give you a month of young video art from all over the world.

So now let's go back to the cave and please forget any allegory because this isn't Plato's cave...

This is for real, this is back to basics...No city's Graffiti Abatement Program can wash away the walls.
No one will stop video.
The videohunters are coming.
The videohunters are coming at PLAY in Berlin by the wall

Gea Politi