Because understanding the present requires an awareness of the past, this discussion considers the broad development of abstract motion pictures over the course of the twentieth century. Within this larger history, it is possible to identify three distinct phases to the emergence and consolidation of abstraction as a specific genre of animation.
The definition of video art as a distinct medium, apart from both experimental film and television was a central topic of theoretical and critical concern during the early years of video arts existence; of greatest importance to these first writers on video was the ways it differed from televisionmuch more than the relationship it had with the avant-garde film community, many of whom had shifted from film to video as lower cost cameras and video tape recorders became readily available.
Len Lye (1901 1980) worked as an animator, then as a director of newsreels for the March of Time from 1946 to 51, and finally as a kinetic artist; within the history of motion graphics he occupies an unusual position: even though he had informal training as a painter and worked with various types of sound-image synchronization in abstract film, these works exhibit a distinct conception of abstraction as a kinetic art, rather than an art constructed upon a musical analogy as was typical for the other artists drawn to create abstract motion pictures during the first phase of their history. This emphasis appears in his theorizing shortly after his first hand painted film had achieved a wide-spread critical success in Europe. Writing with a collaborator, Laura Riding, in 1935 for the essay Film-making, Lye proposes a tentative framework to think about motion as form:
