The Oculus Shift

Before Sony released the Portapak portable video camera in 1967, artists looking to create art out of “moving pictures” had to either purchase costly 8mm/16mm film or gain access to immobile, prohibitively expensive TV studio cameras. Early Portapak adopters like new media art godfather Nam June Paik led the charge to turn video into a respected art form, and video art collectives such as TVTV and Videofreex created subversive video works for pirate broadcast networks. The Portapak’s launch was timely in the art world, too. Performance art had just found its cultural footing and many artists sought to document their work or to eliminate the need for sanctioned performance spaces. Many early video artworks are actually documents of performance art as much as they are video art.

Throughout history, there’s been a correlation between the accessibility of creative tools and an increase in the use of those tools to create art. The Portapak can be almost singlehandedly credited with spurring artists to experiment with video—just as, now, the proliferation of the Oculus Rift has turned virtual reality into an accessible artistic medium. There’s no telling if the Oculus Rift will truly assume the first camcorder’s mantle as a launchpad for countercultural programming, but the more artists that can get their hands on the Rift and think outside of traditional gaming conceits, the more likely it is that VR will become a viable medium for expression.