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In order to understand the concepts and prac-tice of electronic video image processing, it may be helpful to first explore the more general term "video art." Artists began to intensively inves-tigate the medium of video when the first porta-ble recording systems began to appear on the commercial market in the late 1960s . For the past fifteen years, video artists have been producing works which have helped to extend many of the important notions of contemporary art. They have investigated and expanded performance, conceptual, narrative, documentary, formalist, and experimental art traditions. The term "video art" helps to communicate the intention of the maker and establishes the context within which the work is to be viewed . The term reinforces the use of video as a means of creation and expression. It refers to the medium with which the art is created, but makes a distinction between the medium of video and that of televi-sion . The emphasis is on video as a productive medium ; broadcast television is only one of the many possible avenues of distribution of the work . Art tapes can be displayed using broadcast technology, but can also be screened in closed-circuit situations in museums or at home . The proliferation of alternative technologies like cable, satellite, video disc, and Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) all make possible a more focused definition of the intended audience and offer a certain amount of viewer control over the material being screened . The term "video art" places emphasis on the idea of video as a means of making art rather than on television as a means of transmitting art or, more generally, information . Electronic image processing uses as art-making material those properties inherent in the medium of video . Artists work at a fundamental level with various parameters of the electronic signal, for example frequency, amplitude, or phase, which actually define the resulting image and sound . The electronic tools are the instru-ments with which the signal is created and then altered . These signals carry the imagery in an SHERRY MILLER is Assistant Director of the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York . electronically coded form . These coded struc-tures are what the artist actually works with when creating an image-processed work . When these signals are decoded by a television monitor, the images and sound are displayed . Image processing can be thought of as a genre within video art. It shares many of the concerns of twentieth century art. It is a machine art, using new technologies in the making process ; it is an art created with and displayed on a machine. The process of creating video encompasses methods ranging from the artist controlling each device by hand to the artist specifying only a set of parameters within which the machine will then automatically function. The "art" can refer as much to the processes of making as to the "art object" which results. As image processing tools have evolved, each single frame or image can be specified in a very detailed manner, as can the transitions between moving images. Image pro-cessing can be a real-time medium, in which the making of images is a process of handcrafting at each moment ; the resulting tape can be thought of as a document of an activity or gesture per-formed . Using computers and analog audio con-trol systems like electronic music synthesizers, the specific images as well as more general struc-tures can be pre-programmed and are therefore repeatable . The computer programs or "patches" can be thought of as scores for the visual image . Image processing is an art which uses light as a plastic compositional medium to define and to display shape, color, and form . In the process of electronic imaging, video is understood to be a reproductive, camera-art medium as well as a generative medium . It is possible to create wholly synthetic images using such devices as oscillators or a computer . Camera-based images (literal or abstracted representationalism) can be combined with non-objective, purely formal, and geometrically-based imagery . In this sense the artist may use image processing techniques to interpret and to create a reality . Image processing involves the use of electronic tools which allow the artist to define changes within the parameters of the electronic signal .