A video recording of a computer-generated abstract animation that is keyed, wiped and matted by electronic oscillators and feedback. The sound of the electronic oscillators is delayed and pitched to produce modulations.
Black Oval White is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.
Storyteller recomposes aerial shots from the Las Vegas casino skyline to create a slick, artificial world, reminiscent of science fiction. At first glance, the viewer might think of jewelry-like space ships floating slowly through the universe. When the camera zooms in on buildings and architecture, the detailed glitter and kitsch of the city hypnotically reveals something of pure beauty and madness.
Fashioned out of home movies recovered from failing hard drives, this glitch-art video makes comparisons between different forms of memory - suggesting that, while error and decay may keep us up at night, they might also be the way we put our ghosts to bed.
-- Evan Meaney
The four‐part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds.
“Computer animations are currently becoming a general model, surpassing film. In films, there is the wind that blows and the wind that is produced by a wind machine. Computer images do not have two kinds of wind.”
-- Harun Farocki
In Stitch, computer graphics are altered with image processing effects. Beeps and electronic music provide a soundtrack as abstract structures and evolving shapes and patterns rotate in space. About halfway through the video, the music takes on a jazz and blues quality and at the end, Tom Defanti, a collaborator of Phil Morton’s, introduces an event with thanks to the artists and other people who made it possible.
Family Court introduces us to the world of good, clean, family fun and leisure.
This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.
PASSIONS run deep and LOVE flies high on Cupid’s arrow when ‘Boys’ are the desired target.
2001 Colours Andy Never Thought Of transforms Warhol’s infamous screen prints of Marilyn Monroe through a process of color manipulation. The viewer witnesses a flurry of changing tones, colors, and shades in a postmodern nod to the scratch genre that Barber came to define.
Using the image processor as it was intended as a performance instrument, Icron exploits the processor’s real-time capabilities: the image and soundtrack were generated through simultaneous improvisation, although the color was added later. The title of the piece is a neologism created by fusing "icon" with "chron" as a reference to the effect of temporal changes on images. Snyder combines iconographic elements of broadcast television with the structural features of music by deconstructing the face of a newscaster into scan lines.
This film is an appropriation from the 1949 movie On the Town. Each sync sound frame of the Overture, "I Feel Like I’m not of Bed Yet" and "New York New York" is repeated 32 times and reoriented.
In Lossless #5, a water-ballet crafted by the famed Busby Berkley is compressed into an organic mitosis, within which we detect the spirit of a "buggy" Brakhage ghosting about the integrated circuit.
Simultaneously dark, surreal, and unnerving, this seventeen-minute tape is a stark departure from the usually playful productions of the Videofreex. Through the use of slow fades, processed audio, and the juxtaposition of often-times violent imagery with a bleak, winter forest, the viewer is thrust into an atmospheric and experimental trip.
An episodic adventure highlighting the riff between mind and body. Through a series of animated narratives, role reversals and associations, images are driven out and stacked one on top another. "A best friend is like a four leaf clover: hard to find and lucky to have. But I'm beginning to wonder if he knows something the rest of us don't."
An insert square of a man running is superimposed over a magnified mouth that speaks to him — first in nurturing encouragement, then with a no-win Mommie Dearest kind of criticism. Originally presented as an installation on six monitors, Deadline focuses on “the stress man feels in the urban environment,” using a range of digital video effects to stretch, compress, flip and fracture the image.
IEVE Aura features video art created and recorded at the first Interactive Electronic Visualization Event at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. This title was edited by Phil Morton and includes video and sound art created by Dan Sandin, Bob Snyder, and Tom Defanti.
Aura of IEVE, a companion piece to this title, spotlights the artists working on the Sandin Image Processor, sound keyboard, and computer graphics ("Digital Keyboard").
Short for "Probably The Last" (of the series), Spiral PTL uses the image processor like a musical instrument to create variations on a spiral, transforming its basic form into an ever-moving gyro. The movement is synchronous with an audio track that varies from electronic buzzes and Space Age voices to the quiet sounds of running water.
"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.
In Music on Triggering Surfaces, Bode constructs an interface between audio and video systems. The luminance information (voltage) from the visual images traversed by the black dot is routed to an oscillator to produce the audio signal, which varies according to the changing luminance. The video image itself then triggers the audio. The shifting grey-scale of the image becomes a two-dimensional sound map or audio score. This tape was produced at the Experimental Television Center.
Mom and Dad highlights causal conservations between Phil and his parents around family life, road trips, and camping in an interview-like setting, where his parents sit against a plain brick wall facing the cameras. Phil gives a live-demonstration of the image processor to his parents. His minimalistic approach to processing implies a laid back family time instead of his pursuit of an artful, finished product.
Fantasy Suite was the last standard definition video I made from VHS tapes. Like WHS VHS #1, I made it to premiere at Roots & Culture’s Zummer Tapez, and speed manipulation figured heavily into its construction (the Bachelor material was not interesting or even tolerable at normal speed, but slowed down slightly, it became fascinating to me). Shana Moulton’s work was a strong influence on this video (I programmed my piece to play after hers in the Zummer mixtape), hence the animated facial masks and SkyMall imagery.
In this series I composed a series of portraits on my audio/video digital mixer, ranging from impressions of places and people to renditions of feelings their work inspired, and domestic-type gossip from the kitchen and bedroom. The gallery of images and sounds were fed into my gizmo and ground up into gourmet gruel. Includes: Isleton 3:20 Trinity 5:28 Kitchenetiquette 5:
Dani Leventhal gathered material for 9 minutes each day, then condensed it down to this 16-minute video montage of impressions which has a cumulative effect, accessed and read differently depending on the mental connections the viewer makes. It is presented as short scenes: documentation of the quotidian, on-camera monologues, and performative or expressive shots that are constructed. The material, while mostly generated as a diary, is heterogeneous enough to include just about any kind of footage.
Ana Mendieta performs a kiss in Old Man's Creek with another performer.
I live in the Hudson Valley near the Hudson River. Historically, Muhheakunnuk, a river that runs both ways was a waterway for the colonization of North America. This film combines old footage I shot of the river in winter when the ice flowed with a live video/audio synthesizer performance as a meditation on settler colonialism and its ecosystem.
— Les LeVeque
This is the new choreography of devotion, via the vlog of southern nightmares. This is the light that never goes out. This is the line describing your mom.
