The Tuscan town of Vinci, birthplace of Leonardo and home to a museum of his machines, should fittingly put on a show of the television-robot sculptures of Nam Jun Paik. This Korean-born American artist and the Renaissance master are kindred spirits: Leonardo saw humanistic potential in his scientific experiments, Mr. Paik endeavors to harness media technology for artistic purposes. A pioneer of video art in the late 1960s, he treats television as a space for art images and as material for robots and interactive sculptures. Mr. Paik was not alone. He and fellow artists picked on the video cameras because they offered an easy way to record their performance art. Now, to mark video art's coming of age, New York's Museum of Modern Art is looking back at their efforts in a film series called 'The First Decade'. It celebrates the early days of video by screening the archives of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world's leading distributors of video and new media art, founded 30 years ago. One of EAI's most famous alumni is Bill Viola. Part of the second generation of video artists, who emerged in the 1970s, Mr. Viola experimented with video's expressive potential. His camera explores religious ritual and universal ideas. The Viola show at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin shows us moving-image frescoes that cover the gallery walls and envelop the viewer in all-embracing cycles of life and death. One new star is a Californian, Doug Aitken, who took over London's Serpentine Gallery last October with an installation called 'New Ocean'. Some say Mr. Aitken is to video what Jackson Pollock was to painting. He drips his images from floor to ceiling, creating sequences of rooms in which the Space surrounds the viewer in hallucinatory images, of sound and light. At the Serpentine, Mr. Aitken created a collage of moving images, on the theme of water's flow around the planet as a force of life. 'I wanted to create a new topography in this work, a liquid image, to show a world that never stands still', he says. The boundary between the physical world and the world of images and information, he thinks, is blurring. The interplay of illusion and reality, sound and image, references to art history, politics, film and television in this art form. that is barely 30 years old can make video art difficult to define. Many call it film-based or moving-image art to include artists who work with other cinematic media. At its best, the appeal of video art lies in its versatility, its power to capture the passing of time and on its ability to communicate both inside and outside gallery walls. The birthplace of Leonardo is mentioned in the text ______.