[2] Scratch video arose in opposition to broadcast television, as (anti-)artists attempted to deal critically and directly with the impact of mass communications.
The primary audience for scratch video in the early to mid-1980s, was in nightclub performances by industrial music bands such as The Anti-Group, Cabaret Voltaire, Nocturnal Emissions, Psychic TV, SPK, Test Dept, and Autopsia.
Scratch video is a rather catch-all category of work which derive from popular dance and music fashions and the cutting of found trash images with it.
Its long history begins with the cubist collages of Picasso and Braque, the 'ready-mades' of Duchamp, and passes through Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs and Anthony Balch cut-ups.
Certainly when we saw the work of Kim Flitcroft and Sandra Goldbacher, George Barber and Gorilla Tapes it was uncanny that so many people had been experimenting in the same area without knowing that the others existed.