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

[Benton C Bainbridge]

Murat, I love your poetic perspective on the ETC exhibit. Like you and
Goddard I see cinema as life, not it's mirror. When those moving pictures
are generated in realtime from an electronic signal, well - as Jason said,
"Video is Reality".

Again, I and my collaborators turned to music - mostly improvised and/or
electronic - as formal, practical and philosophical inspiration for our
media art practice. Yes, Goddard was an important early influence. More yet
important was the Surrealist seed that flew across the pond and its
seedlings, the American late modern art movements in general and New
American Cinema in particular. However, music remains the central model.

Why is this? I feel that music has these qualities distinct from plastic
and film arts:

1. Freedom from illusion: music may evoke vivid images, scenes or
beginning-to-end narratives, yet we can easily dissociate from these
meanings and listen abstractly. Even in musique concrete, reality becomes
grist for the signal mill in the hands of the synthesist/studio artist.

Bill Etra told me that, while looking at the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer,
Stan Brakhage asked if it could make a tree. Nam June Paik replied, "too
young! Too young". But even when empowered with "total plasticity of the
moving image" (Bill Etra's phrase for his life-long goal), the visual
performer/image processing/media synthesist always shapes the image. Yes,
Jason, I agree that the real-time electronic process is distinct from
illusory effects, whether optical or digital.

2. Time is life / attention variability: Though traditional cinema forms
exist in time, the fundamentally
language/storytelling/information/commercial purposed uses of the medium
ask for a different kind of attention. In other words, a TV may be left on
in the background and ignored, but the content isn't enriched by being
lived with at different levels of attention. I should make clear that #1
still applies; I feel that many electronic image media works that tell a
story may be absorbed poetically/musically/pure-imagistically. Excerpted
passages of Breaking Bad may function similarly, but those exceptions prove
the rule.

Here we can find an affinity between a  painting on the living room wall,
which is absorbed just as decoration for years or decades and studied
closely in quiet moments or with guests, and the way process/signal artists
often make and study their work - make a patch on the synth, peer
unblinking at every pixel as the knobs turn and volts ebb and flow, then
eat dinner while the patch still runs in the background. Still I think more
of the system and process, electronics and signal flow, and their
musical/poetic relation to natural phenomena, whenever I am in the presence
of any realtime generative/performative media artwork.

3. Signal as life force: we make music and visual music with our bodies and
instruments not to paint an illusory trompe l'oeil but to filter our world
through ourselves. (Here is a good place to mention that I think of dance
and choreography as visual music as well, I am inspired by, and often work
with, dancers but I know music much more deeply because I have a lifetime
of constant exposure to a wide range of genres and styles.)

Orange Blossom Special, Flight of the Bumblebees, and nearly every techno
song are an evocation of external or internal stimuli. Much of the work on
view at the ETC exhibit similarly taps into evocative rhythms and hues.
Though I feel Murat is right about the shockingly new images and their
creators' awareness of their originality, more often a second glance
reveals a heartbeat control signal, the oceanic cresting wave of a camera
feedback loop or the candy-colored process tape that looks just like... a
TV tube as candy jar.

4. A shared abstract language: here again I think Murat is absolutely right
about the self-conscious newness of media art's pioneers, but I am from the
second wave - the artists who grew up watching Walter Wright's Scanimate
spin art word twists on Electric Company, then later Nam June Paik's Global
Grooving on PBS. I felt this entire way of making was being erased from art
history as I sought to learn the language of the Signal. So, why bother
learning analog a/v synthesis if it had already been done, or newer tech
(at that time, digital/analog hybrid hardware or Amiga based realtime
instruments fed by miniaturized Hi8 cameras) was available? I wanted to
learn these instruments and formal techniques to enter into a dialog with
my heroes and history to see if I could still express something unique to
me. I wanted to add my voice to the chorus. I also wanted to "jam" with my
peers and our pioneers, so I had to practice.

Since the early 90s I preferred text-less, abstract media artmaking because
i wanted to connect with something universally human across all bounds of
language, class, religion and culture. I felt that synthesized, generative,
processed and performative media art would prove to be timeless and able to
be appreciated by nearly anyone once "the tools of electronic media became
as common as the pencil". Now of course, this is actually happening, as the
full house at HCAG for the opening seemed to reflect. Nam June Paik turned
to old TV robot video sculptures as a familiar frame work to present
radically new kinds of unseen images; the third wave of media artists and
their art enthusiast peers are far more electronic-visually sophisticated
as a generation and can easily unravel complex imagery from studying a
little.

5. Realtime collaboration: by no means unique to music, nonetheless musical
collaborations have long impressed me with the fluidity of roles. The
leader/side musician dynamic of jazz groups was a helpful model, but the
Downtown improv scene was our direct inspiration. From these artists we
learned to solo or comp from moment to moment, not just bar to bar. Thet
technical demands of realtime visual performance at ETC would require us to
jump from behind to right in front of the camera during a brief blast of a
vacuum cleaner (Bainbridge/Bonner/Giles/Koontz/Stohmayer 'We Machines",
part of the ETC DVD), then to run to the sampler keyboard  to trigger an
audience cheer, followed by a turn on the Jones Sequencer.

These are just a few reasons that music was our model, not film/TV language
effects. In fact, many of the 2nd wave had film and television school
training like myself (which was less commonly available before my young
adulthood) so we were consciously seeking a more flexible, modularly
synthetic  way of making art. Many like myself had grown up with video,
electronics, computer, synth and sampler tech as a teen and we found ETC's
custom synthesis/image processing custom tools more inspiring and
challenging than the conventional broadcast studios where we had day jobs.

I could site more examples with time but I must prepare for tonight's
supermoon eclipse show ,I hope we all have a good viewing!

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

> 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
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
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