[-empyre-] Week Three Guests: Bernagozzi (x2), Bainbridge, Turim

[Jason Bernagozzi]

Sure Benton, I think that is a good idea to discuss. First, I just want to
remark that the scale and importance of this exhibition will hopefully be
talked about for quite some time. I have never been so fully engaged at an
opening, and seeing the love and support for ETC was heartwarming. I am
sure that Ralph and Sherry had smiles on their faces all night, even if
they could not be there. I also want to say that Tim and Sarah's work on
this exhibition was thoughtful, engaging and more importantly, it captured
the spirit of the center and what it represented (which is no small feat).
Congrats to everyone involved..

For those of you who are not familiar with this device, the Paik/Abe Raster
Manipulator (aka the wobbulator), was first constructed by Nam June Paik
with the guidance and expertise of video engineer Shuya Abe in the late
60's. I am not sure why it was eventually called a wobbulator, but for some
reason I imagine this is a term that someone like Walter Wright probably
coined (sounds like him). Simply put, a wobbulator is a modified television
that has a series of larger TV yokes and hand wrapped copper wire coils
that are placed in certain areas of the back of a cathode ray tube so that
when voltage is fed through them, they become electromagnets that cause the
raster to scan in wild patterns on the screen of the television. A good
example from the Hunter exhibition is Marisa Olson's "Black or White",
found here: https://vimeo.com/110210532

Now, the reason I maintain this is an instrument instead of a prepared
television like Paik used for works like "Magnet TV" is the ability to
visually articulate a wide range of "notes" from which the user could
"play" the unit. The traditional unit had three basic functions: S,
Hotizonal and Vertical. All of these manipulations could be controlled by
the frequency of the audio or control voltage being fed into the coils of
the unit, so the range of what you could get out of a wobbulator is as
broad as you could get out of audio synthesis (which is to say, a lot!)

The wobbulator for this exhibition was created in the spirit of the unit
that was used by most of the people who came through the Experimental
Television Center. It is created from a Sony TV 760 television from 1967,
which was one of the early portable TV's that Sony made. I did leave out a
couple of features, such as the raster collapse/reverse switch, for
logistical reasons so that the gallery staff would not accidentally burn
the screen of the unit and to keep it relatively simple for them to set up.
Otherwise, most of the hardware is similar to what you would have seen on
the unit at the Experimental Television Center, except that I used a new
method that Dave Jones and I came up with over the summer for the
vertical/horizontal deflection. The TV's center's unit had a dolor
deflection yoke from a TV from the early 60's that would be used for
horizontal and vertical deflection. The problem with building this today is
that there are very few of those tv's or those size yoke available anymore.
So, our method we created this summer is a technique to use modern yokes by
detaching them from their housings and clamping the new yoke from the side
rather than having to slip it over the back of the CRT tube.

Technical details aside, the unit  that I made for the exhibition is kept
behind glass for safety reasons. So, to generate the signals I simply
created a program in Max/MSP/Jitter that phased the S-coil and vertical
coil signals to be offset from one another with ramping values from 58-62
hz in order to show variability in the image manipulation. A 60 hz sine
wave will create the effect, but it won't move very fast, so having small
changes brought out the dynamism of those coils. The signal was also being
brought up and down in volume, which affected the intensity of the process
and also leaving some "breathing room" for viewers to be able to see their
unaffected image on the screen and watch it ramp up and be ripped apart by
the raster displacement. I then recorded these phasing changes for about an
hour and burned the audio to a DVD and fed that into the amplifier that is
running the wobbulator. I could have put it on a computer, but I wanted to
make this as simple as possible for the staff at Hunter to deal with since
I was not there to set the unit up, and I think it worked pretty well.

When talking about video instruments, a large part of the discussion that
is not necessarily understood by those outside of the community is that
these are not merely special effects. These signals that are being
generated and are being affected by real manipulations to circuitry.
Perhaps this goes back to the tension between film and video being seen
nowadays as the same thing, to me they could not be further apart. This is
not a value judgement, but in terms of vocabulary they represent entirely
different physical and metaphorical states of being. Film is about
illusion, light passing through celluloid to give the appearance of
something being there, a ghostly shift of light to transport a viewer to
somewhere that does not exist. Video is reality. Maybe not the reality we
perceive, but it is electronic, instantaneous, and helps us visualize
things that are not inherently visual. Yes, you can use video as illusion,
but that is because it is being used like film (which is a fine application
mind you, just not necessarily the kind you might find at this exhibition).
Special effects, to me, mean illusion. I think a better term to describe
the work seen at the Hunter exhibition is "process", something that is
occurring, being figured out and articulated in real time, giving the
artist an electronic voice from which to speak.

When you are watching a wobbulator do what it does, you are watching
magnetism happening. All kinds of things come to mind, such as the idea of
the electronic image being an eye into a spectrum of our world that we
cannot perceive without it. It calls into question our bias towards
perception as truth, and in many ways all of the instruments used at the
center expose the signal as something inherently manipulative. Paik was
aware of this, and if you understand that video synthesis in many ways can
be used as a tool to both expose media and empower people, you can see a
direct line in his body of work from cutting off ties to making Nixon
wiggle around on screen. For him, the wobbulation wasn't a cool effect, it
was a way to show that despite causal appearances and assumptions, the
monumental broadcast giants are in fact just made up of fragile,
impermanent signals. When he wobbulated the Beatles, Nixon and other media
personalities, he was showing you how little power they have over the
viewer, making them puppets that dance around and rip apart.

I'm excited to see these discussions continue, what a great month at Empyre!

-Jason


On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 11:41 AM, Benton C Bainbridge <
bentoncbainbridge at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm still "processing" ;) the abundance of art, tech and artifacts I
> enjoyed along with the huge crowd that packed the HCAG for "The
> Experimental Television Center: A History, ETC..." In advance of my empyre
> post-"ETC" exhibit post, I'd like to ask Jason Bernagozzi if he can write a
> little bit about the "Wobbulator". I'm particularly interested in how the
> control signals are being generated and fed to this modified TV to create
> the raster patterns at Hunter. Jason, your introduction to the Wobbulator
> during the Exhibition walk was informative and eloquent - could you put it
> in writing for our "Video: Behind and Beyond" discussion?
>
> thanks, Benton
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20150926/93c66007/attachment.html>