Over the last four decades video art has undergone numerous transformations. If in its early years, during the mid sixties, video was used by artists to record performances created in an isolated studio, it also offered an important creative environment which defined new spaces and an alternative language to the mass codes used by television. In the `80s video took on the form of a projected image that was capable of defining a totally new type of space inside which spectators could move while surrounded by a hypnotic electronic embrace. More recently with digital technology artists can compete with the magic of cinema and develop a singularly fertile exchange with it that has been fundamental in developing the poetic language of video works today.