<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>I first want to say thank you Renate for inviting me to discuss what we do at Signal Culture!<br><br></div>The residency programs at Signal Culture are designed with several philosophies in mind. First and foremost is the idea that old media is still new media, and that each media device is imbued with a specific language. We are aware that the relentless tide of new technologies often tout more "quality" in the process or image, but we are more interested in the "qualities" inherent to a specific device. Shooting a video essay with a Barbie Video Girl camera has distinctly different connotations than a 4K camera, and understanding and utilizing media for specific nuances we believe will help form more dynamic relationships between artists and their toolsets.<br><br></div>But this notion of old media is new media goes beyond that. When media devices from several ages talk to one another, what kind of dialogue forms? While our artist studio has a large system of analog video processing tools, we are not attempting to emulate the Experimental Television Center in this context. We have the ability to fluidly shift from digital to analog to digital within a fluid real time system. What happens when you convert the data from a Microsoft Kinect controller to control voltage and "perform" a Jones Colorizer in real time? We think these kinds of questions are exciting and perhaps are the beginning of fostering the idea that all media is relevant.<br><br></div>This is not to say that we came up with these ideas by ourselves. One of our founders is Hank Rudolph, who worked with training of residents at the Experimental Television Center for over 25 years. The notion of a real time system fundamentally changed our perceptions of media, and a large part of Signal Culture is working with video and audio in real time using a hybrid of old and new analog and digital processes. In terms of innovation, we believe that it can come through re-evaluation of what has been made. Steina Vasulka always maintained that in order to get everything you needed out of a media "instrument" you needed to play it over the period of a decade. Too often we are asked to shed our media processes for the new. We choose to keep those processes and include the new.<br><br></div><div>A good example of this was the construction of our raster manipulation device (aka the Wobbulator) this past summer. We came to make this device because we knew how valuable it was at the Experimental Television Center. However, there are some major issues with the original design. First, the S-Coil needed to be driven by a hefty McIntosh tube amplifier because the short circuit created by this coil would either blow amplifiers or in worse case scenarios cause them to burst into flames, according to Andrew Deutsch. The second major design issue was needing to get a late 60's color TV yoke large enough to fit over the electron gun circuit board to drive the horizontal and vertical deflection. <br><br></div><div>We did not have the money to buy these parts, the McIntosh amps are a collector's item and feature an auto forming transformer that let it run heavy loads without a problem. So, after some consultation with Dave Jones we figured out some new designs for this old media device that would allow it to be run using new peripherals. <br><br></div><div>The reason this re-investigation is exciting is that through these redesigns we were able to prove that not only can we create a wobbulator from a color CRT, but we can turn it into a real video instrument with over 12 potential processes to localize and further process the image into a raster animation instrument with variable raster collapse ramping. Based on these findings, we will be constructing this instrument this summer and adding it to the Signal Culture system.<br></div><div><div><div><div><br><br><div><br><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 8:00 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:empyre-request@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-request@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Send empyre mailing list submissions to<br>
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