As the legend would have it, the Korean-born artist Nam June Paik, who died on Jan. 29th at the age of 73, invented video art in 1965 when he bought an early Sony Portapak video camera and turned it on Pope Paul VIs motorcade, which was making its way down New Yorks Fifth Avenue.

The footage was shot from a cab and shown later that night at Café au Go-Go.

But while this creation myth obscures lesser-known figures, such as Wolf Vostell and the Vasulkas, it accurately points to Paik as the person who turned the nascent technology of video into an art form.

Paik was the first artist to bring video into the visual arts in a real way, says Kjell Bjørgeengen, a Norwegian artist whose own video work has been exhibited around the globe since the early 1970s.

He definitively integrated a new medium into art, adding the television signal to the already complex mix of influences at the time, says the Oslo-based artist whose work, currently on view at Berlins Neue Gesellschaft für bildende kunst, focuses on processing and using video signal as content.

If he established the category of video art or not, Im not sure, but then again, Im not sure if its a category anyway, Bjørgeengen jokes.

Merging the new technology of video with the conceptual postures of 1970s art, Paik inserted the medium into performances and used television monitors as sculptural objects.

While previous artists had worked with electronically manipulated film, Paik took TV sets and ordinary objects and reconfigured them as video installations, creating now canonical work such as TV Garden. In the process, he became one of the early creators of new-media arts aesthetic history, along with such artists as Joan Jonas, Peter Weibel and Gary Hill.

Yet anyone whos seen work by emerging video artists today knows just how much the idiom Paik founded has changed. While he focused on the formal and installation aspects of videosuch as altering signals and stacking televisionsmany of todays video artists focus on cinematic elements instead.

Video art has really expanded in the last 20 years, says San Franciscobased video artist Anthony Discenza. This includes a move toward a kind of cinema space.

Discenza uses complex processing to condense and transmute appropriated images. Creating works in which the viewer can come in at any point, because the image is there all at once, yet changing all the time, he relates video to more traditional mediums like painting.

His new work, BackScatter, currently on view in a group show at his West Coast gallery, Catherine Clark in San Francisco, is a fragmented fossil of CNNs coverage of the first week of the Iraq War, compressed into 10 minutes.

While Discenzas work forgoes narrative, the artist notes that the rapid sophistication of video technology is driving a shift today toward more story-driven kinds of video art.

What people could or couldnt doand for a long time it was what they couldnt do [from a technological perspective]strongly affected the way artists worked with electronic images in the past. The limitations used to be part of the aesthetic, Discenza explains. Since you couldnt easily edit material, duration became a big part of early video work, for example.

The sophistication of the tools people now have at their disposal represents a big shift from when Paik rushed out to buy one of the first PortaPaks, he adds.

Artist John Baldessari once suggested that video wouldn't come into its own until artists could use it like a pencil. Todays technology seems to be making that the case.

Unlike the clunky portable cameras used by early pioneers like Paik, todays technology at the consumer level includes high-definition video, which provides for cinema-quality images. And sophisticated editing can now be done on a home computer.

As a result, a lot of contemporary video piecesshown in dark rooms, sometimes with arranged seatingare more like films than descendants of Paiks playful environments.

This, along with the focus on storytelling, makes it seem as if a lot of video art today has diverged away from Paiks influence and has shifted toward co-opting the legacy of avant-garde cinema (the upcoming Whitney Biennial, opening March 2, includes seminal experimental filmmakers, including Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger.)