Sean Cubitt hypothesizes that video art is a contradictory term in the age of electronics (versus western tradition) and mechanical reproduction, where the discourse of authorship and artistic creation by art theorists have excluded video's relevance to filmic analysis. Cubitt undertakes formal and theoretical analysis of 1980s video art to articulate how marginalized ethnic demographics can represent themselves. Cubitt's structural criticism of minority-produced films illustrates the epistemological shifts experienced by ethnic cultural producers' interpretation of colonial discourses of difference and power dynamics.

Cubitt also criticizes video art theorists for overt centralization critics on Western paradigm of theoretical implementation in video criticism; he concludes that the postmodern condition exacerbates this model in the video medium's aesthetic domain.