Performance of Video Imaging Tools

1.Calligrams
Woody and Steina Vasulka | 4 min | 1970
Calligrams is one of the Vasulkas' earliest experiments with altering the analog video image. An image is rescanned from the monitor to capture and preserve the violated state of the standard television signal. The repetition of the horizontally drifting video image not only functions as visual rhythm, but is key to the conceptualization of the video image as unrestricted by the concrete frame, as in film.

2.Illuminatin' Sweeney
Skip Sweeney | 5 min | 1975
Skip Sweeney was an early and proficient experimenter with video feedback. A feedback loop is produced by pointing a camera at the monitor to which it is cabled. Sweeney and others were intrigued with feedback's ability to generate pulsing images like a living organism.

3. Video Weavings *
*Stephen Beck | 4 min | 1976
Stephen Beck moved from jazz to electronic music to electronic instrument building. The patterns in Video Weavings are based on sequences of colors in dynamic mathematical progressions, inspired by non-representational Islamic art.

4. Five-Minute Romp Through the IP
Dan Sandin | 4 min | 1973
In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor, an analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. In this segment, Sandin demonstrates the routing of the camera signal through several basic modules of the Image Processor, producing a "primitive" vocabulary of the effects specific to video.

5. Triangle in Front of Square in Front of Circle...
Dan Sandin | 3 min | 1973
In this elegant demonstration, Sandin explains the mistake of using common language concepts and spatial relations to describe what actually can happen on the video screen. The generated images act according to specific parameters set by the artist.

6. Video-taping
Ernie Gusella | 5 min | 1974
Gusella's title creates a pun on the term video "tape" by using a split screen in which one half is the electronic negative of the other. As he slowly removes the obscuring tape from one half of the screen, his ghostly negative image emerges, further confusing the viewer.

7. Exquisite Corpuse
Ernie Gusella | 5 min | 1978
The "exquisite corpse" named in the title of this piece refers to a favorite game of the Surrealists, played by passing a folded sheet of paper among a group; each person draws one section of a body on the folded segment without looking at the other sides. What was done with pen and paper, Gusella accomplishes electronically using the VideoLab.

8. Einsteine
Eric Siegel | 6 min | 1978
Eric Siegel, a child prodigy in electronics, built his first TV set out of scrap parts at the age of 14. His first video synthesizer was used to generate the installation Psychedelevision in Color for the seminal "TV as a Creative Medium" exhibition. Because the early version of the machine was unable to record the images it generated, Einstine was re-created by Siegel after the exhibition. The tape uses colorized video feedback to generate its psychedelic effects.

9. General Motors
Phil Morton | 10 min | 1976
A response to the inability of his local General Motors dealer to fix Morton's 1974 Chevy van to his satisfaction, this tape blends experimental image-processing techniques with documentation of the faulty vehicle. The tape reads like a consumer's manifesto. Morton delivers his psychedelically-inflected performance with humor and the conviction of an embattled consumer.

10. Merce by Merce by Paik
Nam June Paik | 10 min | 1975
Merce by Merce by Paik is a two-part tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp. The first section, Blue Studio: Five Segments, is an innovative work of video-dance produced by Merce Cunningham and videomaker Charles Atlas. The second part, produced by Paik and Shigeko Kubota, further queries the relationship between everyday gestures and formal notions of dance. Snapshots of the New York art world, a rare interview with Marcel Duchamp by Russell Connor, and a meeting between Jasper Johns and Leo Castelli are re-edited by Paik.

11.Crossings and Meetings
Ed Emshwiller | 4 min | 1974
Crossings and Meetings explores the image and sound of a walking man, expanding a simple image into increasingly complex permutations. Emshwiller uses various techniques to develop his images: fast-forward, rewind, multiple keying, audio modulations, etc. With its rhythmic repetition of images and concatenation of sound, this tape represents the fusion of audio, video, and dance explored by many artists during the period.

12. Complex Wave Forms
Ralph Hocking | 4 min | 1977
This intense electronic landscape transports the viewer into a world that is an abstract study in machine-generated imagery. Complex Wave Forms is one in a series of short tapes which explored oscillators.

13.Pictures of the Lost
Barbara Buckner | 8 min | 1978
Composed in 22 movements that introduce a series of silent, haunting, other-worldly landscapes, Pictures of the Lost hovers between figuration and abstraction, and reveals Buckner's sustained interest in spirituality. In 1976 Buckner moved to Rhinebeck, New York, where she and fellow media artists Gary Hill, David Jones, and Stephen Kolpan lived collectively under the auspices of Woodstock Community Video.

14. Video Locomotion
Peer Bode | 5 min | 1978
In this homage to photographer Edward Muybridge, a photo grid of a walking man is resituated in video space. Movement is created by detuning the video synchronization signal, producing horizontal and vertical drifts that expose the electronic space between the video frames. Borrowing images from Muybridge, Bode produces a crude persistence of vision system.

15. Music on Triggering Surfaces
Peer Bode | 3 min | 1978
In Music on Triggering Surfaces, Bode constructs an interface between audio and video systems. The luminance information (voltage) from the visual images traversed by the black dot is routed to an oscillator to produce the audio signal, which varies according to the changing luminance.

16. C-Trend
Woody Vasulka | 3 min | 1974
In C-Trend, one of Woody Vasulka's "dialogues with tools," the video raster, or monitor screen, is controlled by the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor. Each horizontal line scanned by the electron beam is translated into a live graphic display of voltage, radically reconfiguring the luminance information and the video image.

17. Switch! Monitor! Drift!
Steina Vasulka | 4 min | 1976
In this documentation of a studio landscape, two cameras' signals are combined through a luminance key. One camera is mounted on a turntable; the second camera is pointed at the first. As the tape progresses the luminance key is adjusted to include a broader tonal range through which the signal from the revolving camera is increasingly visible.

moderated by: V. Janeček and M. Vojtěchovský