The video art practices that emerged in French-speaking Switzerland at the end of the 1960s rapidly made inroads into galleries and museums. Some years previously, artists in the United States had already placed their video practices within a broader context. In this article, I shall explore the permeability of and differences between artistic and aesthetic uses of video and communication strategies which both demand social involvement and employ different distribution channels. I shall examine the dominant history of video art as production largely centered in the United States and set it against a more minor, local history. I shall focus on two essential questions. How did video art emerge in French-speaking Switzerland, a distinct cultural and geographical area, and to what extent did it displace what had been created in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe, in the late 1960s? To what extent do video practices tend to define and re-articulate the conditions of the aesthetic experience in the course of their development?