Blue
1975 4:50 min
An electronic synthetic color video, based on a memory of Larry
Gottheim’s film “Blues”. Natural and electronic real time events, new
American electronic cinema. B&W video camera, Paik-Abe colorizer,
1/2” vtr, blue berries, bowl and milk. The filmmakers stopped talking to
me. Viva Video.
1-87
1976 4:35 min
Inspired by Ralph Hocking’s fish biting video. Eighty-seven
stones thrown, Volumes shifting of water sound, a real time performance
event. Holding the camera and throwing 87 stones into the frame. 1/2”
b&w reel to reel Sony portapack.
100 Sec. Lumination
1976 1:40 min
My first digital recording and my first and only recording with
Don McArthur’s “Spatial and Intensity Digitizer”. The digitizer was not
working properly. I had no idea. The shift I saw was stunning.
Digitalization of luminosity, strange notion, wonderful light and early
digital embodiment. Image / signal in digitized state / space, noise
field. I always thought of this to be 100 seconds of very beautiful
digital light noise.
Picture +/- Changes
1977 10:00 min
Electric chair. Chair and oscillator difference that is based on
the varying image light intensities from broadcast television
programing. 2 oscillators, b&w camera, David Jones keyer and
colorizer, Peer Bode (personally built) light intensity to control
voltage converter. You don't see the broadcast television program. You
only see the electric chair controlled by it.
Cup Mix (2 channels)
1977 10:47 min
A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration
ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed,
keyed + synthetic color, normal play and rewinding, sync events, the
opening of a space to put the self in. 1/2 inch b+w portapack, 2 reel to
reel videotape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer.
Front Hand Back Hand
1977 2:57 min
Actions, states, one B+W video camera, the Paik Abe Colorizer, a
video switcher. The two states, a b a b, I put my hand in the camera
frame and saw a colored hand shifting. I moved my, the, hand, including
back and forth, realizing or connecting to the visual and language
potential of front hand and back hand. Giving it some veracity the play
became attempting to keep up with the position changes together with
verbally reciting front hand back hand, co-coordinating from hand to
mouth and mouth to hand.
Apple(s)
1978 4:19 min
One apple, two b&w cameras, color burst, independently altered
time base, in a permutation sequence of keying normal and reverse,
camera one then camera two as key clip.
Vibratory Sweep
1978 2:50 min
A hand made raster deflection unit was used, inspired by Nam June
Paik’s video synthesizer system. I also used a TV repair person’s test
signal grid, early digital. Two b+w video cameras, audio oscillator
sweeping up and then down. More keying permutations. Video, oscillator,
keying, graphic timing buzzes.
Keying Distinctions
1978 3:30 min
Free floating sync, altered, drifting camera: video image and
time. Bricks, white noise video. Keying permutations, switching via
gray level values, using a modified b+w Sony special effects generator
(SEG). Building the building, one brick at a time. In video what is a
brick ? In spite of what was then a fierce cultural doxa, an
antimaterialist pressure, and being quite anti-anti-materialist I was
working hard to coax out significant features as expressive intensity
zones, electronic energy points always engaging with the signals.
Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap)
1978 5:00 min
Homage to Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge photo grid put into a
video system space. Movement is created by detuning the horizontal and
vertical video sychronization (time base) signal of the video camera.
Drift and horizontal doubling takes place. When the horizontal frequency
doubles the man doubles on top of himself. A para-cinema shutter
discovered by combining luminance keying of the video and sync signal
together with time base drifting. A basic video structure, sync and a
basic video process, keying, together create a video based
film-like
shutter, creating a crude persistance of vision system. Primitive
physical structures of the video signal, combined, bring Muybridge's
photogrid into an electronic animation of false movements. The small
muscles in my fingers are changing the speed of the Muybridge photogrid
movements. The overall time composition of the piece is a simple
structure of increased time display of the photogrid and decreased time
duration of the photogrid drifting. One postcard, two b&w cameras,
one screwdriver for time base detuning, fingers and video keying.
Ring Modulation
1978 7:47 min
Image states / sound states. A bell, hand held, ringing, two
oscillators each independently controlling a sync event- a red and blue
color together with sound and no sound state and a sweeping video clip,
together with audio filtering. Both oscillators sweep up incrementally
one after the other and then down. The visual and sound bell is immersed
in the electronic space / state. One b&w camera, two oscillators,
David Jones keyer and colorizer, audio filter. Vibratory spaces to live
in, calm and ecstatic.
Counting and Remapping 00-ff (partial disclosure)
1979 7:16 min
A table, a cup,a saucer, a typewriter, a hexadecimal number and
letter count. I am remembering a Hollis Frampton film, “Poetic Justice”.
In the “Counting and Remapping...” video the image is slowly
undulating from the magnetic deflection. This is a digital video
recording using a hand built analog to digital and digital to analog
converter with arithmatic logic unit. Design and built in collaboration
with David Jones. We were building the buffer together by hand. This was
the first stage, a to d and a d to a wth alu. No memory yet. We were
using an Elf 2 computer to control the real time digital video system.
We were aware of and inspired by
Woody and Steina Vasulka’s
buffer building and work in Buffalo. This recording is a counting
through logic permutations; adding, subtracting, oring and noring, to
change the order of the sixteen shades of grey. The color subcarrier
that is mixed into the video signal is also cut up and altered,
resulting in the amazing color shifts. The image is an analog and
digital video text, a time dependent wave based system fusing with a
quantized and time independent system. Is this the mixing of classical
and quantum physics, an analog and digital culture mix? We were looking
at what we had never seen before.
Flute with Shift
1979 4:38 min
Newly hand built digital video A to D and D to A with ALU bit
flipping. Controlled by an ELF II computer. The image brightness changes
also controlled analog synthesizer parameters of the live flute
playing. I sat in the camera image zone and played along with the
programmed staccato picture and sound shifts. David Jones, digital video
design.
Switch / Drift
1980 7:30 min
Two cameras / video sequenceing back and forth, opposite ends of
the studio space of the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY.. The
sound is the oscillator running at the speed of the switching.
Electronic montage, continuous performance. I am watching and changing
the switching sequencing of the two cameras showing one end of the space
and then the other. I am in the room and also in the electronic space.
Electronic system’s designer and technology art hero David Jones comes
to visit.
Video Movements
1980 4:55 min
Self image; camera looks at its own power sync box mixed with a
second camera looking at the large contained studio space. Hand
controlled shifts in the sync time base, mixes, and color. This
performance takes place in the presence and witnessing of the image and
the recording.
Site(s)
1980 7:42 min
Real time mix of digital and analog electronic processes; digital
grey level flipping, oscillator signals converted to video, two b&w
cameras, keying and video feedback. The recording involved an intuitive
action process within a multileveled system. The changes moved through a
permutation of parameters, waiting and then changing, waiting and then
changing. Water flows, system flows, observation sites.
Light Bulb (with circular update, camera zoom +pan +variable clock)
1981 3:30 min
Real time digital buffer recording, light bulb, panning camera
motor and turntable. Light Bulb, the title says it almost all. Real time
recording events. Two cameras, light bulb, camera panning motor,
electric lazy Susan, spinning white paper rectangle for the clip. Using
the first digital video frame buffer I built together with David Jones,
video buffer number one with variable clock. Several minutes of Rube
Goldberg like digital electronics and optical props and motors. No
computer, just energetic digital slivers, shimmering and shattering.
Rectangle Update
1981 3:00 min
I was looking at postcards run through the David Jones digital
video frame buffer. The buffer had two inputs, a video image of white
noise and a video image of holding a post card, blank back to the camera
as a clip. The post card shape defined the frozen memory portion of the
video white noise image. I watched the video as I moved the postcard
and alternated the live and frozen memory states. White noise and
memory. This 3 minute performance recording took 3 minutes to record.
Camel with Window Memory
1983 4:22 min
The “Camel with Window Memory” piece was made one weekend in the
early 80s. I pulled out my post card collection and began to look at
specific postcards run through the new digital video buffer I had built
together with David Jones. The buffer had only one frame of memory but
it was real time. It had the capability of displaying the image memory
space, either as live or frozen. “Camel with Window Memory” was a live
performance recording: hand held postcard, stop watch for timing and the
live or frozen memory mode switch. A second key input to the buffer
determined where the image would be live or freeze. I used two synched
oscillators to create the square key clip shape. For sound, I sampled
two areas
of the image for grey level values that were turned
into control voltages to control the Brewster and Bernie Hutchins
modular audio synthesizer in the studio. The image and sound changes
were live as I turned on and off the image freezing, watched the
stopwatch and heard the sound changes as I moved the postcard, reactive,
as in looking and listening, real time image and sound recording. The
camel and man postcard also was particularly resonant as we were
experiencing gas rationing and gas lines in the states, oil politics of
the time then also. I remember reflecting that the camel was
historically the traveling water storage unit of the desert, an organic
system for storing water, energy and memory.
Invented Eye #1 and #2
1983 2:48 min
Pedagogy and real time electronic processing. Composition notebook
patterns are encoded as analog and digital video signals and reworked
through a high speed audio oscillator controlled sequencer. Pedagogy
becomes biology? Vibrations...
Synthetic Series #2, songs of the synthete
1984 2:45 min
Recomposite recordings of "Video Locomotion (man performing
forward hand leap)" 1978, "Ring Modulation" 1978, "Counting and
Remapping 00-FF (partial disclosure)" 1979, "Site(s)" 1980, and parts
of "Art of Memory " 1985. Linked singular sites and performances become
visual and sonic proto sequence intelligences, timely births of
electronic narrative, struggled and negotiated codes, automatic
artificial intelligences.
Art of Memory
1985 3:30 min
Pacing in the studio and also various still and hand held
Muybridge images digitally video buffered and updated with an analog
oscillator. Real time image reworking. Para celluloid cinema seen
through early digital cinema strategies.
Animal Migrations (and why they don’t get lost)
1985 11:20 min
This is the first of a set of pieces that involved combining a
series of video process recordings, music, texts and appropriated
materials. These multiple elements, simple and tricky grammars, trigged
expanding electronic narratives. The trajectories and drags of the
multiple narratives colored the electronics and visa a versa. The piece
is the scene of many animal migrations as in grammars together with
Hollywood embodied cybernetics.
Silicon Alley Allegany / Manhattan
1999 20:00 min
Lived spaces, loved spaces, begun on Sept. 11, 1998, (strange)
driving towards Manhattan, NY, driving towards Allegany County, NY. High
speed video memory and updates, forward, forward and back, present and
past continuously reinscribing, Allegany, Manhattan, USA, machine vision
and memory, embedded histories, landscapes, urbanscapes, emersion
tensions, emersion ecstasies, information with and with out history,
spaces never the same again in the time of new electronic memory,
silicon alley.
Transport 1, 2 and 3
2001 3:30 min
Composite mix with notebooks and sound elements from Harald Bode,
my father and inventor of the first modular audio synthesizer.
Memory Song (twice)
2002 2:00 min
Toy piano, bell, signal light, book printouts, white noise,
oscillators, deflection and video buffer grabbing. History, evolution,
sounds then texts then digital memory spaces.
World People
2002 2:30 min
Seven channels of oscillator inter-modulation, image and sound, zoomed out, volumed up.
Ring Shift
2003 7:47 min
Ring Modulation 1978 Switch / Drift 1980
Light Counting Memory Lumination
2003 4:20 min
Light Bulb (with circular update, camera zoom + pan + variable
clock) 1981 Counting and Remapping 00-FF (partial disclosure) 1979 Art
of Memory 1985 100 Second Lumination 1976
Synthetic Eye Changes
2003 3:47 min
Synthetic Series #2 1984 Invented Eye #1 1983 Picture +- Changes 1977
Site(s) Movements
2003 8:00 min
Site(s) 1980 Video Movements 1980
Camel 87
2003 4:45 min
1-87 1976, Camel with Window Memory 1983
Man Apple
2003 5:00 min
Video Locomotions (man performing forward hand leap) 1978, Apple(s) 1978
Theater of Metonomic Delights
2003 8:22 min
Table, typewriter, cup, slow deflection, ALU bit flipping sequence counting 00-FF.
Muybridge sequence, time based drifting thru video key space.
studio objects drifting with sound triggering hot spot.
composition notebook pattern drifting, high speed sequencing and digital grabbing.
spatial and intensity digitizer noise recording
art historian Fan Xiaoming with 1000 year old tree outside of Hongzhou, China.
emper(or)(ess)’s bed on display, Forbidden City, Beijing, China.
Songs for Beijing
2003 5:30 min
Royal costuming at the Forbidden City, Beijing, China.
dvd / cd store (new media temple) Beijing, China.
media technology studio, artist research built technologies (art stars), ETC, Owego,NY.
raw analog white noise (all frequencies) into digital buffer.