“On Video and Media Arts”

A Reinterpretation of Néstor Olhagaray’s Work from a Peircean Semiotic Perspective

Abstract

This article proposes a reinterpretation of Néstor Olhagaray’s book On Video and Media Arts through the lens of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics, with the aim of examining the processes of signification that underpin media art. Drawing on the chapter Digital Video, it analyzes video art as a processual and interactive practice embedded within an open semiosis. In Reflections on Video and Videographers, the artist’s internal creative process is addressed, along with video as a symbolic language that articulates body, memory, and experience. Finally, Memories allows us to understand Olhagaray’s career as a network of signs where life, culture, and technique are configured as semiotic mediations, positioning media art as a space for the production of meaning and symbolic resistance.