With the advent of cinema in the early 20th century, artists began to experiment with this new temporal dimension, integrating film into image-making. From the 1960s onwards, the evolving social functions and technological advancements of film propelled the moving image into a prominent position, making it a medium of choice for many artists.
Before its widespread adoption, the illusion of movement produced by artificial light sources was a familiar experience when viewing still images. Perhaps Paleolithic cave painters intentionally exploited the flickering effects of firelight in dark caves, causing animal figures to appear to move across uneven rock surfaces. In the late 19th century, European artists were captivated by both paintings conveying the rhythm of modern life and static photographic images. Movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and early photographic experimentation each gradually developed unique visual idioms to represent time. Kinetic art emerged from this conceptual lineage, and cinema offered an even more compelling medium. Its underlying artistic techniques, which create visual effects, were closer to a painter's vision and were clearly in harmony with the social spirit of the era.
Unlike painting and sculpture, the moving image did not need to be adapted for contemporary sensibilities, as it was inherently a product of its time. It readily captured the rapidly changing zeitgeist. In the 1920s and 30s, artists created films that often arose from serendipitous visual discoveries, yielding a range of remarkably experimental results. Fernand Léger's Ballet Mécanique (1924) was described as "the first film without a plot," establishing a defining paradigm for artist films that would later contrast with both video art and mainstream entertainment.
Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma (1926) further combined linguistic and visual concepts, featuring rotating discs with poetic phrases and abstract designs, characteristic of Dadaist aesthetics. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel's collaborative film Un Chien Andalou (1929) exemplified Surrealism, presenting a meticulously crafted vision of the subconscious. In 1935, the British Post Office commissioned Len Lye's Colour Box, an animated film created by directly painting on film stock, which aimed to liberate animation from traditional narrative constraints and forge closer ties between cinema, popular culture, and commerce. Andy Warhol's Sleep (1963) was a single-shot film, nearly five and a half hours long, depicting a friend sleeping.
By manipulating and editing versions of reality constructed for film, artists sought to avoid traces of artificiality. Whether to minimally adapt filmed events is one approach used to differentiate art films (as opposed to commercial productions) from documentaries. The introduction of portable image-generating devices into domestic life meant that television added a new dimension to moving image art. Although broadcast television often differed significantly from artists' electronic media works, both shared the common viewing medium of the television set. From the mid-1960s, Korean-American video artist Nam June Paik experimented with video recordings and television sets, notably in works like TV Cello (1969) and TV Garden (1974–1978). By the 1970s, video became a primary medium for Conceptual Art, often used to document performance works. Examples include Bruce Nauman's Walk with Contrapposto (1968), a performance recorded on video, or Bill Viola's ritualistic and slow-motion studies of flowing and changing states. Without the moving image, such a transformation would have been impossible to a certain extent. From the 1990s onwards, digital technology made moving images almost as ubiquitous as still photography. Contemporaneously, artists' moving images often revisited earlier film projection technologies; the audible "whirring" sound emphasized the mechanical ballet-like nature of the moving image.
