What is a Scratch Video?

The Scratch Video technique was founded in the early to mid 1980s. It was a form of British Art Movement and was characterised by the use of found footage, fast cutting and multi-layered rhythms. Scratch Video arose in opposition to broadcast TV, as anti-artists attempted to deal critically and directly with the impact of mass communications. Most of the work was politically radical, often containing images of a sexual or violent nature, and using images appropriate for mainstream media.

Two very famous scratch video artists, Rik Lander and Peter Boyd MaClean, who are also known as The Duvet Brothers, are the creators of one of the world's most famous scratch video. This video gives a great insight into it's chosen topic and it gave myself and Scott a lot of inspiration as to how we would edit ours together. Short, snappy clips with low quality.

If television was our shop window on the world, scratch has just chucked a brick through it, and is busy looting 30 years of goodies with abandon. - Andy Lipman, City Limits. 5th October 1984.

Scratch video establishes a radical new approach to television itself. It abandons the idea that TV images are mere representations of what’s real. It starts to disassemble the images themselves by indulging in orgies of editing. In a sense scratch is the epitome of what professional broadcasters would call irresponsible television.' - Benjamin Woolley, The Listener. 14th September 1986.

Cheerio. :o)

 - Olivia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_video - accessed on 4th-March-2014