PART FIVE:

TELEVISION AS A CREATIVE MEDIUM

"Art has operated in the gap between what we know and what we dream. The
gap is closing quickly: what we dream is often what we see. Television will serve
to bridge the gap and to guide the way toward a more successful environment.
The eyes replace the me's and we arrive at a condition where what we show
becomes what we say."
EDWIN SCHLOSSBERG

On July 20, 1969, approximately 400 million world people watched

the same Warhol movie at the same time. As iconographic imagery
goes there's no appreciable difference between four hours of Empire
and four hours of LM. There even were similar hallucinations of
redundancy in our sustained hot cognition of NASA's primary
structure. The bit-capacity of that Minimal hard-edge picture plane
without gray scale was really amazing. We were getting a lot of
information in dragtime across space-time. And they called it
Tranquillity.
The first moon landing was the first global holiday in history. They
even mounted the camera at an Orson Welles heroic low angle to
catch Beautiful Buzz Armstrong the Archetypal Spaceman coming
down the ladder to recite his historical speech: ". . . one giant step
for mankind.'' But few commentators remarked, then or later, that
mankind hadn't moved an inch. No one said how really convenient it
was to sit there in your home, looking directly at the moon dust,
listening simultaneously to four or five conversations separated by a
quarter-million miles, getting metabolic information about the Buzz
Armstrongs in a closed-circuit loop that extended humanity's total
brain-eye out around the moon and back. Who needs telepathy?
The growth of television has been phenomenal. In 1948
approximately 200,000 American homes had television sets and 15
television stations were broadcasting regularly. In 1958 there were
520 stations broadcasting to sets in 42 million homes. Today there
are tens of thousands of broadcasters, and approximately 100

257

ARTSCILAB 2001

258 Expanded Cinema

million homes have television sets. There are 14 million color sets
alone in this country. In fact, there are more television sets in
American homes today than telephones, bathtubs, or refrigerators.
Television antennas bristle from the rooftops of ghetto shacks that
don't even have plumbing. An estimated quarter-billion television
receivers are in use around the world. Yet, because of political
sovereignties and profit-motive selfishness, more than one-third of
humanity is illiterate.
Television, like the computer, is a sleeping giant. But those who are
beginning to use it in revolutionary new ways are very much awake.
The first generation of television babies has reached maturity having
watched an average of 15,000 hours of television while completing
only 10,000 hours of formal education through high school. Yet
television itself still has not left the breast of commercial
sponsorship. Just as cinema has imitated theatre for seventy years,
television has imitated cinema imitating theatre for twenty-five years.
But the new generation with its transnational interplanetary video
consciousness will not tolerate the miniaturized vaudeville that is
television as presently employed.
At London's Slade School, the German-born video artist Lutz
Becker observes: "This purely electronic medium with its completely
abstract rules does not have its own art form which should develop
within the scope of new technologies and their almost chaotic wealth
of possibilities. A new art form is not only the result of new
technologies, but also the result of new thinking and the discovery of
new orders."
But no new orders are to be found in the economic society's use of
the medium it created. "A country that is chiefly interested in turning
out consumers and producers," wrote Robert M. Hutchins, "is not
likely to be much concerned with setting minds free; for the
connection between selling, manufacturing, and free minds cannot
be established. Such a country will transform new opportunities for
education into means of turning out producers and consumers. This
has been the fate of television in the United States. It could have
been used for educational purposes, but not in a commercial culture.
The use of television, as it was employed in the United States in the
1960's, can be put in its proper light by supposing that Guten-

ARTSCILAB 2001

Television as a Creative Medium 259

berg's great invention had been directed almost entirely to the

publication of comic books.''1
A major portion of America's creative energy is siphoned off into
television's exploitation of the profit motive: "Few messages are as
carefully designed and as clearly communicated as the thirty-second
television commerical... Few teachers spend in their entire careers
as much time or thought on preparing their classes as is invested in
the many months of writing, drawing, acting, filming, and editing of
one thirty-second television commercial."2
1

Robert M. Hutchins, The Learning Society (New York: Praeger, 1968), p. 127.
Peter F. Drucker quoted in: Gerald O'Grady, "The Preparation of Teachers of Media,"
Journal of Aesthetic Education (July, 1969).
2

ARTSCILAB 2001

The Videosphere
I have found the term "videosphere" valuable as a conceptual tool to
indicate the vast scope and influence of television on a global scale
in many simultaneous fields of sense-extension. Like the computer,
television is a powerful extension of man's central nervous system.
Just as the human nervous system is the analogue of the brain,
television in symbiosis with the computer becomes the analogue of
the total brain of world man. It extends our vision to the farthest star
and the bottom of the sea. It allows us to see ourselves and, through
fiber optics, to see inside ourselves. The videosphere transcends
telepathy.
Broadcasters now speak of "narrowcasting," "deepcasting,"
"minicasting," and other terms to indicate the increasing decentraliation and fragmentation of the videosphere: regular Very High
Frequency programming (VHF); Ultra High Frequency specialinterest programming such as educational television or foreignlanguage stations (UHF); Community Antenna Television (CATV);
Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV); Videotape Recording (VTR);
Videotape Cartridges (VTC); Electronic Video Recording (EVR);
Satellite Television (COMSAT, INTELSAT) all of which amount to a
synergetic nonspherical metaphysical technology that drastically
alters the nature of communication on earth.
Although the emphasis now is on the EVR cartridge and videotape
cassette as being revolutionary developments in communication, the
more likely possibility is that CATV and the videophone will provide
unparalleled freedom for the artist as well as the citizen. In addition
to regular broadcast programming, CATV operators may establish
subscription systems through which customers might receive as
many as eighty channels of color programming not available to the
VHF or UHF audience. Much of this programming obviously will
constitute the kind of personal aesthetic work to be discussed in this
ook. CATV subscribers may lease receivers with high-resolution

260

ARTSCILAB 2001

The Videosphere 261

1,000-scan-line pictures, compared with broadcast TV's 525 scanlines.3 In addition to providing videofax newspapers, magazines, and
books, CATV will allow "visits" to friends, shops, banks, and doctors'
offices without ever leaving the comfort of one's home. CATV
systems are now being developed to transmit programs to home
VTRs while a family is sleeping or away from the house, to be
replayed later.
It is estimated that ninety percent of American homes will be wired
for CATV by 1980, primarily because "demand TV" or
"telecommand" systems are expected by about 1978. By this
process one will telephone regional video-library switchboards,
ordering programs from among thousands listed in catalogues. The
programs will be transmitted immediately by cable, and of course
could be stored in the home VTR if repeated viewings are desired.
The videophone will be included in a central home communications
console that will incorporate various modes of digital audio-visual
and Xerographic storage and retrieval systems. New developments
in videotape recording will be crucial in this area.
There are two key phases in information storage: recording and
retrieval. Retrieval is perhaps more important than recording, at least
at this early stage. Retrieval systems are more difficult to perfect
than recording devices. Nam June Paik has illustrated this problem
with the difference between the English alphabet and Chinese
characters. "Retrieval is much quicker with Chinese characters," he
explains. "You can record (write) quicker in English but you can
retrieve (read) quicker in Chinese. One is retrieval-oriented, the
other is recording-oriented but you read more than you write." Thus
it is quite likely that video-computer systems will be available for
home use with one-inch videotape, half devoted to video information, half to digital storage codes.
After some twenty-five years of public television, we are just now
developing a sense of global unity that is destined to affect directly
the life of each individual before this decade is past. We have seen
that technology already is fragmenting and decentralizing broadcast
3

Electron beams in camera-tubes and picture-tubes scan the screen in 525 horizontal
lines from top to bottom. This is standard in the United States. Associated with this is
what are called "lines of resolution." Since microwave broadcasting tends to dissipate the
coherence of a signal, it is composed of only approximately 320 lines of resolution by the
time it reaches home receivers.

ARTSCILAB 2001

262 Expanded Cinema

The Picturephone: "A completely new video

environment and life-style." Photo: Bell
Telephone Laboratories.

television. Soon entertainment and localized functions of the video-sphere

will be handled by CATV and videotape cartridges, leaving broadcast
television free to perform vital new tasks. Large communi-cations
conglomerates such as RCA, CBS, ABC, CBC, BBC, Euro-vision, Bell
Telephone, AT&T, and COMSAT are now planning net-works of planet
analysis that will result in television as a constant source of global
metabolic and homeostatic information.
Direct satellite-to-home television has been technically feasible for some
time. Scientists at Bell Telephone and COMSAT anticipate fifty domestic
communications satellites in orbit by 1977. The total system will be
capable of 100,000,000 voice channels and 100,000 television channels.4
Hughes Aircraft engineers estimate that within the decade individual roof4

Videa 1000 Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 3 (New York: Videa International, January, 1969).
ARTSCILAB 2001

The Videosphere 263

top antennas will pick up twenty-five to thirty channels from "local"

satellites in addition to whatever video information the home may be
receiving from CATV and videotape cartridges.5
Existing satellites now deliver photographs and video images with
such high resolution that "COMSAT typesetting" is possible. A CBS
satellite system employed by the military to flash reconnaissance
photos from Vietnam to Washington reportedly resulted in color
qualities "as good or better than National Geographic." In 1969, RCA
engineers began work on video cameras and receivers capable of
10,000- and possibly 12,000-scan-line resolution. Also in that year,
RCA officials proposed that NASA's TIROS M meteorological
satellite could be converted into an "earth resources" vehicle to help
overcome food shortages and combat pollution problems. Equipped
with special high-resolution 5,000-scan-line cameras in a 500-mile
orbit, the satellite would yield picture resolution equivalent to 100
feet above ground. Higher resolution would be possible, officials
announced, but some countries would complain of "invasion of
privacy.
On the receiving end, the next few years will see the development
of transistorized sets with 500-hour rechargeable batteries; TV sets
that can screen 16mm. movies through the color cathode tube by
using built-in telecine systems; so-called spectral color 3-D television
without Polaroid glasses; four-by-six-foot cathode tubes only one
foot thick; self-correcting color receivers that will correct even broadcast errors; one-gun color sets that will eliminate three-gun
registration problems; stereo TV; new color TV projection systems
that will project six-foot color images with brightness and registration
equal to studio monitor equipment; two-dimensional laser color TV;
tubeless TV cameras smaller than a man's hand, coupled with TV
receiving tubes the size of a quarter. And it is estimated that the flat
wall-size plasma crystal screen will be distributed commercially by
1978.
Individual personal expression through videotape has begun only
recently, and the artist who works with videotape as his own
personal medium of expression is still quite rare. However, new
developments in small inexpensive portable videotape recording
systems will completely revolutionize this mode of artistic freedom.
5

Ibid.

ARTSCILAB 2001

264 Expanded Cinema

As early as 1968 several firms demonstrated prototype low-cost

home VTR systems in the thousand dollar price range. It is expected
that by 1973 one will be able to purchase a color TV camera, color
VTR unit, and color display console for less than $1,000. By
comparison, similar equipment in 1970 ranged from $11,000 (Sony)
to $50,000 (Ampex).
However, within the next few years we'll witness the growth of
video cartridges and cassettes into a market greater than that
presently enjoyed by books and records. The potentials are so
impressive that Jean-Luc Godard, possibly in a moment of passion,
once vowed to abandon his feature-film career to make "instant
newsreels" via portable videotape equipment. The first serious
competitor to Columbia's EVR system will be Sony's videotape
cassettes for home VTRs, to be marketed by 1973. At approximately
the same time RCA will introduce its "SelectaVision" unit, which will
play pre-recorded tapes through any TV set using a safe low-power
laser beam and special scratch-proof vinyl tape. Virtually all video
hardware manufacturers are developing their own versions of the
videotape cartridge storage-and-retrieval system.
Meanwhile a whole new area of feature film cartridge projection
systems has developed to compete with the video cassette market.
Kodak, Bell & Howell, Fairchild, and Technicolor have demonstrated
cartridge projection systems for home viewing. Zeiss-Ikon has
developed a compact textbook-size cartridge projector for 300-foot
cassettes of 70mm. film divided into twelve separate image tracks to
produce two hours of color sound movies in stop-motion, slow
motion, and reverse, using a capstan drive instead of sprockets.
It is now obvious that we are entering a completely new video
environment and image-exchange life-style. The videosphere will
alter the minds of men and the architecture of their dwellings.
"There's a whole new story to be told," says video artist Scott
Bartlett, "thanks to the new techniques. We must find out what we
have to say because of our new technologies."

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics

The underlying principle in creative use of videotronic hardware

might be called "video synthesizing," just as we speak of sound
synthesizing in the Moog process. There are no special restrictions
inherent in the video signal as opposed to the audio signal. Anything
that can be done with sound can be done with video if the proper
hardware is available. The basic ingredient of alternating current is
identical in both processes, and represents potential for as many
variations as the equipment will allow. Just as the new filmmaker
seeks to synthesize all the elements of his technology, so the video
artist attempts to synthesize the possibilities of his medium in the
creation of electron synaesthetics.
Since present television studio equipment was not made for the
purpose of aesthetic experimentation, artists have been forced to
work within parameters that amount to video imitation of cinematic
techniques: electronic equivalents of cinematic wipes, fades, superimpositions, and traveling mattes. There are, however, certain advantages in working with video systems to achieve variations of
these effects quite unlike their cinematic counterparts, and with
considerably less expenditure of time and effort.

The Television Camera

In standard photography a photosensitive emulsion on a strip of
acetate is exposed to lens-focused rays of light that form an image in
the emulsion. A similar principle is involved in television except that
the image is translated into coded electronic-signal information and
is then "erased" to make way for another image. Inside every TV
camera, instead of film, is a photoconductive camera tube. These
tubes are called variously Image Orthicon, Vidicon, Staticon, and
Plumbicon, depending on the chemical makeup of the tube's
photosensitive surface, which is called the photocathode screen. For
many years the Image Orthicon was the standard camera tube.
Recently, however, the Plumbicon, whose photosensitive surface is
composed of lead oxide, has become the popular camera tube.
According to how much light is focused onto the surface of the
265

ARTSCILAB 2001

266 Expanded Cinema

photocathode screen, each tiny photosensitive element becomes

electrically charged, building up a "charge pattern" across the screen
proportional to the lights and darks of the televised scene. This
charge pattern is swept across, or "read," by a beam of electrons
emitted from a cathode gun in the camera tube. The beam
neutralizes each picture element on the photocathode screen as it
sweeps across, producing a varying electric current that corresponds
to the pattern of light and shade in the televised scene.
As each photoconductive element on the screen is scanned by the
electron beam and relinquishes its information, it is said to be "wiped
clean" and can therefore respond to any new light image it may
receive through the camera lens. This charge-forming and
systematic "reading" is a rapid, continuous process with the entire
photocathode screen being charged, scanned, and recharged thirty
times per second to produce a constant scan-line pattern of 525
lines resolution, the standard in the United States.6

The Television Receiver

The video picture signal thus produced is subsequently amplified
and cabled through a video switcher/mixer console in the studio
control room where it is transformed back into a picture on monitors
that operate like home television receivers. Cathode-ray tubes in
television receivers are called "kinescopes." In them, a cathode gun
like the one in the camera tube sprays the phosphor-coated screen
with a beam of electrons synchronized with the exploratory beam in
the studio camera. The phosphor coating glows in the path of the
beam as it scans the picture tube. Horizontal and vertical "sync
pulses" keep the two beams in step.
A beam of constant strength would produce a white rectangle of
fine horizontal lines, which is called a "raster" and is the basic field of
the picture. But if the beam's strength is varied, the trace-point
brightness is varied also. When the video signal is made to regulate
the picture tube's beam, a pattern of light and shade can be built up
on the screen's phosphor corresponding to the distribution of lights
and darks focused through the camera lens thus a duplication of
6

Gerald Millerson, The Technique of Television Production (New York: Hastings House,
1961) and Howard A. Chinn, Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953).

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 267

the televised scene. This picture fades and is continually replenished

by the rapidly-scanning beam so that we see a clear, complete
image. In relatively low-resolution systems such as the 525-line U.S.
standard, a so-called rolling effect of the scan-lines can be detected
on the picture tube. In high-resolution systems of 1,000 to 5,000
lines, however, the resulting image is unflickering and extremely
clear.
The same principles are involved in color television except that
four camera tubes are incorporated inside each camera: one each
for the basic colors red, blue, and green, and one black-and-white
tube for use in aligning and resolving the three colors. In color
television receivers, three cathode guns instead of one are used to
scan the phosphor screen, electronically "mixing" the palette
according to the distribution of hues in the televised scene.

De-Beaming
The electron beam scanning the photocathode screen in the
television camera requires a certain strength, a certain amount of
electric current, in order to reproduce the image completely with
sharp definition and contrast. Controls on the camera called "gain
control clippers" are provided to assure that the beam is receiving
proper energy to reproduce the image. By deliberately starving the
electron beam of its required current, highlight details are washed
out of the picture, causing the image to be retained or smeared in
the camera tube. Any motion occurring in the brighter areas of the
televised scene will produce a lingering smear of the image similar to
the phenomenon of retinal persistence in human vision, but slower
and longer lasting. Accidental beam-starving often is noticeable in
musical programs when brass instruments develop flaring jelly-like
trails as they move. Deliberately causing and exaggerating this effect
is known as "de-beaming" or "rolling off the beam."
In color television, beam energies can be controlled in any of the
three primary color tubes inside the camera simultaneously or
separately. This means that the smear will be in one or all of the
three colors and their combinations. Thus a human face or figure
can be made to have brightly-colored outlines or ghost images that
seem to stick to the screen as the figure moves. In addition, the
three color tubes can be deliberately de-aligned from the
coordinating black-and-white tube, producing three separate color

ARTSCILAB 2001

268 Expanded Cinema

images moving together in time but spatially differentiated, as

sometimes occurs accidentally in offset color lithography.

Keying and Chroma-Keying

The video equivalent of cinematic matting is called "keying." As in
cinematography, the purpose is to cause one image to be inserted
into another image so that the background image is effectively
obscured by the insertion. Cinematic matting is mechanical whereas
video keying is electronic. There are two basic methods of keying:
"inlay keyed insertion" (static mattes and wipes), and "overlay keyed
insertion" (traveling mattes). Inlay keying involves a picture tube
displaying a plain white raster on its screen, which is seen through a
transparent masking plate (or "cel") by a lens focused onto a phototube that triggers a switching circuit. We select part of Camera One's
picture to be matted out and make an opaque mask (cardboard, etc.)
to cover the corresponding area on the cel over the inlay tube's
raster. The switching circuit automatically blanks out that area in
Camera One's picture, allowing the rest to show through wherever
the circuit "sees" the inlay tube's raster. Camera Two's picture is
automatically inserted into the matted area. Numerous wipes are
possible simply by moving a mask over the inlay tube's raster. These
wipe masks may be manually or electronically operated. Or they can
be photographed on motion-picture film, which is then run through a
telecine projector whose video signal triggers the switching circuit.
In overlay (traveling matte) keying, the switching circuit senses the
scale of grays in a televised scene. Clipper controls on Camera One
are adjusted to select the particular gray-scale level at which a
keyed insertion from Camera Two is desired. This level of luminosity
is known as the "switching tone." If a white switching tone is
selected, Camera Two's picture will be inserted into Camera One's
picture wherever the circuit "sees" the switching tone or a lighter
one. If a dark tone is selected, the insertion will be made wherever
the circuit "sees" that tone or a darker one. The shape of the
insertion is determined by the shape of the switching tone areas in
the scene. There must be a marked tonal difference between the
inserted subject and its surroundings for the switching circuit to
operate effectively. For example: Camera One shoots a dancer in

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 269

black leotards against a white backdrop; Camera Two shoots a

striped pattern. If a white switching tone is used, the dancer will be
seen against a striped background. If a black tone is used, the
dancer's body will be filled with stripes and the background will
remain white.
Ordinary use of keying as described here usually results in the
same sort of unconvincing, tacky visual effects as are generally
produced by traveling mattes in movies: that is, a scene in which two
images are trying unsuccessfully to be one. The problem lies in
general insistence on "clean" mattes. Tonal differences of at least
fifty percent on the gray scale must exist between the subject and
surroundings, otherwise the switching circuit reaches points where it
cannot distinguish between forms. This results in image-breakthrough and ragged "fringing" of matted edges, destroying the desired illusion of "objectivity." In synaesthetic videographics, however,
keying is employed purely for its graphic potential in design
information. Since there's no attempt to create the illusion of a
"foreground" figure being inserted into a "background" field, imagebreakthrough and edge-fringing are no longer a problem. In fact,
they are deliberately induced through a technique called "tearing the
key."
If there is no second video source, all areas of a scene above a
white switching-tone turn black and all areas below a black tone turn
white. If the scene contains a wide range of gray-scale tones with
little contrast a great deal of image-breakthrough and edge-fringing
will occur to the point where one cannot distinguish between the two.
Electronic metamorphosis has occurred. If the scene is a medium
close-up of faces in low contrast and a white tone is used, all facial
highlights will turn black while all lower gray-scale values will remain
normal. If a black tone is used, facial shadows will flash white while
lighter values reproduce normally.
If the clipper, or sensor of the gray-scale level, is adjusted up and
down the scale instead of being left at one level, the result is a
constantly "bleeding" or randomly flaking and tearing image. This is
called "tearing the key." In the scene just described, this would result
in a constant reversal of dark and light tones and a general
disintegration and reappearance of the image. If a second video
source is used, which happens to be the same image we're seeing,

ARTSCILAB 2001

270 Expanded Cinema

except through another camera, the result is a bizarre solarization

effect of flashing outlines and surfaces, or a composite in which an
image appears to be inside of itself.
Gray-scale keying is possible also in color television, flaring and
intermixing colors based on their gray-scale luminosity. However,
Chroma-Key, although limited in some ways, provides certain
advantages in color video work. Chroma-Key does not sense grayscale luminosity but rather color hues. Any combination of the red,
blue, and green primary tubes can be selected as the keying hue.
Whenever a background is a particular hue, it will be keyed out and
a second video source will be inserted. Any combination of colors in
the spectrum can be used, but blue is normally employed because it
is most opposite to skin tones and therefore provides the widest
margin for "clean" mattes. If a blue-eyed girl is in front of a blue
background and the Chroma-Key is set for blue, "holes" will appear
in her eyes into which any other video source including another
image of herself can be inserted.
In July, 1968, WCBS-TV in New York featured the Alwin Nikolais
Dance Company as part of its Repertoire Workshop series. The
dance composition, Limbo, was designed especially for Chroma-Key
effects and thus provides an excellent example of a certain approach
to this technique. In one scene of Limbo a man is threatened by
disembodied hands and arms. He is tossed aloft by them and,
according to the program description, "all of life's little problems are
thrown at him." To achieve this effect the principal dancer and the
chorus were positioned in front of a blue backdrop, all on the same
camera. The chorus members were dressed completely in blue
except for their hands and arms. Using a blue Chroma-Key, this
meant that wherever there was blue in the picture, the background
camera shooting smoke would show through. Thus the hands and
the principal dancer appeared to be floating through smoke clouds.
At one point, the hands appeared to pull confetti and streamers out
of nowhere and throw them in the air. The colored confetti was
concealed with blue confetti covering the top of the pile. It was
invisible until it was pulled out in the open.
In another segment, serial rows of running dancers were
suspended in green space. The inside of the dancers' bodies was a

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 271

Chroma-Key video matting makes

arms of Alwin Nikolais dancers seem
to float in space. Photo: WCBS-TV.

series of wavy stripes that moved from right to left to accentuate the
effect of motion. Two cameras and three videotape recorders were
used. In this way, three separate "takes" of one row of dancers were
combined in the final image. On take 1 the camera framed the
dancers at the top of the screen. The dancers were placed against a
large blue canvas backdrop that curved down to the floor, permitting
even lighting so that the dancers' full figures could be matted. The
background was a green slide that appeared wherever there was
blue in the picture. The outlines of the dancers cut the "hole" in the
matted green slide, and these "holes" were filled by another camera
shooting a revolving drum with painted stripes on it. This was
recorded on videotape 1 (VT-1). This was played back to the studio
where a wipe was used to combine the first level of dancers on tape
with a second level of dancers now being framed live in the center of
the camera. The resulting composite of two rows of striped dancers
was then recorded on VT-2. This was played back to be combined
ARTSCILAB 2001

272 Expanded Cinema

Two cameras and three VTRs were

used to suspend candy-striped dancers
in green space. Photo: WCBS-TV.

with the third level of dancers using the same process. The total
effect was recorded on VT-3.
In another vignette the dancers were to represent the torments of
everyday living, from crawling sensations to jangling nerves. The
final effect was of two lines of dancers, toe to toe, lying side by side
on clouds and water, holding long tapes above their head to
represent nerve endings. The outlines of bodies and tapes were
filled with red. The segment was done in two takes. The first take
was tape-recorded with the dancers lined up on the right side of the
screen. On the second take, the dancers moved to the left side of
the screen. The tape was played back and combined with the live
action using a vertical wipe. Later this effect, plus goldfish and
crawling ants, was inserted inside the body of the principal dancer.7
7

Technical descriptions of the Limbo program were provided by Herb Gardener, WCBSTV Studio Operations Engineer, in How We Did It, a publication of the WCBS-TV
Repertoire Workshop, New York.
ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 273

Two VTRs were wiped together in this

composite scene from the Limbo

program. Photo: WCBS-TV.

While demonstrating the nature of Chroma-Key, these examples

also clearly show how a purely electronic medium with an
unexplored range of possibilities has been used to imitate the older
discipline of cinema, and to express an archaic intelligence that
insists upon "objectivity" and linear development in graphic forms.
The rigid adherence to "clean" matting implies disdain toward what is
obviously the unique property of video keying: "metamorphosis," not
overlay or insertion. The new consciousness seeks the transformation of realities whereas the old consciousness ventures no further
than a timid juxtaposition of "objective" realities that retain their traditional identity. The fact is that there exists no cinematic equivalent of
video keying. Tearing a key in grays or colors produces graphic
designs of unique character, blending form and color in a manner
virtually impossible in any other medium. Video keying is inherently
synaesthetic; such a claim can be made for no other aesthetic
medium.
ARTSCILAB 2001

274 Expanded Cinema

Feedback
If a microphone is placed too close to its amplifier it squeals. If a
television camera is positioned too close to its monitor it squeals
also, but it squeals visually. This visual noise, like audio noise, is
called "feedback." Video feedback may be intentionally induced and
carefully controlled to produce graphic effects possible only through
this technique. The most common effect is the infinitely-repeated
image similar to the infinity effect of fun house mirror chambers. This
can be done with one, two, or three cameras shooting into the same
monitor that displays their output. One or two cameras can shoot
into a monitor that displays their output in addition to an image from
a third camera. There are a number of combinations based on the
principle of the squealing camera.

Telecine Projection
Because it is the video equivalent of a cinematic optical printer, the
"telecine projector," commonly known as the "film chain," plays an
important role in the production of synaesthetic videotapes or
videographic films. It is a device that projects slides or films directly
into television cameras whose signals are sent through a
switching/mixing console and then are broadcast or videotaped.
Telecine movie projectors are modified to project at the video rate of
30 fps instead of the cinematic rate of 24 fps. (A video "frame" is the
amount of signal information produced in the thirtieth of a second
required for the camera-tube electron beam to scan the photocathode screen one time.)
Since certain limitations are inherent in the physical and technical
characteristics of a live studio setup, the film chain offers many
advantages in the production of videographics where image control
and graphic integrity are extremely important. The video signal from
a film chain is "live" in the sense that a slide or movie is being rerecorded live. Thus it is possible to televise scenes that have been
prestylized and could not exist live in front of a studio camera. These
may then be combined on videotape with normal studio scenes.
Most film-chain cameras employ Vidicon tubes, which can be
controlled just the same as studio floor cameras. In fact, film-chain

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 275

vidicons often are more flexible to work with, since studio cameras
are fine-tuned and one frequently is forbidden to alter their adjustments. De-beaming and keying film-chain cameras produces a very
different effect, a more subtle effect than the same techniques in live
studio cameras, for the simple reason that film loops can be fed
through the system. Film loops allow one to rehearse, as it were, the
precise moments at which a certain effect is desired. Endless takes
can be made with the same image, an advantage not possible in
studio situations. For tape-mixing purposes, monitors show which
film-chain images are upcoming, and several film chains can be
synchronized for mixing onto one tape.
Slightly different procedures are involved in using film chains for
the production of videotapes as opposed to videographic films. The
primary difference is in the ability to manipulate colors. In filmmaking, the usual procedure is as follows: Original footage is shot on
16mm. or 35mm. high-contrast stock from which a workprint is
made. This print may then be edited in the usual fashion or fed
directly into a video system through the film chain. High-contrast
stock is used to overcome the image-breakdown effect of video
scan-lines, and to retain image quality as much as possible through
the three separate stages of videographic filmmaking: original
footage, videotape, and kinescope (videotape images recorded on
movie film). This process would tend to obliterate the subtle
shadings of slower, more sensitive film stocks.
Once the high-contrast work print is formed into loops and fitted
into the film chain, it can be processed through the video mixing/
switching system, augmented by de-beaming, keying, wipes, and
compounded with other video sources, either live-action, tapes,
films, or slides. The final master tape may be edited before a
kinescope is made. Assuming that the imagery has already
undergone three edits first as original footage, then in film-chain
mixing, then as a master tape a fourth edit may be performed on
the kinescope footage. This is then processed through an optical
printing system where color is added.
Since video colors reproduce poorly onto film, most videographic
films are shot in black-and-white with color added optically after
video processing is completed. However, as in the case of Scott
Bartlett's OFFON and Moon, color can be added to black-and-white

ARTSCILAB 2001

276 Expanded Cinema

film by running it through a three-gun, color film chain. The color is

induced electronically through the video circuit and appears on tape.
The same reproduction problem remains when a kinescope is made
of this color tape, and the final color print must be augmented in
optical printing. Videotronically-induced colors are desirable for their
unique qualities of electron luminescence, which cannot be duplicated in chemical photography.
Since synaesthetic videotapes are made with no intention of
transferring them onto film, color reproduction is no problem. Tapes
may be composed entirely through the film chain from looped film
information, or composites of film, live action, slides, and other
tapes. Color or black-and-white film stocks may be used since videotape color in a closed-circuit playback situation is always superior to
the incident-reflected light of movie projection.

Videotronic Mixing, Switching, and Editing

The television switching/mixing console, described by Stan VanDerBeek as "the world's most expensive optical bench," is an array
of monitors and switching circuits by which different sources of video
information are selected, mixed, and routed in various ways. Within
its basic ingredient alternating current exists the potential for an
art of image-synthesizing that could exceed the boldest dreams of
the most inspired visionary. Yet, because the equipment was neither
conceived nor constructed for aesthetic purposes this potential has
remained tantalizingly inaccessible. Traditional use of the video
system to imitate cinema is, in the words of one artist, "like hooking
a horse to a rocket." Still most artists are quick to admit that even
this limited potential of the television medium has not been fully
explored.
Most video systems are capable of handling only three image
sources at once. Although any number of sources may be
available most larger systems accommodate approximately twentyfour the maximum capacity for viewing is any combination of any
three of those sources. This is an absolutely arbitrary limitation
based only on the intended commercial use of the equipment, for
which three video sources are perfectly adequate. A few systems
can accommodate four video sources at one time. Still fewer, called
"routing switchers" or "delegation switchers," have five available

ARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 277

sources, each of whose five input terminals is fed by five more so

that the image potential becomes any combination of any five-timesfive video sources. This is a positive step in the direction of video
synthesizing.
Compounding this image limitation is the cumbersome and
unwieldy physical layout of the switching console itself. The primary
reason is that video hardware has been design-oriented around the
literary narrative mode of the cinema it imitates. It is built to
accommodate a literary instructional form in which the elements are
relatively simple and linear. In reality, the unique capabilities of video
are perhaps even further from the narrative mode than cinema. No
amount of written instruction could communicate the complexity of
technical and intuitive maneuvers involved in the synaesthetic
videographics we are about to discuss; and even if that were
possible, no engineer could spend the time required to read and
carry out those instructions: the program would never reach the air.
Video hardware has been designed around a depersonalized
instructional motive whereas it clearly should have been designed to
accommodate personal aesthetic motives since all technology is
moving inexorably in the direction of closer man/machine interaction
and always has been.
The result of this traditional perversion of the medium is that any
attempt at creativity becomes extremely complex and often flatly
impossible. Even relatively simple effects used commonly in movies
such as dissolving from one matted title to another matted title
are not possible with normal switchers. The desired effect is a
background scene over which title credits, either static or in motion,
dissolve from one set of words into another set of words without
changing the background. In video this requires a very elaborate
device called a "double reentry switcher" with six rows of push
buttons for each video source. Combinations of any of two- or threetimes-six buttons must be used in order to get the effect on the
screen.
Assume that one wishes a video image in which colors are
automatically reversed while blacks and whites remain the same; or
reversing the blacks and whites while colors remain unchanged;
draining a picture of all colors but one or two; enhancing only one or
two colors so that they become vivid while other hues in the scene

ARTSCILAB 2001

278 Expanded Cinema

Stan VanDerBeek at work in "the world's

most expensive optical bench," the mixing/
switching control room at WGBH-TV,
Boston, Massachusetts. Photo: Gene Youngblood.

remain stable; warbling a picture so that it looks like shimmering

water; composite wipes, so that the edge of the wipe moving across
the picture is not a hard edge but rather modulated by the audio or
modulated by gray scales or colors; numerical camera controls that
would cause one portion of a scene to grow larger or smaller
according to the control setting. All of these things are possible in
existing video technology, yet are not available to the artist in the
form of a mixing/switching console. Moreover, they are potentially
possible in a totally random and instantaneous fashion, whereas
much labor and many hours are required to achieve the same
effects in the cinema.
In addition, there is no reason that video switching must be pushbutton controlled so that the operator of a common master-control
switcher must select combinations of approximately one hundred
and twenty buttons. Effects could easily be tone- or voice-actuated,
or controlled by hand capacitors, photoelectric cells, or correspondARTSCILAB 2001

Cathode-Ray Tube Videotronics 279

ing pairs of voltages for transition effects. All of this could be realized
in integrated circuitry, reducing the mammoth proportions of existing
switchers by many times. Delegation or routing switchers could
accomplish with twelve buttons what now requires more than a
hundred.
The potentials of a video system are so vast that it becomes
physically impossible for one person to have them accessible to him
in a workable manner. This is where video-computer symbiosis
becomes necessary. Virtually every possible alternative can be
programmed into a computer, which then can employ them in a
specific programmed order, or within random or semirandom
parameters. Computer-controlled switchers can and will be designed
that allow simultaneous processing of the video source by computer
program, audio modulation, and manual override. In this way all
desirable features of synergetic technology would be available: the
randomness of a computer, which can be infinitely more "random"
than any human; the video being semicontrolled by its own audio;
and finally the artist manually overriding the whole system. Thus it
would be possible to preset all conceivable combinations of
alternatives for one video source, which could be actuated by one
button or one audio tone. These capabilities not only exist within the
scope of existing video technology, they are virtually inherent in the
nature of the medium.
Until recently the one major advantage of cinema over video was
sprocket holes and frames: that is, the ability to do stop-frame
animation. For many years the closest that video could come to this
was the digital method of videotape editing such as the Ampex
Editec system or the EECO system. These methods involved the
digital timing of the videotape cue track in hours, minutes, seconds,
and frames. Thus it was possible to pre-edit a videotape session by
setting a dial, or to do post-editing and single-frame animation,
though extremely time consuming and lacking precision. Remarks
video artist Loren Sears:
One of the hardest things to do is stop the recorders and try to sync them up
again. So the goal is to go from start to finish in planned lengths but still keeping
the tape recorders running. So I tried doing some animation with an Editec
system. You can animate by presetting anything from one to thirty-six frames,

ARTSCILAB 2001

280 Expanded Cinema

and there's a manual override that keeps repeating the same frame as long as
you hold it down. You lay down a cue track and set the machine going in an
automatic mode. It has a seventeen-second cycle time in which it rolls to a stop,
backs up and lays down a pulse where it's to pick up next time. It took about four
hours to do twenty or thirty seconds of animation, whereas in film that's all instant
with the single-frame button. This is exactly the reverse of other aspects of videoversus-film, in which video is much more expedient. It's an extreme example, but
it's something that film can do easily and there's no advantage of doing it in
television; you waste time, and you can be more creative in film.

However, greater animation control and simplicity is now possible

in video through computer-controlled color disk recording such as
the Ampex HS-200 system. It provides all of the editing freedom that
previously was possible only with film, plus the ability to pre-program
the insertion of cuts, wipes, dissolves, and other effects exclusive to
video all instantaneously, with the push of a button. Digital
identification and retrieval of any frame within four seconds allows
skip-framing and stop-motion at normal, fast, and slow speeds in
both forward and reverse modes. Apart from this positive note, I
have stressed the limitations of the video system as an aesthetic
medium because they need to be emphasized, and because the
many positive aspects of videographic art will be quite clear in the
pages that follow.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes
VT Is Not TV
It is essential to remember that VT is not TV: videotape is not
television though it is processed through the same system. The
teleportation of audio-visual information is not a central issue in the
production of synaesthetic videotapes; rather, the unique properties
of VTR are explored purely for their graphic potential. An important
distinction must also be made between synaesthetic videotapes and
videographic cinema: the videotape artist has no intention of
transforming his work into film.
"I've come to find out that there's a lot of difference between
seeing something on a TV screen and seeing it projected," explains
Loren Sears. "The two-dimensionality of the movie screen as simply
a surface for reflecting a shadow is quite obviously incident light.
Television doesn't have that two-dimensional quality at all; it doesn't
strike you as a surface on which something is being projected, but
as a source. It comes as light through a thing."
It is perhaps not surprising that the most important work in
synaesthetic videotape has been done through affiliates of the
National Educational Television network (NET). In 1967 an experimental video workshop was established at NET's San Francisco
outlet, KQED, with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Arts. Two years later the workshop had
become the National Center for Experiments in Television, with a
grant from the National Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1968 KQED became involved in a third project. In collaboration
with San Francisco's Dilexi Foundation, the station provided facilities
and assistance to artists commissioned to work in the video medium.
Some of the most impressive videotapes to be seen anywhere
resulted from this project, notably Terry Riley's Music With Balls and
Phil Makanna's The Empire of Things.
Meanwhile, that same year, NET's Public Broadcasting Laboratory
(PBL) produced a program of video experiments by six artists
including Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, and Otto Piene. The show,
called "The Medium Is the Medium," was produced at WGBH-TV in
Boston, where later in 1969 Stan VanDerBeek became the first of
281

ARTSCILAB 2001

282 Expanded Cinema

several artists to take up residence under a three-year Rockefeller

grant. He was followed by Nam June Paik.
A new breed of television management is evolving as teledynamic
video consciousness saturates the noosphere. Since the fundamental art of television rests in the hands of the broadcaster the
ability to move information through time and space his attitude
toward the medium is a matter of cardinal importance. We know
what most broadcasters think of the medium; in the following pages,
in addition to discussing artists and their work, I hope to present a
new attitude from a new generation of TV management. Until
videotronic hardware becomes inexpensive enough for individual
use it is the producers, directors, and station managers who make
today's video art possible. Brice Howard of the National Center, John
Coney of the KQED/Dilexi programs, and Fred Barzyk of WGBH are
exemplary of the new vision in television.

Videospace: The KQED Experimental Project

With few exceptions, most of the work produced during the first
year in the experimental workshop was black-and-white videotape.
The approach seemed balanced between use of the medium for its
kinaesthetic design potential, and the medium as vehicle or
environment for some other aesthetic content. Artists in residence
included a composer, Richard Feliciano; a poet, Joanne Kyger; a
novelist, William Brown; a painter-sculptor, William Allen; and a
filmmaker, Loren Sears.
In addition, various guests were brought in throughout the year,
participating from one week to three weeks. These included Ellen
Stewart of the Cafe La Mama theatre troupe; Paul Foster, one of the
playwrights who had come out of that workshop; Eugene Aleinakopf,
an expert in television law; Maurice Freidman, a theological
philosopher, particularly known in the United States for his English
translations of Martin Buber; Robert Creeley and Charles Olson,
poets; and Joel Katz, a New York psychiatrist.
The two most vital functions were performed by Robert Zagone
who was resident director of the actual videotaping sessions, and
Brice Howard, organizer and administrator of the project. I asked him
what answers had been found to the project's two questions: What is
the nature of the medium? Can an artist work in it?

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 283

BRICE: Yes, the artist can work in television. Of course it's quite a
different system from that of the artist. Artists generally are one-toone people. They and their medium are in direct contact. But the
television system engages a great many people; any product of
that system is the product of a number of people. No single human
being can make anything in television. And of course television
equipment is not easily available to the artist either.
GENE: One possibility is working through the medium of the
cassette videotape cartridge rather than a broadcast system.
BRICE: No question about it. But it s a long way off, not so much
technologically and commercially, but philosophically. The kind of
work going into the EVR cartridge now is institutional. The artist
will be the last to participate.
GENE: And what have you discovered about the nature of the
medium?
BRICE: Where I'm having the greatest difficulty in reporting this
occurrence is in discovering ways of separating the medium from
its broadcast, distribution characteristics. Television has been a
broadcast system, and for that reason its technology and its
practice grow essentially from that logic, the logic of distribution.
We accepted the inference that we were not obligated to produce
anything. And because of that, all kinds of things happened. If we
had started out by saying "let's make a program" it would have
been a pretty redundant or repetitious thing.
GENE: In your estimation the technology is separate from the
practice?
BRICE: The emphasis so often gets centered in the technological. I
want to take it away from the technology because it really is not
that. So frequently I find myself saying, when confronted with
technical questions, "It is not technology; it is attitude shift that is
making this happen." Indeed, there is no technology in any of the
experiences we've had that is greater than that which exists in any
standard television studio. We went after our goal from a different
place. For instance, you can experience some of our material and
feel that you're discovering an enormously rich technical
breakthrough, when as a matter of fact what you're experiencing is

ARTSCILAB 2001

284 Expanded Cinema

process. And the same process would be with clay, paint

anything. In this case the material just happens to be the electron.
All the tapes have no post-editing, are records of process, records
of discovery, untouched, nonobjective, nonprogrammatic. Very
often the most meaningful moments were those in which some
incredibly remarkable, mercurial connection was occurring among
a number of people, and the process was constantly feeding back
upon it.
GENE: Were certain visual effects deliberately sought?
BRICE: When you describe a particular visual effect achieved in our
work it must be remembered that there are so many other
elements involved. Television has been fed by four currents of
recent history, and one not so recent: cinema, radio, journalism,
and theatre. And the characteristics of these histories affected the
making process. You mention a specific effect and I might tell you
that keying is the technical means by which you acquire that effect.
But in order for that effect to be genuinely valuable we have to add
theatre's part, journalism's part, radio's part, and film's part. Then
keying becomes something meaningful.
GENE: What effect does radio have on keying?
BRICE: It has to do with the architectural space in which the
experience occurred. You see, the fascinating character of the
space in which some of the sources of the mix are acquired is that
it's a space of a different order. The television studio is affected
architecturally by the influences of theatre and radio. For example,
the audiometrics the acoustical character of that situation is
very much influenced by microphones which preceded television.
And how sound pickup sources affect the order of masses, planes,
volumes, compositions, so on. Very frequently the imposition of
that technology, which has nothing to do with the experience you're
seeking at the moment, is there nonetheless and has to be taken
into consideration, forcing certain kinds of compromises. For
example there's no reason that an omni-directional acoustical
transducer cannot be devised to pick up all the sound in all the
360-degrees of cubic space within the studio. But there isn't one.
And that's partly a factor of radio and partly a factor of film.
The architectural space itself is very close to theatre, from which
film derived its basis, etcetera, etcetera. And indeed in a conven-

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 285

tional studio, ask a so-called set designer, stage designer,

television art director (all those terms apply to the same man in
television; all those terms are used in television), you ask that man
to fix you an environment and more frequently than not he'll fix you
an environment that looks like it's on a stage. Indeed you can
almost see the proscenium arch. Now the cubic space with which
you are dealing in this newer mode of television is of a different
order entirely. The only space which is valid is the space on the
surface of that monitor. Whether or not one wants to argue about
the word "space" is irrelevant as long as you understand the intent.
I'm saying that it isn't in the studio, it's in the monitor. Now, the
monitor screen has some remarkable characteristics. Among other
things, it itself is information irrespective of anything you put in it
sign, symbol, rhythm, duration, or anything. It is delicious all by
itself, if you want to enjoy it, though its matter is apparently of a
totally random character. It is different, for example, from the
reflective surface, which is a movie screen, off which light bounces
with the image intact. But television is an electronic surface whose
very motion is affecting the motion that you're putting into it. And
what is really the richest part of television, less its technology, less
its cubist nature, less its incredible colorations and shapes and
motions and excitements it's now, it's capturing the damned
actual with all of its aberrations. Television will help us become
more human. It will lead us closer to ourselves.

Robert Zagone: The Music of Electrons

Virtually all of the project's black-and-white tapes, plus a one-hour
segment of a regular KQED color program called West Pole, were
directed by Robert Zagone, one of an increasing number of video
artists who approach the medium from the side of the new
consciousness. ("I mixed the programs," Zagone said. "We don't use
the term 'director' any more.") Out of more than forty hours of tape
approximately fifteen hours were considered relevant. Of these I
have selected two for discussion here.
The first is a brief but devastating exercise in feedback techniques,
which was among many effects accompanying a poetry recital by
Robert Creeley. This particular episode involves the gradual

ARTSCILAB 2001

286 Expanded Cinema

Multiple-camera feedback techniques

produced this disintegration of form
in Videospace at the KQED Experimental project.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 287

disintegration of the poet's profile in silhouette. In addition to the

figure, other image sources included multiple translucent plastic
surfaces being fed into a monitor that was taking images from still
another source. At one point all three cameras shot the same
monitor that displayed their images.
The result is an almost visceral, physical quality to the image as
endless waves of flaking matter peel away from the silhouette,
slowly at first, then faster and more chaotically, with ever-increasing
convolutions of geometrical patterns. A kind of serial nightmare, like
a magnetic field suddenly rendered visible, the reverberations of
chiaroscuro flip hectically in giant sweeping flak bursts of light until a
shimmering white glow is all that remains of the image of a man. "It's
really a matter of where your head is at with respect to the
technique," said Zagone. "I would say that it would take eight months
to achieve in film the same effects that took us one minute and fortyfive seconds with Robert Creeley's recital. And even then the texture
would never be the same."
Like most videographics, the immediate impression is of seeing
something that one has never encountered before, except perhaps
in dreams. This was even more pronounced in Zagone's interpretation of a solo dance sequence involving a male dancer in six
levels of delayed tape superimpositions of de-beamed positive and
negative images. Three cameras taped the dance simultaneously as
Zagone mixed. At first the dancer is silhouetted in black against a
white field. A second and then a third image of himself, delayed and
slightly staggered with each superimposition, appear like ghosts who
follow him through his routine. Suddenly the background becomes
dark and the dancer develops a glowing white outline or halo; his
facial characteristics become ominous with huge white eyes and
exaggerated features. Still more delayed images appear until there
are six figures of the same dancer seen simultaneously at various
points in time, like visual echoes. The richness of the image was
varied with each superimposition, causing some images to stand out
while others fade almost into nothingness. Finally, as though trapped
in some video world where space and time are out of register, the
dancer looms large and close, peering into (out of) the camera
(monitor) as though to examine the "real" world of men.

ARTSCILAB 2001

288 Expanded Cinema

Six levels of delayed videotape superimpositions of de-beamed positive

and negative images were combined
in this experiment at KQED.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 289

"The technique is satisfactory," said Zagone, "but requires

immense sophistication on the part of the user. You must constantly
be thinking in advance where will you be five superimpositions
from now? How will you deal with the tape at that point with respect
to the images you're creating now? We had no plan for that
sequence ten minutes before it began. The conceiving of it took
place as it happened in the cathode tube. It's all in the electrons. The
effects exist nowhere but where you see them. It's not in clipper
levels or blanking pulses or blacks and whites that's not where it's
at. The most successful moments occurred when we had absolutely
no preconceived notion of what would happen."
In May, 1968, Bob Zagone directed two half-hour segments of
KQED's West Pole, featuring a rock concert by The Sons of
Champlin. Even for young filmmakers of the San Francisco/Berkeley
area, where synaesthetic cinema is part of the life-style, this initial
exposure to pure video amounted to a revelation. An article in the
rock newspaper Rolling Stone described the show as "more
psychedelic than underground movies." The realization that
something so common and "public" as a television set could be the
source of virtually unprecedented visual experiences was the
beginning of a new socio-technical awareness that is now common,
as are the West Pole techniques. Colors bloomed, flared, and
melted; shapes disintegrated and intermixed; the picture-plane was
demolished in a cascade of spectral brilliance the Bonanza fan,
who knew that television was capable of something more, finally saw
that potential in all of its phosphorescent shimmering beauty.
GENE: What were you reaching for in the West Pole work?
BOB: I just wanted to fuse the electronic music with electrons. Video
is very close to music and rock music is very close to video.
GENE: What effects were you particularly pleased with?
BOB: Tape delays and de-beaming, primarily. We had been
working with refinements of those techniques regularly for six
months.
GENE: There's a fabulous scene where the fellow is singing: green
gaseous clouds move across his mouth, and when he opens his
mouth to sing, the inside is intense red.
BOB: That's a combination of tape delay, feedback, de-beaming,
tearing the key, and the black-burst generator which suffuses any
color with black.
ARTSCILAB 2001

290 Epanded Cinema

Loren Sears: Sorcery. 1968. VTR.

Black and white. 30 min. "I wanted to
express a feeling of entrapment in the
electronic environment."

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 291

Loren Sears: The Sorcery of Neuro-Aesthetics

Loren Sears regards television as an extension of the central
nervous system, and thus employs the term "neuro-aesthetics" to
indicate the unique character of videographic art. Sears produced
seventy-five minutes of experimental videotapes as an artist in
residence at KQED in 1968. The best was called Sorcery, which he
codirected with Bob Zagone. "Every medium," Sears explained,
has a fundamental means of operation. In film it's sprocket holes, registration,
optics, frames. The characteristics of television are different. In both cases,
however, there's a strategic way of using the medium effortlessly. Sorcery was an
attempt to go right through the medium using what it can do easily.
It occurred to me that if media are extensions of the central nervous system,
it's like you're taking on an extra load. There's more of yourself to deal with,
because while you're putting things out of it, you're also taking them back in. So
I'm certain there are hallucinations which occur entirely within this realm. It has its
own ability to create, its own importance, its own way of seeing things. It shapes
the world-view information that's put in and taken out of it. So I wanted to do a
very intuitive piece that would express a sense of the video mode of operation. I
wanted it to evolve without a script simply from camera techniques, mixing
techniques, a set, two people clothed in an odd fashion, some props like death's
heads. So I put Joanne Kyger and Chuck Wiley, with his violin, in front of a rearprojection screen for slides.
I wanted to express a feeling of entrapment in the electronic environment. You
watch television and all you know is what's going on in television. That's all you
really find out. There's no way to tell if that's really what's going on in actuality. It
was pretty difficult to think of a way to suggest that, so I just told Chuck and
Joanne that they were totally trapped in this milieu and their problem was to try to
get through it somehow to outside reality through some kind of divination. They
were left alone in the studio with these instructions and two cameramen who had
been given shooting patterns to follow. They ad-libbed their way through it. Chuck
played his violin. And what happened was that they began to feel it. It began to
work on them.

Through de-beaming and keying of one camera while a second

camera was on tape-delay, an ominous sense of the video environment was generated through most of Sorcery. Relatively representational images slowly disintegrated into swirling diaphanous lines and

ARTSCILAB 2001

292 Expanded Cinema

clouds of light. The death's head melts into vague outlines through
which are seen smoky crumbling faces and ghostly superimpositions. Long sections of the half-hour tape are composed of
swirling lines as sounds and voices are heard as though from
another world. Humans interact with clouds of electrons, which seem
finally to engulf them.
"Any medium can be transformed by the user," Sears said. "The
paradigm for it all is music. There's the music of the medium, which
means it also has a muse. We can learn from it. Television has been
used as an attraction, a come-on, an effect. Nothing used for effect
is an art." Just as in his synaesthetic cinema, Sears merged
aesthetic and technique. There are no effects when form and
content are one.

Conceptual Gallery for Conceptual Art

The traditional triangle of studio-gallery-collector in which art
historically has thrived is slowly being transformed. The
psychological effect of television's totally immaterial nature may be
largely responsible for the contemporary artist's awareness of
concept over icon. For several years Gerry Schum has operated a
unique "television gallery" (Fernsehgalerie) at a station in
Dusseldorf, West Germany. "In art," he explains, "there is a general
change from the possession of objects to the publication of projects
or ideas. This of course demands a fundamental change in artistic
commerce. One of the results of this change is the TV gallery, more
or less a conceptual institution which comes into existence only in
the moment of transmission. After the broadcast there is nothing left
but a reel of film or videotape. There's no object that can be seen 'in
reality' or be sold as an object."
Somewhat similar ideas inspired San Francisco art dealer James
Newman to transform his Dilexi Gallery into the Dilexi Foundation in
December, 1968, with the purpose of "allowing more freedom for the
artist, reaching a general audience and making art an organic part of
day-to-day life." Newman was among the few gallery owners to
recognize television's potential as the most influential gallery in the
history of art. He engaged in a joint project with KQED-TV to

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 293

establish a regular series of programs in the form of an "open

gallery," not to sell objects but to move information the experiential
information of aesthetic design and concept.
Newman commissioned works by Robert Frank, Ken Dewey,
Walter de Maria, Yvonne Rainer, Ann Halprin, Julian Beck and the
Living Theatre, Robert Nelson, Frank Zappa, Edwin Schlossberg,
Terry Riley, and Philip Makanna. The first pieces, televised in the
spring and summer of 1969, were unanimously acclaimed. Chiefly
responsible for this success was KQED producer-director John
Coney, who coordinated, produced, and codirected many of the
video projects, working closely with the artists.

Terry Riley: Music With Balls

Rarely has the multiplex structure of any film or videotape been so
totally integrated as in the transcendental composition Music With
Balls (see color plates), conceived by Terry Riley and commissioned
by the Dilexi Foundation in 1968. It was the work of three men
whose separate disciplines meshed in synaesthetic alloy: Terry Riley,
composer; Arlo Acton, sculptor; John Coney, video mixer. Music With
Balls is a dialectical synthesis of nonverbal energies that strikes
deep into the inarticulate conscious. It inundates the beholder in
megabits of experiential design information, aural, visual, and
kinetic. To understand it we must understand its four elements:
music, sculpture, cinema, and video.
Riley's music is strongly influenced by the work of LaMonte Young,
with whom he is closely associated. Yet it can be said that Riley's
music is unique in itself and represents, with the exception of Young,
the most vital and refreshing American musical composition of the
late twentieth century. While he is seriously involved with the "row"
and "stasis" techniques that inform Young's work at a fundamental
level, Riley is able to subsume a wide range of musical structure,
combining the climax and directionality of Western music with the
stasis of Eastern modalities. The result is cyclic precision and a
buoyant mathematical randomness.
For Music With Balls, Riley pre-recorded four tracks of fourteencycle beats with a tenor saxophone and a Vox electric organ. Each
beat was assigned a pitch, thus forming a tonal "row" that he played

ARTSCILAB 2001

294 Expanded Cinema

back through oscillators. Various levels of tape delay were possible

by starting and stopping one or more of the tracks randomly. In the
studio Riley sat behind a bright red table, flanked by his tape
equipment. Against the recorded, delayed, and oscillated time cycles
he played rhythmic variations on his saxophone, effectively generating a static yet melodious macrostructure of cycles containing epicycles within epicycles. The music was alternately tense and
relaxing, a shimmering trilling universe of aural bubbles penetrated
randomly by syncopated wailing crescendi and diminuendi. The
overall effect was magical, soothing, hypnotic.
Two stereo speakers were fitted into two of Arlo Acton's giant black
spheres that were swung from the studio ceiling on long wires and
revolved around the set in diminishing circles, pushed periodically by
black-clad girls at either side. Thus the amplification of the cyclic
music was itself heard in a physically cyclic fashion as it swirled
about the empty space. A smaller chromed sphere was set in
pendular motion, like a giant metronome, just above Riley's head.
This had a calming, centering effect.
This auditory/tactile/kinetic environment was then processed
through cinema and video on several levels, all corresponding to the
cycle/epicycle mode. Tiny ball bearings suspended from threads
were filmed in ultraslow motion with a high-speed camera to make
them seem heavy. The resulting film of swinging spheres was made
into twelve loops that were then superimposed over one another in
all the various combinations and as many levels of multiple-exposure
as possible on one master print that had been cut into a strip as long
as the entire program, twenty-six minutes. This was fed through a
film chain as one possible video source.
Two floor cameras shot Riley in wide-angle and close-up, and also
focused alternately into a color monitor and a concave mirror. "The
mirror gave the entire image a curvature which corresponded to the
cyclic nature of the whole piece," Coney explained. "Also it broke the
repetition of the circular orbits by making them elliptical. Shooting the
color monitor was not done for feedback but simply to achieve an
electronified or subaqueous visual patina. A rather blue cast. Also it
accentuates the scan-lines which are appropriate to TV, and we
used them as a design element. In addition it gave us the ability to

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 295

have the same picture running synchronously on two different

scales. Seeing the image a bit larger on one camera than the other.
That produced a very interesting cycle effect, particularly when we
dissolved to another image."
The master tape of Music With Balls is a fabulously rich mantra of
color, sound, and motion. Huge spheres sweep majestically across
the screen trailing comets of shimmering ruby, emerald, and amber.
Contrapuntal trajectories intersect, pierce, and collide. Keying, debeaming, wipes, and dissolves result in phantasmagoric convolutions of spatial dimensions as Riley is seen in several perspectives at once, in several colors, alternately obscured and
revealed on various planes with each pass of a pendulum. The
composition builds from placid serenity to chaotic cacophany to
bubbly melodiousness with a mad yet purposive grace. Acoustical
space, physical space, and video space become one electronic
experience unlike anything the cinema has ever known.

Philip Makanna: The Empire of Things

"I'm supposedly a sculptor," remarks Phil Makanna, "but there's
something strange and maybe decaying about making things
things peopling the overpeopIed world with more junk, not really
touching anyone. More than anything I feel the frustration,
desperation, of wanting to be able to reach out and hold your heart."
With the startling beauty of his synaesthetic composition The Empire
of Things (see color plates), Makanna reached out through the
videosphere and held the hearts of thousands.
A combination of sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and electronic
engineer, Makanna was conducting a creative television course at
the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland when he was
commissioned by the Dilexi Foundation in 1968. At the college,
Makanna focused on TV as a medium specifically for such "fine"
artists as sculptors and painters. His approach followed two
directions simultaneously: videotape as a self-contained aesthetic
experience, and closed-circuit television as an environment for live
events of a theatrical nature. These included a collaborative effort
with the Mills College Electronic Tape Music center, involving live
performers, eight television cameras, twenty monitors, and eight

ARTSCILAB 2001

296 Expanded Cinema

audio recorders functioning simultaneously. In another project, three

and four acts of King Lear were presented simultaneously in several
modes: actors seen in rear-projected movies, actors in video
projections, actors seen through several closed-circuit monitors, and
"live" actors on a stage.
But it remained for the medium of broadcast television, and The
Empire of Things, to reveal to Makanna a means of reaching out to
the hearts of the public. "He has such a powerful conceptual mind,"
recalls John Coney, "that all I did was guide him into a general
technical format, offered suggestions that he could use as a matrix,
and explained the capabilities of the color-film chain in painting video
color. We processed The Empire of Things entirely by de-beaming
the guns of the film chain. We formed the film into loops and
practiced over and over again until the balance between form and
content was perfect. We had a couple of engineers Larry Bentley
and Wayne McDonald who were very interested in that piece of
equipment as an electronic painting palette."
While Music With Balls wholly nonverbal and concrete, The Empire
of Things is that rare combination of words and images often sought
but seldom achieved. Makanna miraculously manages to contrast
the abstraction of words with the concreteness of images, clarity with
ambiguity, alternating between evocation and exposition to produce
an overwhelming emotional environment of evocative powers. The
title of the piece is the title of a short story by H. L. Mountzoures that
appeared in the New Yorker magazine. An offscreen narrator reads
the entire story aloud while we see a collection of images shot by
Makanna specifically for this purpose, combined with stock footage
from old movies, newsreels, and TV commercials.
Mountzoures' story is itself a masterpiece of imagist prose, often
indistinguishable from poetry and only occasionally linear in
structure. A parable of war in surrealistic and extra-objective terms, it
consists of alternating haikuesque impressions of things observed,
events remembered, nightmares experienced, and realities confused
in the first-person consciousness of the narrator. One is completely
caught up in this strangely beautiful story as it unfolds with a
masterly richness of language. At the same time, however, the
images are generating their own, quite separate, world of impres-

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 297

sions. One is caught in a sensorium of contrasts, a dialogue

between visual and aural absolutes from which arises a pervasive
sense of abstraction. One is made keenly aware of nuances seldom
expressed with such clarity in any art form. The synthesis of harmonic opposites is raised to perfection.
Word-and-image connections are tangential at best, and often
starkly antithetical in conceptual content. The narrator might be
speaking of old belongings in an attic trunk, for example, while we
see a line of men on horseback at the rim of a steep cliff. As the
horses plunge down the incline, video de-beaming turns the sky
orange and sends mint-green flames streaking behind them. The
scene becomes an Expressionist painting of green shadows and
purple highlights quivering in a liquid mosaic of hues. This almost
Daliesque image of rainbow horses melts into an Impressionist
vision of sun-dappled woods. A horse and rider move slowly through
trees whose colors suddenly detach and float in midair. Images
merge until all that is left of the horseman is a cloud of electronic
pigment moving nebulously through a spangled field of Seurat-like
pointillist fragments. Elsewhere a man rides a bicycle that melts
beneath him; he performs a strange dance ritual on a deserted
beach as the sky seems to burst in spectral madness. Never have
conceptual information and design information been so poetically
fused as in The Empire of Things.
We haven't even begun to explore the potentials of the medium [Coney
remarked]. Part of it lies beyond our reach because of stringent union regulations
as to who can use the equipment and who can't. Part of it lies beyond the reach
of the technicians who are authorized to use it. Videotronics will never come of
age, will never be useful for creative purposes, until the knobs are put in the
hands of the artist. We haven't even begun, for example, to work with really
controlled color design. One built-in characteristic of television is the ability to
manipulate spectral colors. There's a tremendous amount that can be done with
muted and controlled colors that we haven't even started to do.
Television's biggest problem today is learning how to let go. Essentially that's
what I'm trying to do; I want to let go of control without creating a disaster on the
set. I want to open television to the extent that film is open. You see a multiplicity
of voices and ideas in film on a number of levels of intent, interest, and
seriousness. It doesn't always have to be "professional" to be true. And truth is
what we're after.

ARTSCILAB 2001

298 Expanded Cinema

WGBH-TV, Boston: "The Medium Is the Medium"

"The reason we're experimenting," explained Fred Barzyk, "is that
a large portion of the public is really ahead of television. They can
accept more images and ideas at once. They're watching
underground films; they're commercial buffs who are fascinated by
how many cuts there are in a Pepsi-Cola ad. These are the people
who could easily be turned on to educational television if it had the
proper ingredients." With young producer-directors like Barzyk taking
an interest in television as an educational experience, the ingredients are certain to be there sooner or later.
It was at WGBH, for example, that the program "What's Happening
Mr. Silver?" was originated. A regular experimental feature on pop
culture, the program proved so successful that it was carried also by
most other ETV stations except KQED in San Francisco, where it
was found to be "technically innovative but slightly sick." In 1967 the
program's host, David Silver, conducted his weekly show from a bed
in the center of the studio floor, in which he reclined naked with an
equally nude young lady.
We wanted to experiment with every possible aspect of the medium [Barzyk
explained] and intimate behavior in the form of nudity became one factor. We
tried to create new problems in the broadcast system so that we could break
down the system as it existed. We adopted some of John Cage's theories: many
times we'd have as many as thirty video sources available at once; there would
be twenty people in the control room whenever anyone got bored they'd just
switch to something else without rhyme or reason.
"The Medium Is the Medium" came out of this show in one sense, because
after two years of "What's Happening Mr. Silver" we had so totally bombarded the
engineering staff with experimentation. We took the attitude that the engineers
would have to change their normal functions. In most of the television industry a
video man is a video man, an audio man is an audio man, a cameraman is a
cameraman; they never step over each other's bounds. We created a situation in
which each one of them was asked constantly what he could do for the station.
We told them they were artists. We said each week, "We don't know what we're
going to do, here's our raw material, let's see what we can do with it." So out of
this the audio man had his sources running, the cameraman had his sources
running, and so on.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthelic Videotapes 299

Initially there is a great deal of resistance from the engineering staff, as might
be expected when you change someone's job conditions. We deprived them of
their security. I mean, you know what a "good picture" is: flesh tones, lighting, so
on. But we deprived them of that. We said on our shows it doesn't really matter.
One engineer turned off his machine. He didn't think it was right. A year later he
came up to me with three new ideas that we might be able to use. So the
pressure is reversed to bring creativity out instead of repressing it; we have the
most production-oriented engineers in the whole country, I'd say. In effect we tell
them the station is experimenting and we ask them not to be engineers.

It was in this environment that the experimental program "The

Medium Is the Medium" took form in the winter of 1968-69. The
contributions of Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, and Aldo Tambellini
are discussed elsewhere in this chapter; Otto Piene and James
Seawright were also among the six artists who participated in the
project.

Otto Piene: Electronic Light Ballet

Otto Piene's work with luminescence, pneumatics, and lighterthan-air environments is among the most elegant examples of
aesthetic applications of technology. The artist's exquisitely delicate
sense of proportion and balance, as demonstrated in his Light
Planets, for example, is always stunning to behold. His synaesthetic
videotape Electronic Light Ballet was no exception.
Typical of Piene's austere sensibility, only two image sources were
used in this piece: a grid of colored dots that melted in rainbow
colors across the screen; and a videotape of Piene's Manned Helium
Sculpture, one of a series of experiments with lift and equilibrium
that the artist conducted as a Fellow at M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced
Visual Studies. The helium sculpture involved 800 feet of transparent
polyethylene tubing in seven loops, inflated with approximately 4,000
cubic feet of helium, attached with ropes and parachute harness to a
ninety-five-pound girl for a thirty-minute ascension into the air,
controlled from the ground by ropes attached to the balloons and
harness.
The ascension was staged at night in the parking lot of WGBH,
which was illuminated by colored floodlights. Over this slow,
buoyant, ethereal, surrealistic scene Piene superimposed a geometrical grid of regularly-spaced colored dots similar in effect to the
multiple-bulb brilliance of his light sculptures. In exquisite counterpoint

ARTSCILAB 2001

300 Expanded Cinema

Otto Piene: Electronic Light Ballet. 1969.

Hi-Band Color VTR. 15 ips. 5 min.
Lighter-than-air space contrasted with vivid
videospace in Piene's usual elegant fashion.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 301

to the balloon scene the dots flared brightly, became liquid, developed
spermlike tails, and finally dripped oozing globlets of color across the
screen. The technique was deceptively simple: de-beaming the separate
guns of the color camera with a strong hot light source shining through
multiply-perforated stencils. Both the stencils and the camera were
moved, causing a sperm-shaped burn-in of intense colors. If a dot
appeared originally as yellow and was moved, the de-beamed "tail" would
remain yellow but the "head" of the comet-shaped light would suddenly
turn red or green. The effect, as in all of Piene's work, was quietly elegant,
revealing the potentials of the medium in the hands of a true artist.

James Seawright: Capriccio for TV

James Seawright, then technical supervisor of the Electronic Music
Center of Columbia and Princeton Universities, was best known for
kinetic/electronic sculptures. In fact, Capriccio for TV (see color
plates) was Seawright's first experience with video as a creative
medium. Whereas Piene's effort was a ballet of light and air,
Seawright processed an actual ballet pas de deux through the
videotronic medium to produce an inspired dance of form and color.
In contrast to the elaborate yet unimaginative convolutions of the
CBS "Limbo" program, Seawright's piece was simple and effective.
He televised two dancers his wife Mimi Garrard and Virginia
Laidlaw against a score of electronic music by Bulent Arel. In the
first two "movements" the dancers were shot in negative color and
were superimposed over reversed images of themselves, producing
a Rorschach-like mirror effect similar to bas-relief "flopping" in the
cinema. In the concluding section Seawright televised the scene with
three cameras that recorded only one of the three basic colors each
onto three separate tapes. In addition, one camera was on tape
delay so that a second dimension of abstraction was added. It was
therefore possible to see two images of the same figure performing
the same action at different stages in different colors, whereas the
other figure was equally abstract in other colors. The image took on
a ghostly quality, suggesting colored X rays or dream sequences in
the mind's eye. Space, time, form, and color were brought into
concert in an unforgettable video experience.

ARTSCILAB 2001

302 Expanded Cinema

Nam June Paik: Cathode Karma

"Cybernetics, the art of pure relations, has its origins in karma. The Buddhists
say karma is sangsara, relationship is metempsychosis. Cybernated art is
important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be
cybernated."

"My experimental television is not always interesting," admits Nam

June Paik, "but not always uninteresting: like nature, which is
beautiful not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it
changes." Paik is the embodiment of East and West, design scientist
of the electron gun, pioneer ecologist of the videosphere. He is to
television what John Whitney is to the computer; he does with TV
sets what David Tudor does with pianos. "Television has been
attacking us all our lives," he says, "now we can attack it back."
This Korean-born genius has been attacking it back longer than
anyone, and in his own inimitable fashion. The bloody head of an ox
was hung over the door to his first video exhibit in Wuppertal,
Germany, in 1963, as a shock device "to get the audience into a
oneness of consciousness so they could perceive more" as in Zen,
the master would strike the pupil. Although he never really harmed
anyone, Paik was for several years a cultural terrorist, a kind of deus
ex machina of the Orient, who left in his wake a series of demolished
pianos, clipped neckties, bizarre junkyard robots, and scandalized
audiences from Holland to Iceland. John Cage once remarked that
"Paik's work, performances, and daily doings never cease by turn to
amaze, delight, shock, and sometimes terrify me."
In recent years Paik has abandoned his mixed-media environmental Happenings to concentrate exclusively on television as an
aesthetic and communicative instrument. Independently, in collaboration with scientists, and in a special research and development
program with the State University of New York, he has explored
nearly every facet of the medium, paving the way for a new generation of video artists. His work has followed four simultaneous directions: synaesthetic videotapes; videotronic distortions of the received
signal; closed-circuit teledynamic environments; and sculptural
pieces, usually of a satirical nature.
There are approximately four million individual phosphor tracepoints on the face of a 21-inch television screen at any given

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 303

moment. Paik's canvas is the electromagnetic field that controls the

distribution of these trace-points in horizontal and vertical polar
coordinates at 525 lines per second. By interfering, warping, and
otherwise controlling the cathode's magnetic field, he controls the
four million glowing traces. "It creates the possibility of electrondrawing," he says. "It's better than drawing on a CRT with a light pen
because it's multicolored and provides interaction with the air
program." (See color plates.)
Although he is continually developing new parameters of control
and interaction with television, most of Paik's basic techniques were
developed in the period 1963-64 in collaboration with Hideo Uchida,
president of Uchida Radio Research Institute in Tokyo, and with
Shuya Abe, an electronics engineer who, according to Paik, "knows
that science is more beauty than logic." Paik has outlined three
general areas of variability with these techniques. ("Indeterminism
and variability are underdeveloped parameters in the optical arts," he
says, "though they have been the central problem in music for the
last two decades. Conversely, the parameter of sex has been
underdeveloped in music as opposed to literature and the visual
arts.")
The first level of variability is the live transmission of the normal
broadcast program, "which is the most variable optical and
semantical event of our times... the beauty of distorted Nixon is
different from the beauty of distorted football hero, or not always
pretty but always stupid female announcer." Paik estimates that he
can create at least five hundred different variations from one normal
broadcast program.
The second level of variability involves the unique characteristics
of circuitry in each individual television receiver. Paik has resurrected
several dozen discarded sets from junkyards and brought them back
to wilder life than ever before in their previous circuits. "I am proud to
say that thirteen sets suffer thirteen different varieties of distortion,"
Paik once announced, and then added: "1957 model RCA sets are
the best." By altering the circuitry of his receivers with resistors,
interceptors, oscillators, grids, etc., Paik creates "prepared televisions" that are equivalent in concept to David Tudor's prepared
pianos.

ARTSCILAB 2001

304 Expanded Cinema

The third level of variability is the manipulation of these prepared

TVs with wave-form generators, amplifiers, and tape recorders to
produce various random, semirandom, or completely controlled
effects, examples of which are: (a) the picture is changeable in three
ways using hand switches: upside-down, right-left, positive-negative;
(b) the picture can become smaller or larger in vertical or horizontal
dimensions separately, according to the amplitude of the tape
recorder; (c) the horizontal and vertical electron-beam deflection of
normal TV is changed into a spiral deflection using a yoke oscillatoramplifier, causing an average rectangular picture to become fanlike;
(d) the picture can be "dissipated" by a strong demagnetizer whose
location and rhythm contribute variety; (e) amplitude levels from
radios or tape recorders can be made to intercept a relay signal at
the grid of the output tube so that the picture is visible only when the
amplitude changes; (f) asymmetrical sparks flash across the screen
when a relay is intercepted at the AC 110-volt input and fed by a 25watt amplifier without rectifier; (g) a 10-megohm resistor is placed at
the vertical grid of the output tube and interacts with a sine wave to
modulate the picture; (h) wave forms from a tape recorder are fed to
the horizontal grid of the output tube, causing the horizontal lines to
be warped according to the frequency and amplitude.
Once a set has been thus prepared, the simple flick of a switch
results in breathtakingly beautiful imagery, from delicate Lissajous
figures to spiraling phantasmagoric designs of surreal impact and
dazzling brilliance. Tubular horizontal bands of color roll languidly
toward the viewer like cresting waves; flaccid faces melt, twitch, and
curl, ears replacing eyes; globs of iridescent colors flutter out of
place. When videotape playback systems are used as image
sources instead of broadcast programs, the extent of control is
multiplied and the visual results are astounding.
However, technical descriptions tend to underplay the sheer
intuitive genius of Paik's video art. His techniques are hardly
exclusive and are far from sophisticated (engineers say he does
everything he shouldn't), and his cluttered loft on New York's Canal
Street is scientifically unorthodox to say the least. Yet out of this
tangle of wires and boxes comes some of the most exquisite
kinaesthetic imagery in all of electronic art. "My experimental color
television has instructional resource value," he suggests. Kinder-

ARTSCILAB 2001

Electromagnetic distortions of the video

image by Nam June Paik. "Out of this
tangle of wires and boxes comes some of
the most exquisite kinaesthetic imagery in
all of electronic art." Photos: Peter Moore.
305
ARTSCILAB 2001

306 Expanded Cinema

garten and elementary school children should be exposed to electronic situations as early as possible. My experimental TV demonstrates various basic facts of physics and electronics empirically,
such as amplitude modulation, radar, scanning, cathode rays, shadow
mask tubes, oscillography, the ohm principle, overtone, magnetic
character, etc. And it's a very pleasant way to learn these things."
Perhaps the most spectacular of Paik's videotape compositions was
made early in 1969 for the PBL show "The Medium Is the Medium" at
WGBH-TV in Boston, where later he became artist in residence. Paik
brought a dozen of his prepared TVs into the studio; using three color
cameras he mixed these images with two nude dancers, tape delays,
and positive-negative image reversals. The nude slow-motion
dancers in multiple levels of delayed action suddenly burst into
dazzling silver sparks against emerald gaseous clouds; rainbow-hued
Lissajous figures revolved placidly over a close-up of two lovers
kissing in negative colors; images of Richard Nixon and other
personalities in warped perspectives alternated with equally warped
hippies. All this was set against a recording of the Moonlight Sonata,
interrupted periodically by a laconic Paik who yawned, announced
that life was boring, and instructed the viewer to close his eyes just as
some fabulous visual miracle was about to burst across the screen.
Later in 1969, Paik produced an impressive teledynamic
environment called Participation TV. The first version was shown in
an exhibit called "Television as a Creative Medium" at the Howard
Wise Gallery in New York City; it was then modified into Participation
TV No. 2 for the "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibit in Washington, D.C.
The principle of the piece involves three television cameras whose
signals are displayed on one screen by the red, green, and blue
cathode guns respectively; the tube shows three different images in
three different colors at once. Color brightness is controlled by
amplitudes from three tape recorders at reverse phase. Thus the
viewer sees himself three times in three colors on the same screen,
often appearing to float in air or to dissolve in shimmering water as
multicolored feedback echoes shatter into infinity. This was repeated
on three and four different TV sets arranged around the environment.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 307

"Television has not yet left the breast":

Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman in
TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Howard Wise
Gallery, New York, 1969. Images are
modulated by musical tones played on the
cello. Photo: Peter Moore.

ARTSCILAB 2001

308 Expanded Cinema

"The real issue implied in art and technology," he has said, "is not to
make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and
the electronic medium I suggest Silent TV Station, which transmits
only beautiful 'mood art' in the sense of mood music. What I'm aiming
at with my Lissajous figures and other distortions is a television
equivalent of Vivaldi, or electronic Compoz. Lumia art will then
become a permanent asset in the collections of millions of people.
The Silent TV Station will simply be there, not intruding on other
activities, and will be looked at exactly like a landscape or a beautiful
bathing nude of Renoir. Normal TV bores you and makes you
nervous; this soothes you. It's like a tranquilizer. Maybe you could call
it video-soma."
Paik's exquisite sense of satirical irony comes through most
effectively in his video sculpture pieces. In TV Bra for Living
Sculpture, Paik covered cellist Charlotte Moorman's bare breasts with
two tiny three-inch TV sets whose images were modulated by the
notes played on her cello. "Another attempt to humanize technology,"
Paik explained. For an exhibit titled "The Machine at the End of the
Machine Age" at the Museum of Modern Art, Paik contributed a chair
with a built-in TV set in place of the seat: one was able to sit on the
program of one's choice. For an exhibit at New York's Bonino Gallery
he constructed a video crucifix of glaring and ominous proportions;
and in the privacy of his studio loft there sits a box containing a TV set
that peeps through the vaginal opening of a photographed vulva.
"Art," he says, "is all activities, desires, phenomena, that one cannot
explain."

Aldo Tambellini: Black TV

"Our creative involvement with television must begin now so that the electronic
energy of communication can give birth to new visions: we will face the realities
which astronauts and scientists know to be part of life."

Intermedia artist and filmmaker Aldo Tambellini has worked

creatively with television in many ways for several years. He has
produced synaesthetic videotapes, videographic films, and closedcircuit teledynamic environments. All of his work, in whatever medium,
is concerned with the theme of "black," both as idea and

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 309

Aldo Tambellini: Black TV. 1964-68.16mm.

Black and white. 9 min. Two years of TV
news compressed into a staccato barrage
of sight and sound.
ARTSCILAB 2001

310 Expanded Cinema

Aldo Tambellini: Black Video Two. 1968. VTR. Black

and white. Both image and sound were generated
electronically. Made in collaboration
with engineer Ken Wise. Photos: Peter Moore.
ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 311

experience. For Tambellini, black is the womb and the cosmos, the
color of skin and the color of the new consciousness. "Black is the
beginning," he says. "It is birth, the oneness of all, the expansion of
consciousness in all directions."
Tambellini began working with videotape in 1966-67 as part of his
intermedia presentations. This work was subsequently expanded
into live, closed-circuit, and broadcast video experiments. In the
spring of 1969, Tambellini became the recipient of a grant from the
New York State Council on the Arts in a project to develop
relationships between artists and television engineers. He worked
with technologists at five educational TV stations throughout New
York, producing several experimental programs.
Also in 1969 he was one of six artists participating in the PBL
program "The Medium Is the Medium" at WGBH-TV in Boston. The
videotape produced for the project, called Black, involved one
thousand slides, seven 16mm. film projections, thirty black children,
and three live TV cameras that taped the interplay of sound and
image. The black-and-white tape is extremely dense in kinetic and
synaesthetic information, assaulting the senses in a subliminal
barrage of sight and sound events. The slides and films were
projected on and around the children in the studio, creating an
overwhelming sense of the black man's life in contemporary
America. Images from all three cameras were superimposed on one
tape, resulting in a multidimensional presentation of an ethnological
attitude. There was a strong sense of furious energy, both
Tambellini's and the blacks', communicated through the space/time
manipulations of the medium.
Black TV is the title of Tambellini's best-known videographic film,
which is part of a large intermedia project about American television.
Compiled from filmed television news programs and personal
experimental videotapes, Black TV has been seen in many versions
during the four-year period in which Tambellini constantly re-edited it.
"Since my interest is in multimedia and mixed-media live events, and
in experimental television, I think of film as a material to work with,
part of the communications media rather than an end in itself. In the
future we will be communicating through electronically transmitted
images; Black TV is about the future, the contemporary American,

ARTSCILAB 2001

312 Expanded Cinema

Aldo Tambellini in control room of WGBH-TV, Boston.

Below, a scene from Black (1969), an experimental videotape
he produced at the station with 1,000 slides, seven 16mm.
projectors, thirty black children, and three TV cameras.
ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 313

the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and the expansion
of the senses. The act of communication and the experience is the
essential."
As Tambellini's remarks indicate, Black TV is about perception in
the intermedia network. It generates a pervasive atmosphere of the
process-level perception by which most of us experience the
contemporary environment. Since it involves the use of multiple
monitors and various levels of video distortion, there is a sense of
the massive simultaneity inherent in the nature of electronic media
communication. Black TV is one of the first aesthetic statements on
the subject of the intermedia network as nature, possibly the only
such statement in film form.
Black Video One and Two are representative of the techniques and
approaches involved in Tambellini's videotape compositions. He calls
them "video constructions" to emphasize that they are self-contained
image- and sound-generating units, which do not take image
material either from broadcast programs or closed-circuit cameras.
Instead, special circuitry is devised to generate both image and
sound electronically on two monitors. These completely synthetic
videographics can be juxtaposed with other image material to create
a sense of convergence between different worlds. As in most of
Tambellini's work, archetypal white globes, spheres, or expanding
coils are seen suspended in a black video void. Various forms of
video noise are generated to accentuate the purely kinetic aspect of
the tapes. Most of this work was first produced in 1967-68, and has
been incorporated into Tambellini's intermedia presentations and
films.
Black Video Two was exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New
York in 1967. Two years later, Wise commissioned Tambellini and
two engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories to produce a work
for his exhibit "Television as a Creative Medium." Tambellini and the
engineers, Tracy Kinsel and Hank Reinhold, came up with Black
Spiral, a beautiful example of aesthetically manipulated video
circuitry. The normal rectangular raster of the TV picture was
transformed into a circular raster by modification of the circuitry from
an xy coordinate system to a polar coordinate system. As a result,
the broadcast picture appeared as a flowing spiral; any movement in
the picture caused the spiral to swoop and explode in giant gaseous

ARTSCILAB 2001

314 Expanded Cinema

curls of glowing phosphors. "Television is not an object," Tambellini

said. "It's a live communication media. Black Spiral brings you live
information. One day we will look at nature as the floating astronauts
do in a spiral or circular form where no up or down or gravity exists."
The sound was transformed by modulating normal audio signals
from the television station with a random audio signal.
"The artist will have to get to this medium and begin to explore all
possibilities," Tambellini urges. "After all, television is actually an
image made of light which travels through time and space. I'm
interested in getting to that particular point to actually show that light
is a constantly moving and ever-changing form, that light is energy,
and the same energy which moves through us is the energy which
moves through the universe. It is the same energy we have discovered in the atom. When creative people begin to get involved
with this idea of energy rather than making objects for someone,
they will be exploring possibilities for everybody, art will be an
exploration for all of mankind."

Eric Siegel: Video Color Synthesizer

"I see television as bringing psychology into the cybernetic twenty-first century. I
see television as a psychic healing medium creating mass cosmic consciousness, awakening higher levels of the mind, bringing awareness of the soul."

In 1960, as a high school student of fifteen, Eric Siegel won second

prize in the New York City Science Fair for a home-made, closedcircuit television system he constructed from second-hand tubes, a
microscope lens, and junk parts. The following year he won another
prize in the same competition for a home-made system called "Color
Through Black-and-White TV." Although highly successful as a
technician, he was virtually unknown as an artist until his spectacular
"Video Color Synthesizer" was exhibited at New York's Howard Wise
Gallery in May, 1969. It was clear the television generation had
produced another genius.
The synaesthetic videotape Psychedelevision in Color, made by
Siegel on his own home-made equipment, was at least as creative
as works by more established artists represented in the exhibit, and
according to some critics was the outstanding work of the entire

ARTSCILAB 2001

Synaesthetic Videotapes 315

Eric Siegel: Psychedelevision. 1968-69.

Synthesized VTR. "Great waves of curling
clouds sweep under and over the viewer
in turbulent fury."

show. "A work of genius," wrote video artist Peter Sorensen in a rave
review devoted entirely to Siegel's tape. A reviewer for Time found
Psychedelevision ". . . closer to Kubrick's 2001 than to Disney's
Fantasia... a glowing visual abstraction."
Siegel's synthesizer is a device that converts the gray scale of a
video signal (in this case from a portable videotape recorder
playback unit) into changes in hue on the screen of a color TV set.
The results are, according to Siegel, "electronic Rorschach patterns
in the context of a metaphysical statement." The statement is the
tape he prepared for processing through the synthesizer, and this
tape itself was recorded through special equipment that the young
artist, characteristically, calls his "magic box." This device, more
aptly described as a "video effects generator," processes images
from a portable TV camera during the actual taping: the images are
transformed during the process of moving from the camera to the
videotape recorder.
ARTSCILAB 2001

316 Expanded Cinema

One segment of Psychedelevision involves variations on a portrait

of Albert Einstein as recorded through the effects generator and
tinted through the color synthesizer. Einstein's face is seen in
infinitely-repeated multiples, then implodes, bursting into a shower of
fiery sparks, reforms again from the fragments only to melt into
Daliesque puddles.
Because of the peculiar nature of the color synthesizer, the colors
of Psychedelevision are unlike most other video hues: now organic
in appearance, now like shimmering metal or mercury, glowing with
an unearthly light, trembling in fierce brilliance, like the colors on the
inside of the retina. But in the best kinetic art it's form as well as
color that determines the kinaesthetic effectiveness of the piece.
Siegel's forms are virtually indescribable: great waves of curling
clouds sweep under and over the viewer in turbulent fury, quite
reminiscent of the Stargate Corridor in 2001. Random fire bursts of
phosphorescent crimson flash across this eerie landscape. Suddenly
the forms become bilaterally symmetrical, with shapes and colors
streaming wildly from the center of the screen.
"Psychedelevision is my attempt at video mind expansion," Siegel
explained. "A new science must be created which can reach the
inner core of human beings. One of the most important tools of this
new science will be television. I've been thinking of a television
system which would take impulses from a human being through
electrodes in a positive feedback loop: the person would be able to
watch his own neurological reactions to the video patterns and video
information generators activated by himself. The American Dream no
longer is evolving. It's in a state of decay. Television must be
liberated."

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema
"We use video technology in filmmaking," explains Loren Sears,
"exclusively for its graphic potentials. You can't really 'represent' or
carry over satisfactorily into film the electronic viewing experience of
watching television. You can carry the graphics over, but not the
actual electronic experience." In the best videographic cinema,
which we are about to discuss, the artist is at least able to
approximate or suggest the luminescent atomic world of video
imagery. As Sears indicates, however, the motivation is more toward
the graphic characteristics exclusive to television, which simply
cannot be duplicated by cinema alone.
"Metamorphosis is the main thing you can do with video that you
can't do with film," says Scott Bartlett. "But video plus computers
could do it even better." As it turns out, the optical effects of many
Hollywood films have for several years been done on high-resolution
videotape since that medium is less expensive to edit than film. But
the fantastic capabilities inherent in videotape are not used; it is
employed only as an imitation of cinema.
In the work discussed here, film and video technologies have been
synthesized together, often through many generations of processing,
to achieve graphic character unique in the world of film. Since one
automatically thinks of any movie image as having been
photographed by a camera, videographic films are quite startling on
first encounter. Nothing in one's experience with movies can explain
how such visions were captured on film and indeed they were not:
videographic cinema might succinctly be described as a film of
videotaped film. "Color is the biggest problem," Bartlett admits. "It's
very difficult to control. But more stable circuits are being developed
all the time. The possible range of video color is as great as the
range of color in any other medium. And because you're right there
watching it happen you can deal with the psychological nuances of
color and form."

Scott Bartlett: Tribal Television

"There's a pattern in my film work that could be the pattern of a hundredthousand movies. It simply is repeat and purify, repeat and synthesize, abstract,
abstract, abstract."

317

ARTSCILAB 2001

318 Expanded Cinema

With his first film, Metanomen, made at San Francisco State

College in 1966, Scott Bartlett went practically as far as possible
within the structural limitations of black-and-white film and conventional cinema technology. Winner of the 1966 National Student
Film Competition, Metanomen was a stunning kinaesthetic experience in which form and content merged in synaesthetic alloy. It
became immediately obvious that with more elegant structural
technologies Bartlett could raise this form/content metamorphosis to
higher levels of graphic integrity. Like the best synaesthetic cinema
Bartlett's films are not about an experience: they are the experience.
Here we find kinetic empathy soaring to poetic heights.
Early in 1967, as Bartlett recalls, "television sort of found me. I had
been superficially exposed to it, as my friend Tom DeWitt was in the
TV department at school. That summer another friend, Michael
MacNamee of Washington State University, said he could set up a
TV studio situation for me at a station in Sacramento. I didn't know
what would come of it, but OFFON came of it. And now Moon has
come of that. Going into television doesn't mean I've abandoned
cinema. It's a matter of expanding my technical vocabulary. I'm still
doing Metanomen things, and I'm still doing OFFON things. But it's
all adding up; I'm creating a new vocabulary."
Winner of many international awards, OFFON (see color plates)
was the first videographic film whose existence was equally the
result of cinema and video disciplines. Like all true videographic
cinema, OFFON is not filmed TV, in the way that most movies are
filmed theatre. Rather, it's a metamorphosis of technologies. "That's
becoming a kind of aesthetic common denominator," says Bartlett.
"Marrying techniques so the techniques don't show up separately
from the whole. It's crossbreeding information. That's what a
computer does, too. Having several aesthetics force each other into
their separate molds and then sort of seeing what happens."
What happens in OFFON is extraordinary. The basic source of
video information was in the form of twenty film loops that Bartlett
and DeWitt had culled from more than two-hundred loops they had

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 319

made for a multiprojection light concert called Timecycle, described

as a "two-hour moviemural." The iconographic character of the
Timecycle imagery was clean and simple since it was intended for
use in addition to other image projections. These loops were
superimposed over one another to a depth of as many as eleven
print generations for one strip of film, separating images from
background, positives from negatives, adding colors to separate
strips, and then recombining them optically.
Black-and-white loops were fed through a color film chain in the
television control room, adding videotronic phosphor-texture to the
cinematic graphics. Simultaneously, other loops and portions of Glen
McKay's light show were rear-projected onto a screen on the studio
floor, which was televised as a second video source. Both video
sources were routed into one monitor: two images riding between
two incoming channels, each pattern competing for exhibition on the
monitor, generating a cross-circuited electronic feedback loop ". . . to
the point where white information in competition with itself breaks
down into colors: spectral breakdown." A second TV camera
televised the monitor, feeding the signal to a videotape recorder.
This master tape was again processed through the switching/mixing
system. Instead of being recorded back onto film in the usual
kinescope process, a special camera was set up in front of a monitor
that filmed at the video rate of 30 fps instead of the movie rate of 24
fps.
"The entire process took three hours," said Bartlett. "The
advantage I had was that all the material was on loops and I could
just keep adjusting knobs and arranging appliances, cameras and
such, until I had what I wanted, and then just film a burst of it." This
videographic imagery was again processed through an ordinary
cinematic optical printing system in Bartlett's studio. "The video
colors were pale, but they were for that special texture that you can't
get any other way. After I had that, I separated the film into AB rolls
and dyed the strips with food color. One roll was dyed one color,
another roll was dyed a different color. I built a trough and filled it full
of dye and rolled the film from one reel through the trough and up
along banks of heaters. I sat atop a ladder and very slowly rolled the
film through this assemblage at a rate of about five or six inches a
minute. Took me all night. A yoga dedication."

ARTSCILAB 2001

320 Expanded Cinema

It was well worth the dedication. OFFON begins with a close-up of

a huge blue-red eyeball that pulsates with the sound of a heartbeat.
The eye is both human and video: suddenly it bursts into an
electromagnetic field of vibrations and becomes a slowly-expanding
force field, a tight ring of bright red in a pale blue universe. The red
ring blossoms into a constellation of scattering sparks and suddenly
we see the image of a mirror-doubled dancer throwing out multiple
layers of arms like a human flower in bloom. "The multiplication of
arms was done in cinematic optical printing," Bartlett explained. "But
the multiplication of the multiplications was done in video: the halos
around the arms were created by video feedback."
Pink and blue sea gulls wheel languidly around the disintegrating
dancer, whose image slowly melts into an infinity of geometrical
echoes. This evolves into a close-up of a girl's face that seems to be
streaking off, disintegrating but somehow holding together. "That's a
good example of hiding one technique inside another," said Bartlett,
"by doing essentially the same thing with both systems and just
compounding one action. Two pieces of film of the same shot were
flipped over so that the left became the right. This was printed back
onto the left, except out of register so that it staggered behind,
apparently trying to catch up with the right. And the shot itself initially
was a very slow zoom, rocking the camera back and forth while
zooming in on the girl's face, who was herself rocking back and
forth. When that was fed through the monitor it was refilmed by a
zoom lens which was also rocking and swaying."
OFFON moves with dynamic thrust through a succession of
images that never seem separate from one another, each evolving
into videographic metamorphosis, exploding, glowing, disintegrating,
cracking into infinity until it all ends with a final burst of kinetic
energy. Later in 1968, Bartlett made a second videographic film, this
time in black-and-white, called A Trip to the Moon. It involved a live
panel discussion between Bartlett and friends on the subject of the
new consciousness, cosmic unity, and metamorphosis. Films and
slides of the moon and rockets were keyed into the scene randomly
and certain interesting effects were achieved by associating audio
and video feedback techniques. However, the film was too long
(approximately half an hour) and not varied enough to support its
length.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 321

In the spring of 1969 Bartlett set about remaking A Trip to the

Moon, but the film that resulted, simply titled Moon, became a wholly
new work with only a few seconds of original footage remaining.
Moon proved to be his most satisfying work, more impressive even
than OFFON, because in addition to spectacular videographics it
also was constructed around a substantial conceptual content. It was
completed less than two months before the first moon landing, yet is
more effective in its metaphysical evocative power than many of the
films of the same thematic content made since then.
Moon begins in a black void as we hear a recording of the Apollo
Eight astronauts reading from Genesis. Under this is a rather spacey
track from the Steve Miller album, Sailor. Suddenly the black void is
recognized as a night sky as we approach a distant airport whose
lights seem to float in deep space. The image is flopped; the runway
lights become a starry corridor similar to the slit-scan corridor of
2001. This gives way to stop-frame, optically distorted footage of
astronauts boarding their craft before takeoff. The pale colors and
unearthly motions lend a kind of dreamlike dj-vu quality to the
scene as these hooded creatures lumber slowly toward the giant
rocket.
We see the ocean and a dawning sky. As though from another time
and place, we hear reverberating voices speaking of the Universal
One, cosmic unity, the I Ching. A purple face appears in the sky and
is fragmented into infinity. Waves of the ocean obeying lunar
gravity crash in slow motion, and over this we see skip-frame
video-distorted scenes of the lunar module simulator spinning and
maneuvering in space.
Now we're inside a television control room with several monitors
reflecting the faces of men whose words seem far away. The control
center appears like some window onto a video space of another
dimension. A roaring wind takes us soaring through towering clouds,
an ethereal atmosphere similar to the opening sequence of 8.
Aqueous fingers of de-beamed video phosphors stretch across the
sky like phantom visitors from another galaxy. A spaceman whirls
through the clouds, flashing and sparkling like an asteroid. The
graphic tempo increases with flashes of light and a tremendous roar
until the final crescendo. The last image we see is the ocean
receding from a beach.

ARTSCILAB 2001

322 Expanded Cinema

Scott Barlett: Moon. 1969. VTR/16mm. film.

Color. 8 min.". . . A purple face appears
in the sky and is fragmented into infinity..."
ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 323

Moon is a beautiful, eerie, haunting film, a product of the New

Surrealism, all the more wonderful for the fact that we do not actually
see the moon: only the manifestation of its power here on earth: the
ebb and flow of the waters that cover three-quarters of our planet.
The film contains some of the most spectacular manipulations of
video techniques Bartlett has yet achieved, sending fiery rainbows
into a cloudy sky, transforming men and rockets into shattering
crystals, creating a portrait of the cosmos in continual
metamorphosis.
The magic of the film [said Bartlett] is its totally undefined meaning, the purely
visceral message. The message could be called a code that we're trying to learn
about, a code for connections to new space and new consciousness, a code for
making it to the moon metaphysically, paths for your mind to get out where you
can reach anything. In some ways technique equals meaning: the stop-frame
action means mechanically defined space and time and the feedback layers are
like accordion time all the times stacking up on top of one another.
Commercial filmmakers use certain images or techniques as standard
recognizable givens. Like the way a dissolve for them means the passage of
time. But for us dissolve means "blend." Not so much one, not so much the other,
but something in between the two, getting from one to another. It's valuable to
hang somewhere between two different realities as a dramatic element. Dali does
that. You see a face but then you realize the face is made up of a woman's ass
and a cow and a flagpole or something. Your mind goes from one understood
state to another understood state and you realize that you've voyaged in that
process.

The understood state toward which Bartlett was headed in the

latter part of 1969 was a "tribal television network" linking thirty or
forty experimental video centers on the West Coast, some of them
sponsored by rock groups such as the Jefferson Airplane and the
Grateful Dead. "It will be a family of production centers cabled
together and co-broadcasting with an FM radio station," Bartlett
explained. "The FM radio would provide the mainstream
programming and the disk jockey would be televised and would
switch on visuals during records which would be electronically
synthesized interpretations of the sounds. The production centers
would make specials which would always supercede the main entertainment. The television station would be a voice: a natural

ARTSCILAB 2001

324 Expanded Cinema

accelerating pace for more people sharing more knowledge. The

tribal television would allow art and science to wed in a media
marriage free from commercial concerns, free for pure experiment."

Tom DeWitt: The Leap

"I look at the medium through its manipulation of time and space. Man's ability to
manipulate space is very limited. Actually a space change is almost inconceivable. The same with our control of time. We're contained in clock time.
But the medium at least seems to control space within completely malleable
time."

After his collaboration with Scott Bartlett in the making of OFFON,

Tom DeWitt made his own extraordinary videographic film, The
Leap, completed late in 1968. Although the two films were born at
approximately the same time and place in San Francisco, they are
dramatically different in almost every respect: evidence not only of
two strongly individualistic personalities, but of the latitude for
personal expression possible in the videotronic medium.
"I turned to cinema as a vehicle for expressing my intuition,"
DeWitt explained. "I find myself only at the threshold and I can see
no horizons. I try to use technology flexibly to realize dream images,
but I would hardly call my work more than the first crude stage of
image-manipulation through modern technology. I've been trying to
learn enough about image technologies so that if I ever make a
dramatic statement I'll know that it's being communicated through
the essence of the medium. There was a time when I had my copy
of Fortran and began to learn it I saw computer art as a potentially
limitless field but I decided to explore what I could contribute
through videographic cinema."
The leap of the film's title might be interpreted in several ways, all
of them appropriate: a leap of consciousness from one reality to
another; a leap in image technology from cinema to video; a leap to
escape the suffocating boundaries of metropolitan life (in this respect
The Leap is a continuation of the theme of DeWitt's first film,
Atmosfear); and finally it might be seen as a leap to escape the
purely videotronic world of the film's imagery. However one chooses
to view it, The Leap unquestionably accomplished DeWitt's motivaion: "I wasn't satisfied with the film until I felt that without any verbal

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 325

Tom DeWitt: The Leap. 1968. VTR/

16mm. film. Color. 6 min. "A man
seems to interact physically with
videographic apparitions...
androgynous symbols and arcane
electronic voodoo..."

326 Expanded Cinema

references it would take you on an emotional trip, reacting purely to

the essence of cinema and television."
Whereas OFFON is composed entirely of iconographic, geometric
concrete imagery organic figures processed through the medium
until only a fundamental primary structure is left The Leap is
impressive for its mixture of pure video space with representational
filmic space. Thus an ordinary man seems to interact physically with
videographic apparitions, moving in and out of different space/time
realities, fluctuating between the physical and the metaphysical with
each stride of his leap toward freedom.
We see a man jumping across rooftops and racing up a grassy
hillside. He dodges through a jungle of billboards, ominous
structures, and forests of barbed wire. This is the basic vocabulary: a
man running through an industrial landscape in search of nature. But
through the video system this simple footage was transformed into a
breathtaking constellation of exploding perspectives, shimmering
masses of color, androgynous symbols, and vast realms of arcane
electronic voodoo. There are endless zooms into quivering video
centers, rectangles within rectangles of vanishing imagery. In mid air
the man's body becomes a videotronic ghost filled with vibrating
silvery shock waves. A simple motion is shattered into a thousand
mirror images reverberating into infinity. Intersecting space grids
completely demolish perspectival logic. Positive becomes negative,
up becomes down, inside is out and outside is in.
In making The Leap, DeWitt first shot approximately one-hundred
and fifty feet of high contrast, black-and-white film that was
processed through a video system. "By compounding the imagery
through the video mixing panel I expanded the image material into
about eight-hundred feet," he said. "While the film was running
through the system, I added effects by keying, wiping, and debeaming, inserting images into each other. One of the film-chain monitors
had a camera on it, so whenever I switched to that camera I got a
feedback. That studio had only two monitors for four film projectors
and two slide projectors, so some of the calls were blind, based on
what I thought was back on the film chain. I could see the final mix
on monitors, plus one of the two sources coming in from film chains,
plus images coming in from a videotape recorder we started to use
after the first session. So at about three layers deep it got pretty

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 327

Scott Bartlett filming Tom DeWitt at work

in television control room. Photo: William
Bishop.

ARTSCILAB 2001

328 Expanded Cinema

complex. I was very happy because I was penetrating an area that

was completely new to me; but if I were doing it over again I'd want
more control. I'd want to see all the images feeding in; I'd want
synchronization between the images, and I'd master roll the images
before I put them in."
During fifteen hours of studio time DeWitt was assisted by an
engineer who operated the videotape machines, an engineer
operating the two film chains, and a man on the feedback camera.
DeWitt made all aesthetic decisions at the master control panel.
"One of the main things I like about video," he explains, "is the
immediacy of seeing what you're doing, which is a tremendous
balancing effect because you can make decisions on the spot which
feed back into the work you're creating. It's much more spontaneous
than working in film, where you're never really sure what the results
will be until you get the film back. Plus the effects built into television
which are very difficult to get in film, particularly keying and wipes."
The master tape was re-edited as a whole before a kinescope was
made. The kinescope was edited through conventional film
techniques, and color was added on DeWitt's home-made optical
printer. This footage was edited once again, and finally an electronic
sound track was made by Manny Meyer, who composed the track for
OFFON. "I wanted to express an emotion," DeWitt said. "Certainly
you're triggering something in the unconscious when you start
playing with space/time alterations."

Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces

Recognized as one of the leading intermedia artists and filmmakers in the United States, Jud Yalkut has collaborated with Nam
June Paik since 1966 in a series of films that incorporate Paik's
television pieces as basic image material. Yalkut's work differs from
most videographic cinema because the original material is videotape, not film. They might be considered filmed TV; yet in each case
the video material is selected, edited, and prepared specifically for
filming, and a great deal of cinematic post-stylization is done after
the videographics have been recorded.
In addition to Paik's own slightly demonic sense of humor, the films
are imbued with Yalkut's subtle kinaesthetic sensibility, an ultrasensitive manipulation of formal elements in space and time. Paiks

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 329

Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces. (Left column)

Beatles Electroniques. 1967. VTR/
16mm. film. Black and white. 3 min.
(Right column) Videotape Study No. 3.
1968. VTR/16mm. film. Black and white.
5 min.
ARTSCILAB 2001

330 Expanded Cinema

electro-madness combined with Yalkut's delicate kinetic consciousess result in a filmic experience balanced between video and cinema
in a Third World reality.
The two films illustrated here Beatles Electroniques and
Videotape Study No. 3 are part of a forty-five-minute program of
films by Yalkut and Paik, concerning various aspects of Paik's activities. The other films include P+A-I=(K), a three-part homage to the
Korean artist, featuring his concert Happening performances with
Charlotte Moorman, Kosugi, and Wolf Vostell; his robot K-456
walking on Canal Street in New York; and his color television abstractions. Other films in the Paikpieces program are Cinema
Metaphysique, a nontelevision film in which the screen is divided in
various ways: the image appears on a thin band on the left side, or
along the bottom edge, or split-screen and quarter-screen; and two
other films of Paik's video distortions, Electronic Yoga and Electronic
Moon, shown at various intermedia performances with Paik and Miss
Moorman.
Beatles Electroniques was shot in black-and-white from live broadcasts of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from videotaped material produced
during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony
videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied by an electronic sound track by composer Ken Werner,
called Four Loops, derived from four electronically altered loops of
Beatles sound material. The result is an eerie portrait of the Beatles
not as pop stars but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of
electronic media.
Videotape Study No. 3 was shot completely off the monitor of the
videotape recorder from previously collected material. There are two
sections: the first shows an LBJ press conference in which the tape
was halted in various positions to freeze the face in devastating
grimaces; the second section shows Mayor John Lindsay of New
York during a press conference, asking someone to "please sit
down," altered electronically and manually by stopping the tape and
moving in slow motion, and by repeating actions. The sound track is
a political speech composition by David Behrman. In his editing of
these films, Yalkut has managed to create an enduring image of the
metaphysical nature of video and its process of perception.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 331

Ture Sjlander, Lars Weck, Sven Hglund:

Video Monument in Sweden
In the fall of 1967, intermedia artists Ture Sjlander and Lars Weck
collaborated with Bengt Modin, video engineer of the Swedish
Broadcasting Corporation in Stockholm, to produce an experimental
program called Monument. It was broadcast in January, 1968, and
subsequently has been seen throughout Europe, Asia, and the
United States. Apart from the technical aspect of the project, their
intention was to develop a widened consciousness of the communicative process inherent in visual images. They selected as source
material the "monuments" of world culture images of famous
persons and paintings.
The program was created in the form of a black-and-white
videographic film, made with the telecine projector from other film
clippings and slides. The films and slides first were recorded on
videotape and then back onto film for further processing. Image
distortions occurred in the telecine process of recording film on
videotape. The basic principle involved was the modulation of the
deflection voltage in a flying-spot telecine, using sine and square
impulses from a wave-form generator. With the flying-spot method
used by Swedish television, the photographic image is transformed
into electrical signals when the film is projected toward a photocell
with a scanned raster as the source of light. The deflection voltage
regulates the movement of the point of light that scans the screen
fifty times per second.
In the production of Monument, the frequency and amplitude of the
flying-spot deflection was controlled by applying tones from the
wave-form generators. Thus image distortions occurred during the
actual process of transforming original image material into video
signals, since the scan that produces the signals was electromagnetically altered. In principle this process is similar to methods
used by Nam June Paik and others, except that the Swedish group
applied the techniques at an early stage in the video process, before
signal or videotape information existed.
After the videotape was completed from various film clips, a
kinescope was made, which was edited by Sjlander and Weck into
its final form. The result is an oddly beautiful collection of image

ARTSCILAB 2001

332 Expanded Cinema

The King of Sweden as

seen in videographic
film Monument (1967),
by Ture Sjlander and
Lars Weck.

Videographic Cinema 333

Paul McCartney in Monument.

sequences unlike any other video art. We see the Beatles, Charlie
Chaplin, Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the King of Sweden, and other
famous figures distorted with a kind of insane electronic disease.
Images undergo transformations at first subtle, like respiration, then
increasingly violent until little remains of the original icon. In this
process, the images pass through thousands of stages of
semicohesion, making the viewer constantly aware of his orientation
to the picture. The transformations occur slowly and with great
speed, erasing perspectives, crossing psychological barriers. A
figure might stretch like Silly Putty or become rippled in a liquid
universe. Harsh bas-relief effects accentuate physical dimensions
with great subtlety, so that one eye or one ear might appear slightly
unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a constellation of
shimmering video phosphors.
More than an experiment in image-making technologies,
Monument became an experiment in communication. Monument
became an image-generator: newspapers, magazines, posters,
ARTSCILAB 2001

334 Expanded Cinema

record albums, and even textile factories began using images from
the videographic film. Sven Hglund, a well-known Swedish painter,
entered the project after the film was completed. He made oil
paintings based on the Monument images because he found them
"parallel to my own creative intentions; I had for a long time been
working on problems concerning transformations of forms. My
painted versions of the images became another phase of the
experiment in communication called Monument.
"Other phases were silk-screen prints, illustrated magazine
articles, posters, giant advertisements. In each phase Monument
experiments with pictures in their relation to spectators. The
common denominator is the mass-media picture, especially the most
commonly seen pictorial representation, the television picture. The
pictures in the film are so well known to the public that they have
been invested with symbolic meaning. People recognize them and
are able to retain this identification throughout all the transformations
and variations of the electronic image."

Lutz Becker: Horizon

The young German artist Lutz Becker began experimenting with
video feedback techniques in 1965 at the age of twenty-four. In the
period 1967-68 he produced three films of these experiments as a
student in the film department of the Slade School of Fine Art,
London, in collaboration with the BBC. Experiment 5, Cosmos, and
Horizon are little more than documents of the cathode-ray tube
experiments and thus are not particularly significant as examples of
videographic cinema per se. They do, however, clearly demonstrate
the degree of control and precision that is possible in this technique,
and will serve to illuminate our conception of it.
In cooperation with BBC engineer A. B. Palmer, Becker began his
experiments by focusing a TV camera on the blank white raster of its
own monitor the pictureless glowing rectangle produced by a
constant strength of electrons. A point of light appearing momentarily
on the monitor as a result of unavoidable "camera noise" will be
picked up by the camera and reproduced again on the screen. If the
monitor raster and camera raster are suitably registered, the
reproduced point will coincide in position with the original and will be
sustained as the cycle repeats. Depending on the total gain around

ARTSCILAB 2001

Videographic Cinema 335

Lutz Becker: Horizon. 1968. Video

feedback. 16mm. Color. 5 min. Tightly
controlled phasing between a TV
camera and its own output monitor.

ARTSCILAB 2001

336 Expanded Cinema

the feedback loop that is, the video signal's tendency to exceed
the electrical limits of the equipment the point brightness will either
increase until limited in some way, or decrease to extinction.
If the two rasters are deliberately placed slightly out of register, the
reproduced point then appears alongside the original, the next
alongside that, and so on. The visible effect is that the point of light
moves across the picture as the positional errors are integrated. The
direction and velocity of the movement depend on the direction and
degree of misregistration. The point can be made to move
horizontally or vertically by shifting the registration between the two
rasters in horizontal or vertical modes. Changes of raster amplitude
(adjusting the strength of the picture signals) produce either a
convergent or divergent motion in the picture. If one raster is tilted
relative to the other, the movement becomes circular.
By combining these raster-misregistration feedback techniques
with careful adjustment of camera controls Becker achieved a wide
variety of concrete motion graphics, which he describes as
"sustained oscillations in two dimensions.'' Further effects were
realized by reversing the magnetic field of one raster scan. Original
signals on the left were reproduced on the right, then on the left, and
so on. The pattern thus achieved is symmetrical around a central
vertical line. Further convolutions were obtained by combining scan
reversals with raster misregistrations. These are some of the
feedback possibilities employing only a blank scanned raster and
attendant noise patterns. An entirely different range of effects can be
obtained if a second and a third video source are introduced into the
feedback loop.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Closed-Circuit Television
and Teledynamic Environments
"Television can't be used as an art medium," claims Les Levine,
"because it already is art. CBS, NBC, and ABC are among the
greatest art producers in the world." The art of which he speaks is
the art of communication. And, after all, art always has been communication in its most eloquent form. But until television, artists have
been inventors first and communicators second. Artists have created
things to be communicated: they have not created communication.
But television is neither an object nor a "content." Tele-vision is the
art of communication itself, irrespective of message. Television
exists in its purest form between the sender and the receiver. A
number of contemporary artists have realized that television, for the
first time in history, provides the means by which one can control the
movement of information throughout the environment.
In this respect television is not fundamentally an aesthetic medium,
at least not as we've traditionally understood the term. It's an
instrument whose unique ability is, as its name implies, to transport
audio-visual information in real time through actual space, allowing
face-to-face communication between humans or events physically
separated by continents and even planets. The self-feeding, selfimaging, and environmental surveillance capabilities of closed-circuit
television provide for some artists a means of engaging the
phenomenon of communication and perception in a truly empirical
fashion similar to scientific experimentation.
This approach to the medium may in fact constitute the only pure
television art, since the teleportation of encoded electronic-signal
information is central to its aesthetic. The actual transmission of
information across space/time is not an issue when video equipment
is used only for aesthetic manipulation of graphic images as in
synaesthetic videotapes and videographic films. I use the term
teledynamic environment to indicate that the artist works directly with
the dynamics of the movement of information within physical and
temporal parameters. The physical environment is determined by the

337

ARTSCILAB 2001

338 Expanded Cinema

Les Levine with Iris. 1968. Three TV

cameras and six monitors in an eight-by-five
console. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert
Kardon, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
ARTSCILAB 2001

Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments 339

characteristics of the closed-circuit video system. The artist is concerned not so much with what is being communicated as with how
it's communicated and the awareness of this process. Thus
television becomes the world's first inherently objective art form.

Les Levine: Iris

"Machines that show the human organism itself as a working
model," says Les Levine, "may eventually destroy the need for
psychology as we know it today." Essentially an intermedia artist
who works in plastics, alloys, and disposables, Levine was among
the first conceptual artists on the New York scene focusing more on
idea than icon. Naturally he turned to television, the most conceptual
of all creative media. As a video artist Levine is best known for two
closed-circuit teledynamic systems, Iris (1968) and Contact: A
Cybernetic Sculpture (1969).
In both works the motivation is somewhat psychological: Levine is
fascinated by the implications of self-awareness through the
technologically-extended superego of the closed-circuit TV. "I don't
tend to think of my work purely in psychological terms," he explains,
"but one must assume some psychological effect of seeing oneself
on TV all the time. Through my systems the viewer sees himself as
an image, the way other people would see him were he on
television. In seeing himself this way he becomes more aware of
what he looks like. All of television, even broadcast television, is to
some degree showing the human race to itself as a working model.
It's a reflection of society, and it shows society what society looks
like. It renders the social and psychological condition of the
environment visible to that environment."
In Iris, three concealed cameras focus on an environment (one's
living room, for example) in close-up, middle-distance, and wideangle. These images are displayed on six black-and-white TV tubes
mounted in an eight-foot console that also houses the cameras.
Combinations and distortions of images interact from screen to
screen in a kind of videotronic mix of the physical and metaphysical
elements of the environment. Seeing three different views of oneself
in combination with three others is a unique experience.
"Looking at Iris," he remarked, "many people are greatly surprised
at the way they actually look. They see themselves the way they

ARTSCILAB 2001

340 Expanded Cinema

usually see other people on television, and they have to make some
kind of judgment about themselves in terms of themselves as a
piece of information. That's what Iris does most of all, it turns the
viewer into information. The viewer has to reconsider what he
thought about himself before. He must think about himself in terms
of information. You notice people in front of Iris begin to adjust their
appearance. They adjust their hair, tie, spectacles. They become
aware of aspects of themselves which do not conform to the image
they previously had of themselves."
Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture continues the principles of Iris on
a somewhat expanded scale. It involves eighteen monitors and eight
cameras mounted in a sleek eight-foot stainless steel console, nine
monitors and four cameras on each side beneath plastic bubble
shields. As in Iris, the cameras produce close-ups, mid-range and
wide-angle views as images shift from screen to screen every few
seconds. Each monitor screen is covered with a colored acrylic gel
so that a given image may be seen in nine different colors as it swirls
through the closed-circuit system.
"Contact is a system that synthesizes man with his technology,"
Levine states. "In this system, the people are the software. It relies
totally on the image and sensibility of the viewer for its life. It is a
responsive mechanism and its personality reflects the attitudes of its
viewers. If they are angry, the piece looks angry. Contact is made
not only between you and your image, but how you feel about your
image, and how you feel about that image in relationship to the
things around you. The circuit is open."
Levine is rather indifferent to the physical structure of the consoles
that house his video systems. "I don't tend to consider my work in
aesthetic terms," he says. "I don't make a work with any aesthetic
principles in mind. If it happens to be a nice object to look at, that's
fine. What a TV set looks like is only of value in terms of iconic
imagery. However, what comes on the TV set is the real intelligence
of the object, which has no intelligence until the software is injected
into it. People don't look at the TV set, they look at the tube and the
tube is always pretty much the same shape. But television is
constantly re-wiping itself and printing over all the time, so that
depending on what information is available at any given moment the
image will be different. So there's really no image, no definite image.

ARTSCILAB 2001

Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments 341

Les Levine with Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture.

1969. Photo: courtesy of Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.

One could equate it, because of its flexibility, with looking at a person
sitting in a chair: he looks as he always looks except that his
behavior changes your image of him. Television has this quality: it
always somehow looks the same, but it's always doing something
different."

Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider: Wipe Cycle

Unlike Levine's work, the effect of Wipe Cycle, by the young New
York artists Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, was to integrate the
viewer and his local environment into the larger macrosystem of
information transmission. Wipe Cycle was first exhibited at the
Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969. It consisted of nine
monitors whose displays were controlled by synchronized cycle
patterns of live and delayed feedback, broadcast television, and
taped programming shot by Gillette and Schneider with portable
ARTSCILAB 2001

342 Expanded Cinema

Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider: Wipe Cycle.

1969. TV camera, closed-circuit system,
nine monitors, tapes, broadcasting. Photo: courtesy
of Howard Wise Gallery, New York.

equipment. These were displayed through alternations of four programmed pulse signals every two, four, eight, and sixteen seconds.
Separately, each of the cycles acted as a layer of video information,
while all four levels in concert determined the overall composition of
the work at any given moment.
"The most important function of Wipe Cycle," Schneider explained,
"was to integrate the audience into the information. It was a live
feedback system which enabled the viewer standing within its
environment to see himself not only now in time and space, but also
eight seconds ago and sixteen seconds ago. In addition he saw
standard broadcast images alternating with his own delayed/live
image. And also two collage-type programmed tapes, ranging from a
ARTSCILAB 2001

Closed-Circuit Television and Teledynamic Environments 343

shot of the earth, to outer space, to cows grazing, and a 'skin flick'
bathtub scene."
"It was an attempt," Gillette added, "to demonstrate that you're as
much a piece of information as tomorrow morning's headlines as a
viewer you take a satellite relationship to the information. And the
satellite which is you is incorporated into the thing which is being
sent back to the satellite. In other words, rearranging one's
experience of information reception."8 Thus in Wipe Cycle several
levels of time and space were synthesized into one audio-visual
experience on many simultaneous frequencies of perception. What
is, what has been, and what could be, were merged into one
engrossing teledynamic continuum and the process of
communication was brought into focus.

Allan Kaprow: Hello

The elements of randomness and chance, which Allan Kaprow has
explored so successfully in his Happenings and environmental
events, were brought into play in a television experiment conducted
by Kaprow with the unique facilities of WGBH-TV in Boston for "The
Medium Is the Medium." The station has direct closed-circuit inputs
from a number of locations in the Boston-Cambridge area: a line to
M.I.T., another to a hospital, another to an educational videotape
library, and a fourth to Boston Airport. These were interconnected
with five TV cameras and twenty-seven monitors that Kaprow
utilized as a sort of sociological conduit, demonstrating the
possibilities of creativity in the act of videotronic communication,
including obstacles to communication.
Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with
instructions as to what they would say on camera, such as "Hello, I
see you," when acknowledging their own image or that of a friend.
Kaprow functioned as "director" in the studio control room, ordering
channels opened and closed randomly. If someone at the airport
were talking to someone at M.I.T., the picture might suddenly switch
and one would be talking to doctors at the hospital. Thus not only the
process of communication was involved, but the elements of choice
and decision-making as well. Kaprow has suggested a global form of
8

From an interview with Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider by Jud Yalkut in "Film," East
Village Other, August 6, 1969.
ARTSCILAB 2001

344 Expanded Cinema

Hello, interconnecting continents, languages, and cultures in one

huge sociological mix. The information transmitted in Hello, he
emphasized, was not a newscast or lecture but the most important
message of all: "Oneself in connection with someone else."

ARTSCILAB 2001