Scratch video: analogue herald of remix culture

Scratch Video's roots lie in rapidly emerging analog media technology developments of the late 1970s in both the audio and video industries, and in the DIY music cultures which developed around these technologies. With close affiliations to the post-punk and industrial music scenes, Scratch Video's influences lie as much in the critical and contextual histories of music as they do in media and art. In its methods and techniques of composition, for visual effect and affect, it emphasized the blend and the fold in its remixing of televisual cultures and in so doing created new forms of audiovisual aesthetic, challenged copyright law and anticipated digital, Internet, mashup, plunderphonic and remix cultures yet to come. Releasing the latent kinaesthetic and synaesthetic power of its source material, Scratch Video follows the imperatives of music, disengaging with linguistic models of meaning in favour of an intensification of affect.