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Digiscan to St. Olaf College

Phil Morton

1972 00:32:21 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Chicago Art, Documentation, Image Processing, The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive

Description

Phil Morton and Dan Sandin introduce video equipment and editing techniques to St. Olaf College students—a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. They display constant playful interactions, from deliberately making audio feedback to mimicking the feedback sounds with voice. The workshop is very laid-back and carefree which is typical of the '70s counterculture and DIY Video communities.

Following a discussion on editing techniques, the video shows a group of students in a park centering on an inflatable structure for the Videopolis of Midwest (the first national-scale video tape festival according to Dan Sandin). A group of people set up the inflatable and then proceed to interact with each other on the grass lawn.

Upon pausing the footage, the flow is interrupted. We then hear Phil’s voice reciting “I love you” repeatedly. Soon after it cuts back to the studio where the television displays the footage in the park. Phil demonstrates various dubbing techniques on the audio. Using the “I love you” fragment, he speeds up and slows down the audio to manipulate the sound quality.

The video—cutting back to the park scene—concludes with a lively and uplifting staged choreography and casual conversations between Phil, Dan, and students.

–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung

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

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.