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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Composite mix with notebooks and sound elements from Harald Bode, my father and inventor of the first modular audio synthesizer.
Toy piano, bell, signal light, book printouts, white noise, oscillators, deflection and video buffer grabbing. History, evolution, sounds then texts then digital memory spaces.
Seven channels of oscillator inter-modulation, image and sound, zoomed out, volumed up.
Ring Modulation 1978 Switch / Drift 1980
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 Series #2 1984 Invented Eye #1 1983 Picture +- Changes 1977
Site(s) 1980 Video Movements 1980
1-87 1976, Camel with Window Memory 1983
Video Locomotions (man performing forward hand leap) 1978, Apple(s) 1978
Cup Mix 1977, Blue 1975
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.
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.
