A large number of video tapes were produced in Geneva in these early years, the majority by former students of the Médias Mixtes studio, run by Silvie and Chérif Defraoui at the Visual Arts School. In this way, artists such as Marie José Burki, Eric Lanz, Patrice Baizet or Simon Lamunière produced several works at Saint-Gervais. These films were also contractually the property of the Video Department which accumulated them without making any precise use of them.

In addition, a new International Video Week was held every two years; the second in 1987 secured and focussed its objective by choosing a theme, "Writing and video" which was to direct all the choices except that of the competition; two retrospectives, of Gary Hill and Marcel Odenbach, were arranged, a seminar run by Raymond Bellour and Philippe Dubois covered the theme in minute detail by analysing films sequence by sequence; finally, an exhibition of video installations entitled Cinq pièces avec vue (Five Rooms with a View) (Gerd Belz (Germany), Silvie and Chérif Defraoui (Switzerland), Gary Hill (USA), Jacques-Louis Nyst (Belgium) and Marcel Odenbach (Germany)) was arranged in conjunction with the Geneva contemporary engraving centre. By the end of this Week, all of Gary Hill's films had been acquired for the collection. In 1989, the third IVW focussed on the relationship between analog and digital; the retrospective was devoted to Steina and Woody Vasulka; the complete set of the films of these two artists was also acquired for the collection.

André Iten had managed to collect a fairly extensive, but also rather heterogeneous, corpus of works; the prize-winning films in the IVW competitions were also part of the collection. The third IVW had generated considerable energy in rather lively debates between the optimists in favour of total digital and the dubious still loyal to analog; it had also evidenced the existence of really artistic work in the information technology field. From that moment in time, it became evident that the Video Department and the Information Technology Department of Saint-Gervais were to amalgamate to form one single department, called the Electronic Arts and Medias Department. The word art did not make its appearance by pure chance; it had also seemed increasingly evident in the various IVWs and other programmes shown, that the really interesting aspect of video and computer graphics lay on the art side; everything was redirected along these lines and from that time on, Saint-Gervais was only to offer its production studios to projects considered to be of sufficient artistic interest. It was also at that moment that video art began to lose its specificity; first of all, a number of artists began to produce mixed works, which used both information technology, photos or video; there were more and more installations, partly because hitherto fragile projectors at prohibitive prices which had limited their utilisation had now become reliable. In 1992, Kassel's documenta for the first time in its history extended its scope to include video artists (Bill Viola, Gary Hill amongst others) whose works made a deep impression on the audience. The previous year an exhibition Passages de l'image (Passage of the image) had been held in Paris, at the Georges Pompidou Centre, with a theme based on the mixture of techniques in the artistic.
In this context of discernible change everywhere, one particular project was to strengthen the conviction in the Electronic Arts and Medias Department that a collection of artists' videos was a necessity, almost a memory resource obligation: Les pionniers de la vidéo en Suisse (The pioneers of Swiss video). Thanks to chance encounters, particularly his meeting with the Swiss artist Jean Otth who had been one of the first to work with video in the early Seventies, André Iten realised that an element of the Swiss artistic heritage was in danger of being quite simply forgotten; the majority of the films made by artists in the Sixties and Seventies urgently needed restoring, archiving and cataloguing. René Berger, a former Lausanne University professor and the former curator of the Decorative Arts Museum in that town had been the theoretical driving force behind video creation in French-speaking Switzerland in the Seventies; he backed and encouraged André Iten in the steps he took to rescue the works of the Pioneers. After close to two years' research, viewing and surveys, in 1990, the Electronic Arts and Medias Department presented a historic programme entitled Les pionniers de la vidéo en Suisse (the pioneers of Swiss video) which was the visible part of a vast rescue plan, not only involving Saint-Gervais, but also the City of Geneva municipal contemporary art collection which financed the operation. This project revealed the cultural and artistic wealth represented by a collection of video works, to the same extent as any other collection. Such a collection would be revitalised by means of storage methods and availability to the public, made possible by technical developments. From that point in time, the Media library concept took shape: collecting of artists' video works and, as a priority, set up a Swiss video Archive by favouring the acquisition of full sets of the works of some artists, such as Alexander Hahn, Hans-Peter Amman or Anna Winteler, for example. The completion of sets already constituted during retrospectives by the gradual acquisition of new films by major video artists (Bill Viola, Gary Hill, William Wegman); the purchase of films by young artists which renew the ventures and forms of video creation (Serge Comte, Sadie Benning). And, above all, open up the collection to the general public. Since 1991, it has been possible, by appointment, to consult all the works in the collection quite freely in a specially equipped room.

In the early Nineties, the Saint-Gervais Geneva Electronic Arts and Medias Department Media Library had 150 films. Today it has 850. The acquisition policy has been very dynamic but has always kept within the initial guidelines, that is to foster acquisition of full sets of works by the same artist and to seek out new, original works.

By the mid-Nineties, the Media library also included CD-roms made by artists because it was becoming increasingly obvious that video is a technique which can be mixed with others to create works of a new type. The Electronic Arts and Medias Department computer graphics studio has produced a certain number of artistic works, either on CD-rom, or quite simply on diskette or, in a more sophisticated way in the form of Internet projects (Jean-Louis Boissier, Horacio Zabala, Huber / Pocok / Wenz / Noll).

The swift development of information technology and the ever increasing number of young artists using digital image and sound were the basis of André Iten's idea in 1994 to set up a new structure at Saint-Gervais that he envisaged as being a centre for all forms of the contemporary image. After ten years of activity, André Iten felt the need to structure all the facets of his artistic commitments into one particular entity, combining all the activities linked to the image at Saint-Gervais; after months of political negotiation, the Contemporary image centre officially saw the light of day on 1^st January 1998. It has production studios (photography, video, computer graphics), two exhibition rooms, one viewing room, the Media library and an Internet site. The Centre is a multi-purpose entity which is perfectly capable of accommodating artists while filming (Soba, 1998), putting on contemporary art exhibitions (Gary Hill, Gabriel Orozco, Eija-Liisa Ahtila), cycles of films and artists' videos (Skip Arnold, Henry Hills), or helping artists to create special projects for Internet (Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker). The Centre's internal technical possibilities mean that projects can be carried through from start to finish, from the writing stage to performance, from design to exhibition. At the centre of the Centre, the Media library is a memory resource and an instrument of work.

The Contemporary Image Centre's Internet site, http://www.sgg.ch set up in 1996 has, from the outset, been a site which not only provides information on the activities of the Centre but, above all, shows the works of artists, in the same way as other sites such as adaweb or The Thing; and they are numerous and interesting those who today have chosen Internet to produce their artistic work and make it exist. An example of this - the Centre co-produced the documenta X 1997 site, through Simon Lamunière, Exhibitions Manager at the Centre and curator of the documenta site. Several of the works produced on this occasion can be found on http://www.sgg.ch , such as Muntadas' piece, On Translation. Today, within the framework of its exhibitions, the Centre regularly proposes unpublished works on its site, the archives of which are in a certain way an integral part of the Media library.
In the future, the Media library is going to develop in two main directions: it will continue to constitute sets, particularly the works of certain major video artists and expand the CD-rom collection. Swiss artists will continue to be favoured and a systematic purchasing policy has been instituted in conjunction with the City of Geneva municipal contemporary art collection. In addition, the Contemporary image centre is part of the Memoriav association whose objective is to safeguard the Swiss audio-visual heritage. This long-term project adds a more documentary aspect to Media library acquisitions.
The Contemporary image centre Media library now houses the largest video collection in Switzerland and, on a European level, it plays a very special role due to its accessibility efforts, the most recent of which, and not the very least, is the current New Media Encyclopaedia.

Lysianne Léchot Hirt