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

Mon Sep 28 01:34:59 AEST 2015

Murat,

I am talking about the physical properties. Sure, the lens can pick up some
things that are unseen, but what I am talking about is a reaction to the
play of light through celluloid teaches the viewer that non
representational imagery is as effect, not as a process of things
happening. That is the difference. I am not trying to put the whole of film
in a corner, I am articulating the difference between what is seen as
special effects in film and the process based imagery seen in the works
that were made at the Experimental Television Center.
-Jason

On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 9:12 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Watching the exhibits at the opening last Thursday, not as a practitioner
> but as an interested party (I am a poet), I was struck by two things
> particu;arly: first, the mesmerizing effect many of the constructs had on
> me. That was not very surprising to me because I was aware
> images,particularly repeated and detached from words, may have that effect
> (I did not use any of the ear phones, basically because I couldn't hear
> wear through them). Nevertheless, it occurred to me that perhaps in digital
> art that Mesmer-ly effect occupies an essential part, as in photographs. I
> do not know whether this is entirely true. I only want to say that this
> effect is different from illusion. It is rather its opposite, decomposes
> illusion and points to something illusion hides. A machine perhaps, again
> like the photograph, to dis-cover the uncanny.
>
> The second effect was perhaps more powerful. Looking at *some* of the
> works, I had a sense that the creators were aware that they were bringing
> images into existence for the first time, creating new images. Once again,
> these images were not illusions because they were not copying or
> representing anything--except as the projections of the mind. I sensed a
> medium that, properly used, can be the medium for a new kind of
> subjectivity; not particularly of feelings but of thought. Because of that
> the two graphs comparing how the insertion of the "computer" affected and
> altered the previous channels of communications constituted one of the most
> powerful images in the exhibit.
>
> I also would like to comment on something that I think Jason said. To call
> cinema a medium that creates illusion is too general and not correct. One
> should just think what Godard may have meant when he said "cinema *is
> (not imitates)* life." To consider the lens to be a medium of
> reproduction is totally to misunderstand it, something many people during
> the origin of photgraphy did. The lens, as an optical robot records things
> that the naked eye misses. That is its originality as a machine.
>
>
> *Ciao,Murat*
>
> On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 1:12 PM, Jason Bernagozzi <jason at seeinginvideo.com
> > wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> 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
>>>
>>
>>
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