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Class Assignment

Phil Morton

1972 00:20:15 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Chicago Art, Image Processing, The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive

Description

The video opens with visual feedback and various sounds including snoring, whistling, and other generated audio. The video then slowly transitions into Phil Morton’s monologue and a solarized image. Phil is in front of video equipment racks at the Governors State University—a public university in University Park, Illinois. He starts by discussing events at the school, and then draws the viewers’ attention to the video waveform behind him as he sways. He says that “all things in the universe are so interconnected,” and ends up in laughter. 

Phil talks about his upcoming birthday on April 22. Six hours before turning thirty, he talks about “predictive control,” and that he produced a film five years ago to “predict” himself quitting smoking. After this introspective interrogation, he connects this idea with videos’ “real-time feedback control.” 

Vignettes with audio feedback and video processing follow, and the video concludes with Phil giving his students an assignment.

–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung

For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page. 

The date for this title is approximate.

About Phil Morton

Phil Morton (1945-2003) received degrees in art education and fine arts from Penn State and Purdue. He began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Within a year, he had established the first video department in the country to offer both BA and MFA degrees in video production. In subsequent years Morton continued to expand the media resources and educational opportunities at the School of the Art Institute, establishing the Video Data Bank as a collection of videotaped presentations and interviews with artists in 1972.

In collaboration with Dan Sandin, Morton distributed plans for the Image Processor (IP), a modular video synthesizer based on the Moog audio synthesizer. In 1974, he established "P-Pi's" or the Pied Piper Interactioning System, a cable TV station in South Haven, Michigan. He was the sole proprietor of his own independent video production company, Greater Yellowstone News, which published, among other things, video news tapes of the wildlife and people of the Greater Yellowstone area, many of which were shown on Tom Weinberg's PBS program The '90s.

Many of the titles listed here are also part of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive (PMMRA), which was established in 2007 by artist and scholar jonCates to coordinate and freely distribute Morton’s Media Art work and associated research under Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT license. In 2023, jonCates donated the PMMRA to Video Data Bank. In honor of Morton's COPY-IT-RIGHT philosophy, all titles on VDB's website are available to watch for free. Visit a title’s artwork page to view. For more information and to access the full list of available titles related to PMMRA, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection page. 

The titles listed on this page are videos produced by Morton. To view the list of titles only created and collected by Morton's students and collaborators, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive artist page.