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Camel with Window Memory

Peer Bode

1983 00:04:22 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:33/4" U-matic video

Description

"The Camel with Window Memory piece was made one weekend in the early '80's. 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: handheld 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 then 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."

– Peer Bode

About Peer Bode

Working in film until the early 1970s, Peer Bode was first exposed to electronics by his father Harold Bode, a developer of the first modular audio synthesizer. He worked as program coordinator for the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York,  collaborating with resident artist/engineers in constructing prototype imaging tools, thus continuing his commitment to “tool expansion” and “personal studio making.” Recognizing the limits imposed by designers of industrial and consumer technology, Bode sought to externalize the “hidden coding and control structures” of the video signal. His videotapes investigate the semiotics and phenomenology of the medium, specifically through the synthesis of audio and video signals.