"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
2 Spellbound is a frame-by-frame re-editing of Alfred Hitchcock’s 111-minute psychoanalytic thriller (1945) into a seven-and-a-half-minute dance video. Converting narrative suspense into visual velocity and exploiting the symmetry of Hitchcock’s camera by reversing every other frame, 2 Spellbound generates a hallucination of transference—an ecstatic dance where bodies and identities intermingle and shift.
“Normal forgetting takes place by way of condensation. In this way, it becomes the formation of concepts. What is isolated is perceived clearly.”
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.
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.
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.
In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds. The condensed film was then duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation of the frame with each duplication. The four films were then reassembled frame by frame, generating a stuttering kaleidoscopic montage where Oedipal narratives of desire and obsession are shifted and displaced.
Seven digital mandala-chakras superimposed on video works made over several decades that relate to each chakra. This video compiles previous works into a chakra composite.
Performers: Michelle Krell, Ellen Krueger, Cherie McElligott, Ana Mendieta, Elisa Osborne, Monica Wilson
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848
Originally filmed as an installation in Berlin, a digital reworking of documentation results in digital video artwork which uses image, narration, and raw sound for the sake of deconstructing and reconstructing.
With the Watergate hearings as a backdrop, quotes from various newspapers and magazines--including the story of Robert Smithson's death in a plane crash--build a picture of the confusing and tragic events of July 1973. Sonnier uses appropriated footage and reproduced newspaper clippings to create a richly layered video that attempts to sort out the truth from the available information. Sonnier's instructions to the computer operator reference the making of the video, and thereby create a self-conscious, limiting frame.
Concentrating on abstract shapes and color value, Animation 2 is a record of images manipulated through computer animation. By recording the data screens of the animators and the voices of the controllers, Sonnier discloses the process of making the video.
“This tape is about media, and it seems totally unedited, because we hear him talking over the intercom with the engineer… The engineer interjects, ‘Do you want to save any of this stuff?’ Yes, indeed; Sonnier saves and shows it all, the whole process.”
Documentation of the installation The Future of Metropolis at Technical University in Berlin, Germany.
Using highly-manipulated and over-processed images, Latham investigates the process of video as inherently fragmented. Weaving together various people’s impressions of the artist and her work, the work demonstrates important parallels between video, storytelling, and the formation of identity — all processes of active fabrication that blend “lies” and truth in the construction of a certain reality, history, or past. Labeling an image of herself talking as “her most recent explanation,” Latham addresses “the construction of her video personality” as an identity outside of herself.
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
automatism and (-)(+) feedback is a 3:29-minute video made from shot footage of a 10-year-old child playing Zombie Smash on a handheld device. The video footage and sound have been repeatedly rescanned and resampled using a television and a number of old analog video cameras.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
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.
Backwards Birth of a Nation is a re-editing of D.W. Griffith's 187-minute film, Birth of a Nation (1915), into a pulsating 13-minute black and white phantasm. By means of structural strategies of condensation, the frame by frame inversion of black and white, and playing the resulting work from end to beginning, an apparition is brought forth where images of racism float to the surface and are contextualised as a part of the flow of United States history.
In Bataille, fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon are subject to a mirror effect. A scene in which two samurai fight each other becomes a cosmic field of monsters where horror and pain evoke beauty and joy.
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.
"An electronic synthetic color video, based on a memory of Larry Gottheim's film Blues. Natural and electronic real time events, new American electronic cinema. B&W video camera, Paik-Abe colorizer, 1/2" vtr, blue berries, bowl and milk. The filmmakers stopped talking to me. Viva Video!"
– Peer Bode
Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This black and white grainy quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, usually hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure.
"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.
Sequences of landscapes shot in an area of 60 km make up mosaics of places and reference axes constantly changing that do not exist in our surroundings. In this video bodies are not near or far. They are large or small. The horizons change and no space is independent from the viewer. Incorporating only memory, the landscape is seen in a variety of speeds and movements that apply a bodily logic to the vision.
In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology, The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.
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
We have come to this place of meaning together, celebrating our un-remaindered completeness. Yet, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways: misspoken sounds we unconsciously omit, the limitations of our alphabet, the ignored gaps of an imperfect analog, and most recently, these forgetful bits of the virtual. We celebrate the lineage of our information as we celebrate one another, not realizing that the loudest affirmations might come from these unacknowledged, unavoidable participants. With each generation, they say a little bit more, speaking a little bit louder.
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.
Featuring overlaying monologues, Phil Morton brings up a wide range of philosophical and mundane topics: self-exploration, evolution, personal values, frustration, exhaustion, spirituality, video making, etc. He discusses the capability of video as a tool for expansion of perception.
"A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed, keyed + synthetic color, normal play and rewinding, sync events, the opening of a space to put the self in. 1/2 inch b+w Portapack, 2 reel to reel video tape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer."
– Peer Bode
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.
In this hour-long video, Dan Sandin demonstrates and explains in detail on modules of the Sandin Image Processor. Beginning with a playful and amateurish set up segment, Dan introduces his new invention, which he hints will be duplicated by Phil Morton shortly.
This video uses a yoga performance by Barbara Breder to explore the masks of life and the dance of death.
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.
A specific period of late-night TV channel surfing is dissected and manipulated through fast forward and freeze frame. Cultural icons (Roseanne, Mary Tyler Moore, The Golden Girls) can occasionally be glimpsed amongst the detritus, while the echoing and ghostly soundtrack pays homage to the cultural isolation of solitary viewing.
This film is a recording of a live signal analog video/audio synthesizer performance with a voiced narration made in collaboration with an AI program. A speculative machine guided psychedelic broadcast of an astral floral projection. A fictional telepathic transmission that saturates the boundaries of perception with interlacing signals of interconnected consciousness.
— Les LeVeque
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.
Dan Sandin demos the Digital Image Colorizer, a digital module that was part of the analog Image Processor.
Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly changes every single frame of film while leaving the narrative superficially intact. Then imagine that these symptoms came on as a result of the trauma of recording bizarre or horrific events, for instance those of the 1941 horror film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde...
Adapted from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.
This title is also available on Paul Bush Pixilated.
Electric Yogurt documents different modes of childlike play, beginning with footage of a group of people dancing together with arms outstretched against a background of growling, cooing, and coughing. As the dancing continues, the participants get increasingly tangled up in one another and repeatedly chant the word “culture,” eventually transitioning into a trust fall. The enactment of these activities is simultaneously playful and somewhat disturbing, particularly as they parallel symbolic enactments of American nationalism.
ETC: Experimental Television Center 1969-2009 is a five-DVD box set presenting the electronic media work of over one hundred artists who participated in the Center’s Residency Program during a 40-year period. The collection offers a look at the evolution of the unique artist-designed sound and image tools that are the hallmark of the Center’s studio, and provides a view into the constantly changing artistic processes and practices that have shaped the work over the years.
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.
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.
Feathers: An Introduction is a self-portrait centered on the story of Latham's grandmother’s comforter which, old and worn, scatters feathers everywhere. Displaying an arresting stage presence, Latham addresses the viewer as a potential friend or lover, speaking in a soft-spoken near-whisper, and gingerly touching and kissing the camera lens and monitor. Then, almost mocking the video’s intimacy, Latham gives us close-ups of herself chewing a sandwich and shaving her armpits, heightening the sense that she has been playing cat and mouse with the viewer all along.
The temperature in your eyes will rise when you contract ‘FEVER DREAMS’ and experience the haunted mayhem contained therein.
This title comprises The Stone Boy (2011), Nonsensical (2014), and Coffee, Tea, and Wizardry (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A short Flicker Film adulterated by some extra images shot in Malawi, Africa. FF was in answer to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which I was asked to make a “Future Film”.
-- Deborah Stratman
See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !
This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. Sandin decided that the best distribution strategy for his instrument "was to give away the plans for the IP and encourage artists to build their own copies.
Decidedly low-tech, this optical abstraction begins with a shot of an aluminum reflector inside a lamp; a lightbulb in the shot’s center flicks on and off. As the video plays on, nearly identical shots are superimposed, but at a steadily decreasing scale, resulting in an array of nested rectangles. The rhythmic blinking of intense light- accompanied by audible clicks from the plastic light switch- presents the viewer with a swift progression of blinding geometries, (with) dizzying effects.
-- Michelle Grabner, Artforum, May 2010
flight is a frame-by-frame re-editing of an astronaut walking on the moon into a seven-minute long meditation on technological transcendence. The unstable, stuttering image depicts the astronaut's struggle to separate from his body. Comically majestic, the astronaut enacts a late 20th Century ballet. A performance of anti-heroic stumbling, falling down, and disappearance into white light.
This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.
Free Society is a short experimental music video that juxtaposes images of police harrassment in the U.S. with images of the military quelling revolutionary opposition. Includes comments from televangelist Jerry Falwell.
This title is also available on Paul Garrin Videoworks: Volume 1.
"Actions, states, one B+W video camera, the Paik Abe Colorizer, a video switcher. The two states, a b a b, I put my hand in the camera frame and saw a colored hand shifting. I moved my, the, hand, including back and forth, realizing or connecting to the visual and language potential of front hand and back hand. Giving it some veracity, the pace became about attempting to keep up with the position changes together with verbally reciting front hand back hand, co-coordinating from hand to mouth and mouth to hand."
– 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.
An erotic/mystical misadventure in which the allure of the religious path is strewn with earthly temptations. Struggling with a bogus Zen koan involving flowers in keyholes and jumping through windows, the protagonist will end up entering, by the conclusion, the realm of subatomic particles, thereby achieving transcendence-of-a-sort. On the soundtrack, operatic quotations comment ironically (and sometimes sincerely) on the visual proceedings.
Featuring a swirling spiral from video feedback, this video provides a contemplative visual space for viewers. The spiral appears on and off against colorful oscillation patterns.
This video shares a close resemblance with Venn’s Apron, which appears to have been made on the same day: January 1,1973. Compared to Venn’s Apron, which has a seemingly improvised approach, this work is paced and structured.
–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung
Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber) was an underground superstar in the East Village arts scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. Known for his dramatic attire and make-up, and his theatrical stage presence, Nomi was a countertenor and could achieve a wide vocal range, allowing him to include operatic embellishments to his musical numbers. He died in 1983 and was one of the earliest artists to die from AIDS.
Ana Mendieta performs a kiss in Old Man's Creek with another performer.
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.
Skip Sweeney was an early and proficient experimenter with video feedback. A feedback loop is produced by pointing a camera at the monitor to which it is cabled. Infinite patterns and variations of feedback can be derived from manipulating the relative positions of camera and monitor, adjusting the monitor control, becoming a swirling vortex. Sweeney and others were intrigued with feedback's ability to generate pulsing images like a living organism.
"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.
Inconsecreation is a complex mix of videos that fully explores the capability of the Sandin Image Processor’s handling of live-feed, video feedback, oscillation patterns, and recorded footage. The live-feed camera footage consists of a scene where hands are seen manipulating a mixer; the video feedback creates an ever-glowing spiral; the patterns generated from the oscillators form a series of pulsating rhombus shapes; and the pre-recorded material includes footage of a dancer and ocean scene.
A grinding mortar and pestle vignette analogously describes the evolution of digital resolution; from a single color to a high definition image to an infinite splitting of that image back into the pixels themselves.
This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.
Jam #1 highlights the colorizing ability of the Sandin Image Processor. This hour-long video compiles a jam session with a piano and drum set, video footage from movies and nature, and visual feedback. The video mixing juxtaposes and alternates the images to create a kaleidoscopic stream of events, accompanied by the improvised music. With keying techniques, bodies and objects become containers that engulf, assimilate, and disintegrate the alternating visual reality. The final part features a “holographic” aesthetic and ambient electronic soundtrack.
Feedback-generated computer animations wiped and keyed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher.
Jaws is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.
The second in the Jaws series. Feedback-generated computer animations wiped and keyed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher.
Jaws 2 is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.
A Nazi battalion marches in red in front of the ominous floating hand from THE AX HAS FLOWERED. This meditative treatment on genocide can be taken as a palliative or as a poison pill.
Through a process of degeneration of both sound and image, Just endows the iconic American flag with new context and implication. The image is repeated by generations, using different processes such as digital video, computer printout and photocopying, and then combined with degenerated sound. Single frames of original digital images are exported, and evolve through the repetition of process, before being metamorphosed back to digital image by scanning and rendering.
"Bricks, white noise, video. Free floating sync, altered, drifiting camera: video image and time. Keying permutations, switching via gray level values, using a modified b+w Sony special effects generator (SEG). Building the building, one brick at a time. In video what is a brick? In spite of what was then a fierce cultural doxa, an anti-materialist pressure, and being quite anti-anti-materialist I was working hard to coax out significant features as expressive intensity zones, electronic energy points always engaging with the signals."
– Peer Bode
A Letter for Phil suggests an institutional critique in the form of a correspondence signed by “Matt/Rose/Tom/Isac.” The video juxtaposes two angles of the typewriter—one showing the typed text in realtime, another showing hands of the writer. The continuous sound of the typewriter creates an intimate space between the writer and the viewer.
–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung
For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page.
"Real time digital buffer recording, light bulb, panning camera motor and turntable. Light Bulb, the title says it almost all. Real time recording events. Two cameras, light bulb, camera panning motor, electric lazy susan, spinning white paper rectangle for the clip. Using the first digital video frame buffer I built together with David Jones, video buffer number one with variable clock. Several minutes of Rube Goldberg like digital electronics and optical props and motors. No computer, just entergetic digital slivers, shimmering and shattering."
– Peer Bode
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
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.
Lines of Force opens with footage of a dramatic explosion. For most of the piece, the screen is divided, into a triptych at first, and slowly into horizontal and vertical bars. Electronically manipulated footage shows a man walking, a marching band, ferns, cartoons, a window, and a train arriving on a set of tracks. The naturally occurring lines in the array of images presented mirror the electronically created bars and lines that divide the screen. Natural scenes provide a respite from the frantic pace of the images.
Long Live the New Flesh uses found footage to transmogrify existing fragments from horror films into a new video. It deploys a digital technique with painterly quality in which the images literally consume one another and the horror in all its visual power is brought to a natural boiling point. Provost strips down the imagery of a mass medium, uses it to construct a new visual story behind the dissection and horror, and allows the viewer to cross every phase of the emotional spectrum.
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
Lossless #2 is a mesmerizing assemblage of compressed digital images of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon. Baron and Goodwin play heavily with Teiji Ito’s 1959 soundtrack, making the film’s lyrical ambience feel more astonishing than ever before. --Neil Karassik
Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.
Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.
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.
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.
At Breder's direction in the studio, the performer releases a body of light that casts a transient shadow. Following the tantric chakra stations, a match is lifted from root to crown. Instead of a perfect mirror, Breder filmed the reflection in a dented, scratched piece of polished steel.
Magic for Beginners examines the mythologies found in fan culture, from longing to obsession to psychic connections. The need for such connections (whether real or imaginary) as well as the need for an emotional release that only fantasy can deliver is explored.
"Out of the blue, I bought my first television. I kept the TV on all the time."
— Andy Warhol
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?
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.
Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity.
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.
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.
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.
Multiple sources of feedback-generated computer animations mixed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher. The sound is delayed with Max/ MSP.
Mountain is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.
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.
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 trance is a state of detachment with aspects of the ecstatic. Paradoxically, a trance can be induced by a surfeit of input or by its deprivation... In Anthony Discenza's Object 8242600, television imagery is reduced to a flood of unanchored signifiers reorganized as a motive mosaic."
—Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive
‘ODDS AND ENDS’ is a dazzling patchwork of moods, lost and found, for the eye to savor.
A password-protected love affair, a little vapor on Venus, and a horse with no name ride out in search of a better world. Against the mounting darkness, a willing abduction offers a stab at tomorrow.
Please note that strobe effects are used in this video.
A video recording of electronic oscillators producing colors, shapes, and sounds while patched through a computer and/or producing one or several feedback loops.
Oscillator Color is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.
By subjecting fragments from the Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon to a mirror effect, Provost creates a hallucinatory scene of a woman’s reverse chrysalis into an imploding butterfly. This physical audiovisual experience produces skewed reflections upon Love, its lyrical monstrosities, and a wounded act of disappearance.
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
Philip Glass, a pioneer in minimalism in music, gave a two-day lecture at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1974. In musical composition, minimalism highlights the repetition of melodic fragments, harmonic progressions, rhythmic structures, etc. Glass’s music is often steady in terms of volume and tempo, then, when introducing slight alterations, the pattern changes become notably audible.
“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for California Video, a 2008 at the Getty Museum, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidation, making the work unwatchable and threatening to ruin any deck that would play them. Jonathan Furmanski, an Assistant Conservator at the Institute, describes one particularly unruly video installation, Philo T.
Broken up into "chapters," Phosphoresence features an array of abstractions created by manipulating television images. At times almost painterly, the resulting images are set to an ambient electronic soundtrack.
This title is also available on Anthony Discenza Videoworks: Volume 1.
A man with two dogs crosses a landscape. A person walks along a ridge and stops to look at the skyline. Other people run while nature shrinks back to its enigmaticness. In this video landscape doesn’t evolve according to simple time curves, but according to the particular mode of crossing of a weather element: fog.
In a celebrity-obsessed culture, filmmakers often exploit the downfall of a star to amplify the emotional undertones of the fictional films in which they perform. POSTFACE takes a look back at the filmography of Montgomery Clift whose private life and career spiral downward after a 1956 car crash that left his face scarred and partially paralyzed.
Note: This title is intended by the artist to be viewed in High Definition. While DVD format is available to enable accessibility, VDB recommends presentation on Blu-ray or HD digital file.
Red Green Blue Gone with the Wind is a phosphorescent deconstruction of David O. Selznick's Technicolor classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Through the structural devices of condensation, the frame-by-frame separation of the red, green, and blue Tehnicolor layers, and the de-interlacing of the video field, LeVeque presents a destabilized illumination of the relentless romantic nostalgia for the antebellum past.
This title is also available on Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.
“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”
-- Graham Harvey, Animism
Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.
Proposal for sidewalk projection in NYC using 7+7. Performed by Heidi Wiren Bartlett.
Security Anthem’s requisite components came together relatively slowly. I’d known for years that I wanted to make something out of the Oto speakers’ most sinister, suggestive sentences. I’d taught myself to program music on a Game Boy using a cartridge I’d bought from a Swedish programmer, and I composed a sequence of ominous music that seemed well-matched to the speakers. I’d recorded John Ashcroft singing his self-penned song “Let the Eagle Soar” through a media player window, and I knew that it somehow belonged with the speakers and the 8-bit music.
Originally recorded during 1975-76 and re-mastered in March 2005, this selection of 11 skits mostly focuses on Man Ray. Wegman appears to test his faithful friend, continually throwing a ball for him to catch even after the dog loses enthusiasm; playing with a cardboard tube which intermittently emits a loud sound recording, alternately attracting and repelling the dog; pulling a cord attached to his leg while making him “stay”. Wegman also take a leap into the world of color with special effects and a monolog about furniture. Includes:
Small Miracles is a suite of eight video animations in which the artist conjures up and controls forces of nature. Ignoring rational constructs of what is possible, Hechtman creates imaginary works to ground science fiction in the everyday experience. Coupling feminism and natural phenomena, the videos are located in the liminal space between fantasy and the everyday.
An example of what Reeves terms “video poetics,” layered images of a deserted village in the Spanish countryside play counterpoint to poetry by Cesar Vallejo and Pablo Neruda. Using slick production techniques, Reeves marks the passing of time and human presence with a video transparency effect. What we see is a ghost of what was. Reeves’s precise editing makes for an extraordinarily fluid tape, as images seem to fly through the landscape, through past, present and future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stutter the Searchers is an undulating re-edit of John Ford's "frontier saga" The Searchers (1956). Ford's violent narrative is restructured through the use of condensation, repetition, and the oscillating de-location of the image's place within the frame. This work pursues a spiraling, percussive search where flashing images endanger assumptions about home and wilderness.
This title is also available on Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.
Audacious romanticism displays gardens fueled by the human heart where feelings blossom amid leaf and brick.
Constructed from a destroyed rescan of fashion magazine ads and a video self-portrait, Suspension is a meditation on the implicitly narcissistic nature of desire within a commodified context.
Taste the delicious colors of "SWEET NOTHINGS" and observe the dice of desire being tossed on a gambler’s bed like yesterday’s candy. See tomorrow’s chocolate bunny melt into a brown puddle and feel a sticky, rainbow colored lolly-pop thats stuck to six feet of skin that secrets pent up passions... It’s all here for you to eat and is guaranteed to fatten your eyes!!
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.
My TV Dictionary: The Drill (1986) translated through digital filtering in 2014.
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
“A short image-processed work, Thousands Watch deals with the issue of nuclear suicide. The tape’s central metaphor is derived from a 1936 Universal newsreel of a crowd looking on while a young man stands on the ledge of a tall building, threatening to—and eventually succeeding in—committing suicide. It begins with an image of time-lapsed colorized clouds racing across the sky at a frenzied pace while a low siren wail emerges on the soundtrack. This sound forms a pulsing heartbeat and builds into a tense crescendo as the tape progresses.
This is a later reworking of original video documenting the goings-on of the village, Tlocalula, Mexico in 1973.
This is a later reworking of original video documenting the goings-on of the village, Tlocalula, Mexico in 1973. Uses footage from Oaxaca 2004 in the background.
The video content—a live-feed image processing tape—shows intellectual discussion among SAIC Video Area students and faculty members. Instead of being a prescriptive monologue from school to students, Phil sits among the crowd and moderates the session. The decentralized and non-hierarchical academic setting—students and faculty sitting on the floor and cushions in a circle—is typical of the ’70s. At times, students burst into laughter, dancing, and lounging on the floor, hence creating a laid-back environment.
This tape deviates from the more purely formal investigations of Snyder’s earlier work; it has no soundtrack and uses camera images exclusively. Employing Quantel digital effects and editing procedures, a novelty in video post-production at the time, Snyder manipulates images of tract houses shot in a small Indiana town. Cubist re-constructions of the monotonous facades fracture spatial planes into intricate geometric arrangements, with frames enclosing frames, spiralling like Chinese boxes.
Part of a trilogy of works known as the Video Wallpaper Series in which George tests out his new audio/video digital mixer and creates a range of impressions of people and places. "A collage of serpent-infested gruel from Haitian hybrids." —George Kuchar
In Sonnier’s video tape TV In and TV Out, two images are superimposed, one shot off network television and the other shot from a studio performance situation involving some of the materials and visual qualities of his sculptures. This live image is colorized by a device which adds color to a black and white image and in turn manipulates the color. Colorized color is more opaque and less three-dimensionally tactile than synthesized color, but it is tactile in its video scan-line texture.
“The images mix fragments of the real and imaginary in a hermetic effort to express the [Breder's] quest for a visual text that is at once personal reflection and cultural criticism. ” - John Hanhardt, 1989
This meditative silent video features gradual evolving swirls on top of vertically synced bars. Their ever-changing color, shapes, and sizes demonstrate the subtleties achieved through image processing. The slow-paced kaleidoscopic glow invites the viewer to contemplate a dance of visual genesis.
–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung
For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page.
"A hand made raster deflection unit was used, inspired by Nam June Paik's video synthesizer system. I also used a TV repair person's test signal grid, early digital. Two b+w video cameras, audio oscillator sweeping up and then down. More keying permutations. Video, oscillator, keying, graphic timing buzzes."
– Peer Bode
Showcasing a solo organ recital, Victor Solo features seven sets of organ works. A narrator, possibly the organ player, announces work titles before each set. The video then displays superimposed views of the organist and the interior of the cathedral. Each set features a different angle of the organist and the architecture. Fitting to the tranquil chorale and preludes, the video artist gives minimal treatment with image processing.
PASSIONS run deep and LOVE flies high on Cupid’s arrow when ‘Boys’ are the desired target.
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:
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.
Gusella's title creates a pun on the term video "tape" by using a split screen in which one half is the electronic negative of the other. Gusella set up a glass sheet and suspended it from light poles. The glass was covered with black or white tape. As he slowly removes the obscuring tape from one half of the screen, his ghostly negative image emerges, further confusing the viewer.
Blurred images, glowing like a foggy moon and reminiscent of early television broadcasts, are rhythmically set to a relentless, pulsing soundtrack.
This title is also available on Anthony Discenza Videoworks: Volume 1.
On March 8, 1972, Phil Morton conducted a morning class over the telephone. He instructed students that he would answer the phone with “video” and the caller had to reply “W3 Form”—students who responded incorrectly were prompted to dial again. This procedure would then be followed by Phil asking students where they are (street name, city, and zip code) and finally asking “what is your information?” Responses contained research topics, projects, and daily lives around students.
A rural sunset at the edge of the water in WandaWega Waters. The natural rhythmic movement of the water’s surface becomes a highly colored abstraction in motion, a meditation on the intersection of nature and technology.
white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.
Workers Leaving the Factory - Ten Days that Shook the World – downloaded, repeatedly recompressed and reversed V.1 is a 13-minute re-edit of the film Workers Leaving The Lumière’s Factory in Lyon.
1970 marked the publication of Gene Youngblood’s now-formative Expanded Cinema – a text that was instrumental in legitimizing video and new media as viable and serious artistic forms. Youngblood went on to a career in both practice and theory, making a life’s work of championing the uses of video towards both social and political ends. This interview, conducted at SAIC, comes seven years after the release of Expanded Cinema and details its author’s primarily philosophic concerns with the medium of video.