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Practice Tape

Phil Morton

1972 00:29:19 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Film or Videomaking, Technology, The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive

Description

Phil Morton starts the conversation by discussing an engineering project at the University of Wisconsin which was developing an early video communication system over satellite. Phil predicts the use of live-transmission of audiovisual elements for jamming purposes; his visionary thought resembles Marshall McLuhan’s prediction about the internet and social media. With the availability of a home terminal that transmits signals in real-time, the “system becomes a radical educational learning experience.” 

Heeding the overly quick development of technologies, Phil sees the urge to understand media at a deeper level. While the mass public attempts to catch up with the media development, he recognizes there is a lack of proper terminology to describe visual communication. He comments, “...talking has to do with sound, what is the equivalent in the visual realm of talking?” He continues, “I'm sending visual information and I don't have any word for it. I need a new word. We don’t even have terms to account for it, it’s too real. It’s going so fast we don't have the time to make up the new terms that are necessary.”

Phil not only narrates his urge and demand to catch up with the media, he also overdubs and manipulates his voice to create various audio effects for the video. The final section features a student—and other students off-camera—experimenting with the audio equipment in front of the camera.

–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.