[-empyre-] more thoughts from Peer Bode

Thu Oct 1 10:31:12 AEST 2015

Odd Sundays, what a wonderful name.  

Peer, thank you so much for sharing your insights and telling of the ETC's history.  I've throughly enjoyed reading your posts over the last couple days.  It is always exciting to learn more about the ETC, to realize that in researching for the exhibition that I have only scratched the surface of the complexity and importance of the Experimental Television Center in the development of  the medium. This opportunity for ongoing discovery is one of the things I enjoy most about working from archives, especially contemporary archives.   Most of the works and materials presented within the exhibition are culled from the Experimental Television Center's vast collection.The stories that unfold through the unpacking of the archive are complex and varied and involve an expansive ecosystem of artists, technologists, organizations, tapes, machines, and tools.  It has been tremendous meeting so many of these artists/scholars/technologists.  Last Friday we were fortunate to have Dave Jones, Debora Bernagozzi and Jason Bernagozzi give a workshop to students on the wobbulator, Dave's interactive videosnyth modules and about Signal Culture.  That afternoon Peer Bode gave an impromptu tour of the exhibition to a graduate studio seminar lead by MFA professor Susan Crile.  And when I saw Susan this morning, she was raving about how spectacular Peer's tour was and how much the students responded to it.  This afternoon I had the chance to chat with Mona Jimenez, who brought some of her students to see the show and with Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter and Murat Nemet-Nejat.   

On Sep 30, 2015, at 6:14 PM, Timothy Conway Murray wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> The ETC move in 1979 was to a three story brick building downtown in the
>> village of Owego, directly on the river. When we were not looking at
>> oscillator waves and camera based modulations in the studio we could look
>> out the windows and see the Susquehanna River and in the winter the ice
>> on it slow move towards the Chesapeake Bay.
>> 
>> Ralph and Sherry hosted an ³Odd Sundays ³gathering   at their home. It
>> met most every other Sundays. David Jones and Paul Davis were regulars.
>> Paul had studied geology at Alfred University. He became involved in
>> microcomputers. Later in the 80¹s, as I understood it, he ran a company
>> in Ithaca that manufactured a microcomputer that was sold in some large
>> quantities in India. The ETC Odd Sunday afternoons were spent in software
>> development and hardware building. Evenings were wonderful dinners and
>> libations with lively discussions and arguments about mathematics versus
>> fingers as knowledge, machines for thinking, the sheer power and
>> intensity of image and sound experiences, the differences between those
>> writers, film people, and video people, making art with electronics and
>> art¹s electronic future. These were the kind of conversations that were
>> also taking place at the ETC Owego studio on the river with and among the
>> visiting artists.
>> 
>> I do not know all of what came out of those Odd Sunday gatherings. I do
>> know that Ralph, David and Paul developed a computer interface box. One
>> of them a 12 (?) channel in and out, with knobs for fingers, and voltage
>> control in and out was built and then used at the ETC with the Cromemco
>> Z80 micro computer, a hacker/designers computer at the time.  The system
>> could grab video stills as well as grids of video images. Hotspot dots
>> could be put on the image, reading gray levels and sending the gray level
>> info out as control voltages that could be connected to control
>> parameters on other video and sound processing tools.  Also Ralph, David
>> and Paul worked on and David released a fantastic software product for
>> dot-matrix printers that used the Amiga computer. It was called Fine
>> Print. It controlled dot-matrix printers.  They used physical hammer pins
>> to hit the  ribbon. If the ribbon was properly worn out, the printer pin
>> hammers could be controlled to strike the ribbon anywhere from one to
>> sixteen times. The result was a digital print with continuous tones of 4
>> shades of grey. The digital prints you could make with it were fabulous!
>> I made hundreds of prints with it. Ralph and Sherry made fantastic work
>> with it.     
>> 
>> Harland Snodgrass at the School of Art and Design at the NYSCC at Alfred
>> University was also working with David and Paul to get the Z80 there to
>> output drawings and computer animations. He was part of the Odd Sunday
>> activity. I still have the cardboard box interface unit and Z-80 that
>> David and Paul built together with Harland. Harland and his painting
>> class also built a Dan Sandin Video Image Processor. David and Paul
>> helped to get it through the last stages of building. It is still used in
>> the video program at Alfred and at the Institute for Electronic Arts.
>> Harland Snodgrass started the first, if not one of the very earliest
>> video arts programs in an art school in the United States. It would make
>> sense that that would happen in a College of Ceramics, ie: materials,
>> materials.
>> 
>> In the early 1980¹s a number of we living in Owego at the time and in the
>> near vicinity formed the ³Tuesday Afternoon Building Club². The goal was
>> to build, under David Jones¹s guidance, new and more advanced video
>> processing prototypes that would become printed circuit boards. As
>> printed boards there could be multiples and we in the club would be able
>> to have the systems for our personal studios and the ETC would be able to
>> have a new generation of video systems in the studio. Mimi Martin was
>> building a colorizer, Barbara Buckner a computer interface, Neil Zusman a
>> keyer, I was building a realtime video frame buffer. I maybe be
>> forgetting some. What were you building Matt Schlanger?  We got together
>> on many Tuesdays, ate ice cream sandwiches and soldered electronic parts
>> onto perforated boards. It was like jewelry making. David knew the
>> electronics. We were learning from him. We built our boxes.
>> 
>> As I remember Matt Schlanger and Richard Brewster worked with David at
>> the ETC to layout the printed boards for the new processing systems. The
>> boards were printed and the new boxes were built for the ETC studio. I
>> built a second video buffer together with David that had printed boards.
>> One of the printed digital video buffers, the FB-1, was installed and
>> used in the ETC studio.  The old hand wired video processing units were
>> retired as they became buggy. The ETC had new systems by the mid 1980s
>> that were in use until the day the studio was unplugged in 2011. A number
>> of the colorizers, keyers, oscillators and digital buffers that were
>> produced are presently in various artists¹and schools¹ studios. Also a
>> number of those systems have migrated to the Video Arts program and the
>> Institute for Electronic Arts  (IEA) at the School of Art and Design,
>> NYSCC at Alfred University, Alfred NY.  Also a number of those printed
>> board video systems are in use and available at the recently emerged
>> Signal Culture video studio in Owego. Thank you Jason and Debora
>> Bernagozzi, Hank Rudolph and David Jones for the new Signal Culture Owego
>> program and artist residencies. The IEA Alfred, founded in 1997 and the
>> Signal Culture Owego founded in 2012 continue the rich history and
>> heritage of emerging electronic technology and artist collaborations and
>> development.
>> 
>> More later.
>> 
>> The importance of the ETC artists exhibition video art opportunities,
>> communities of engagement,  state wise, nationally and internationallyŠ
>> 
>> The critical writings of ETC artists work Š
>> 
>> The numerous significant supporters at the New York State Council of the
>> Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Arts Council,
>> and the Ohio Arts Council.
>> 
>> 
>> Bests,
>> Peer Bode
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
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Sarah Watson
Chief Curator
Hunter College Art Galleries
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