Image Processing

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.

A Japanese Kabuki-influenced performance piece, shot in the woods in Winter. A masked woman emerges from a snowy forest and approaches a stone dwelling, where another woman is waiting.  The pair enact a tea ceremony in silence. 

In the next scene the tea tray appears in the road, and then disappears after a car passes.  Image processing magic.

Please note, production year is approximate.

"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.

Forever pulsing, a severed hand bobs along a shoreline in this meditation on the atrocities of the early 1990s Rwandan civil war. The all-caps title says it all, loudly and poetically.

Strained Andromeda Strain is a frame by frame re-edit of Robert Wise's 131-minute sci-fi biological thriller into a 7-minute anxious oscillation.

as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die) is a stroboscopic work that pulsates black and white at approximately 14 Hz. Buried within that field of pulsation is a 90 second algorithmically condensed version of John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. Huston's minimal close-ups of the doomed sailors flicker as afterimage ghosts as approximately 4Hz in the visually unstable field of alternating black and white frames.

So long as the creature lives

it must carry forth its vertebrae

as the waves play along

The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA's Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent 'whistlers' produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?

An over thirty-minute static long take of a grass lawn in front of a lake. A camera is set still to capture a day trip of a group of people around the lake. The causal conservation suggests they are having a picnic on a breezy day, where a wind chime occasionally rings, alongside the random blowing of a horn. The video processing focuses on the keying of two distinct areas: the lake and the surrounding grass lawn and trees. 

A very special episode of television's Full House devours itself from the inside out, excavating a hypnotic nightmare of a culture lost at sea. Tropes of video art and family entertainment face off in a luminous orgy neither can survive.

— Michael Robinson

Inspired by the analogy between weaving (vertical warp threads traversed by horizontal weft threads) and the construction of the television image (vertical and horizontal scans of an electron gun), Stephen Beck built the Video Weaver in 1974, and produced Video Weavings in 1976. The patterns in this tape are based on sequences of colors in dynamic mathematical progressions, inspired by non-representational Islamic art. Beck was also intrigued with the problem of synthesizing aspects of human perception.

"My first digital recording and my first and only recording with Don McArthur's "Spatial and Intensity Digitizer". The digitizer was not working properly. I had no idea. The shift I saw was stunning. Digitalization of luminosity, strange notion, wonderful light and early digital embodiment. Image/signal in digitized state/space, noise field. I always thought of this to be 100 seconds of very beautiful digital light noise." 

– Peer Bode

A response to the inability of his local General Motors dealer to fix Morton's 1974 Chevy van to his satisfaction, this tape blends experimental image-processing techniques with documentation of the faulty vehicle. Morton states that he is upset primarily because General Motors "can't get their tech together," and as a video producer involved with using and maintaining high-tech equipment, this strikes Morton as expecially bothersome.

This film is an appropriation from the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blonds. Each sync sound frame of the opening song "A Little Girl from Little Rock" is repeated 32 times and reorientated.

Nine Hamlet RGB engages a simple algorithm to destabilize the timing of the red, green and blue frame sequential display system while incorporating fragmented, appropriated “to be or not to be” excerpts from nine Hamlet films. The audio is the synced sound from the appropriated excerpts laced with low frequency binaural tonal pulsations. The physicality of the constructed optical and aural experience is seeking a mechanism of unconscious disarticulation.

A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person. 

Teramana spends time with drag performer Dainty Adore O’Hara (Mitchell Allan Marco) in Dainty’s apartment in New York City. Dainty, her friend, and Teramana exchange friendly, humorous banter as they flip through Dainty’s collection of photographs and artworks, and Dainty shows off her dress collection, many of which she made herself. The production date for this title is unknown, but presumed to have been recorded after 1991.

This video uses a yoga performance by Barbara Breder to explore the masks of life and the dance of death.

My TV Dictionary: The Drill (1986) translated through digital filtering in 2014.

In Spank an eight-second film clip has been re-edited, frame by frame, into a 7 1/2-minute video, tranforming discreet gestures into suggestive, pulsating sequences. This deconstruction of narrative Hollywood cinema exposes and intensifies the authoritative relationship between a man and a young girl. 

Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, “Blue Studio: Five Segments,” is an innovative work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. Cunningham choreographed the dance specifically for the two-dimensional video monitor screen. Atlas uses a variety of video imaging effects, including chromakey, to electronically transport Cunningham’s studio performance into a series of outdoor landscapes. The audio track includes the voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns.