This medium’s history keeps repeating one pattern: artists play inside a new system, use that play to interrogate the corporations and platforms absorbing it, then keep living inside the resulting condition long after the technology stops feeling new. Video ran that cycle from broadcast through the internet, and is running it again now with generative systems. Students test the cycle firsthand across four assignments: the vulnerability of early single-channel confessions, tested through the supercut and the seamless loop; questions of gender, power, and networked identity as video moved into broadcast and surveillance, tested through a portrait assignment; the absorption of video into the internet itself, from webcam performance to algorithmic curation, tested through a found-object assignment that reframes footage already circulating online; and, in a return to origins, one minute of labor recorded in a single unbroken shot, no cuts, no staging, no narration, no model in between. That absorption did not stop with the internet. The same pattern is now running again with generative systems, where a dataset or a model becomes less a tool than a collaborator, a post-AI condition rather than a clean break from what came before. What does an unedited shot still reveal, now that a century of editing and a decade of generative systems have both found new ways to obscure it?