The Emergence of Video Processing Tools Volume 1

Television Becoming Unglued

Intellect Ltd

Contents

SECTION 1

HISTORIES

Introduction

Kathy High

This first section of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued offers a context for the historical moment when the building of custom tools began, and looks at concepts that were critical in the formative years of video art and remain resonant in twenty-first-century digital culture. The writings trace the social impacts, funding changes, and art-historical influences that contributed to the evolution of tool making, and the art produced by these machines. The section documents the history of a set of electronic art-making tools developed in the United States from the 1960s through the mid 1980s and looks at their effect on contemporary new media artists who today make machines and systems a crucial part of their art process – from analog-to-digital to signal-to-code. What aspects of a historical moment encourage this kind of inventiveness? What drives artists to seek custom-built instruments, and how are they used? What are the influences of cultural policy, technological innovation, and the sociopolitical environment on tool development and use?

The section opens with 'Beginnings (With Artist Manifestos)', an essay by Kathy High that looks at the lineage of radical concepts linking early twentieth-century art movements and those of the 1960s and 1970s: 'From what disciplines or movements did the artists come to this form of practice in the first few decades of video and tool development? How did the discourse develop about the aesthetic and conceptual qualities of artist works using electronic tools, in particular the association of custom tools to image processing?' Her essay is accompanied by a selection of artist manifestos describing working methods and an enthusiasm for the medium of video.

Jeremy Culler's essay, 'Mapping Video Art as Category, or an Archaeology of the Conceptualizations of Video', examines four areas of activity that characterized the context within which tool development occurred: alternative media centers and video collectives, galleries and museums, the published record, and academic institutions and conferences. How do early electronic tools or 'instruments' fit into the changing discourse about video art during its first few decades, as technology-dependent artists' works became part of institutional and gallery and museum systems?

In their essay, 'Impulses – Tools', curator Christiane Paul and artist/critic Jack Tool in place 1970s tool development in a broad continuum of impulses present within contemporary art practices. This essay offers comparisons of conceptual and structural frameworks within art from the 1970s to the current period, considering shifts in technology and other media processes: i.e., how artists use systems in addition to single tools, as instruments; develop custom interfaces and forms of interactivity; use real time media performance to process image/sound; trigger moving images and effects through external devices or signals; interrupt signal transmission and networks; and reverse engineer or 'hack'.

Tom Sherman's original text 'The Art-Style Computer-Processing System, 1974' lays out a clever conceptual and art-historical approach to tool use, equating synthesizer effects to various painterly art styles, such as Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, Impressionism, Photorealism, Action Painting and more. Following this is another article, 'Machine Aesthetics Are Always Modern', where Sherman offers comparisons of conceptual and structural artistic frameworks and philosophies, from early modernism to the current period, considering shifts in technology and other art and media processes as to how machines 'assist in codetermining and implementing aesthetic choices'. Looking at the different machine functions (and video functions), Sherman parses the ways the usage of machines affects aesthetic outcomes, building a vocabulary of aesthetic choices based on amplitude, parallelism, random elements, juxtaposition, distortion and more.

In her essay, 'Electronic Video Instruments and Public Sector Funding', Mona Jimenez finds that despite the antiestablishment and anti-television impulses of many tool designers and users, they relied heavily upon resources made possible by educational and public television. This essay reveals the institutional and funding structures that supported custom tool development and artist access to electronic tools in the 1970s and 1980s: arts organizations, public television labs, universities, arts councils and foundations. In addition, the chapter explores the relationship between tool development and the ideals prevalent in the first decades of media arts, such as the decentralization and 'democratization' of access, production and distribution, and the oppositional stance of many video experimenters to telecommunications and broadcast television.

The focus is on organizations in the northeastern United States, but the essay also includes activities occurring in the Midwest and the San Francisco Bay Area. Early groups include public television TV Labs, the University of Chicago – Circle Campus and the Art Institute of Chicago; the Electron Movers in Rhode Island; and in New York State, the Center for Media Study/Buffalo and the Experimental Television Center (ETC). The role of the Rockefeller Foundation is discussed, as well as the emergence and impact of public arts funding, specifically the role of the New York State Council on the Arts.

Articles by Howard Weinberg ('TV Lab: Image-making Tools') and John Minkowsky ('The New Television Workshop at WGBH, Boston' and 'The National Center of Experiments in Television at KQED-TV, San Francisco') focus specifically on the phenomenon of artist laboratories within public television stations that were sites for the development of machines such as the Direct Video Synthesizer, the Templeton Mixer, Don Hallock's Videola, the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer and the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer, and places where ideas about art and technology circulated.

And finally, Jeremy Culler discusses the Experimental Television Center's history of technological development in his essay 'The Experimental Television Center: Advancing Alternative Production Resources, Artist Collectives and Electronic Video-Imaging Systems'. Culler traces ETC's funding history, teaching record, and establishment as a laboratory for tool creation, building versions of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer. Culler also describes the 'Tele-Techno Conference' in its various iterations as an upstate New York telephone conference where not-for-profit groups compared notes on machine maintenance issues and more.

Beginnings (With Artist Manifestos)

Kathy High

Formal transgressions are based on literary and plastic innovations which perpetuate the illusion of historical change; historical transgressions are essentially structural disruptions subverting the temporal myth of art; that is, they destroy the illusion that art progresses from one stage to the next through time. Historical transgressions, to use Marcel Duchamp's term, 'short-circuit' the evolution of formal transgression. (Burnham 1973: 46–47)

In his book The Structure of Art, Jack Burnham aptly points out the differences of what he calls 'formal' and 'historical' transgressions, and how these transgessions are dynamic ways that art can and does shift our focus. The rifts that these transgressions create is an opening for further understanding of art and culture – perhaps even leaps in consciousness. I would like to look at just such a transgressive moment in this text and to consider Burnham's statement here. I am particularly focusing on the moments leading up to early 'video art' in the 1970s and 80s. This was the 'image processing' video moment – if we can call it that – coupled with the creation of video processing machines, which lead to just such a 'short circuit' as a 'historical transgression'.

This opening chapter poses several questions: From what art disciplines or movements did the artists of the first few decades of video and tool development come to form this practice? How did the discourse develop about the aesthetic and conceptual qualities of artist works using electronic tools, in particular the association of custom tools to image processing? And in their own words, why do artists engage with, adapt and invent machines and other electronic tools? (See the artist manifestos at the end of this article.) Much has been written about the histories of video art and its inception. This chapter looks primarily at the history of video toolmakers, custom-built tools and systems, and the video that was produced with tools of the early period, from late 1960s to the 1980s.

At this time there were debates around image-processing video work, suggesting it perpetuated modernist concerns with its formalist approach. Jon Burris spoke of this formalist concern in his article 'Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium': 'These videomakers, like many artists of the period, were caught in what might be characterized as the dilemma of decadent modernism' (Burris 1996: 11). While the tenets of modernism can be found in some early video art, it also could be argued that the act and process of tool making was itself a fundamental means of understanding the medium and exploring its unique qualities of electronic signal and flow which led to future technology and art production – thus breaking this practice away from the avant-garde and placing it squarely in a do-it-yourself culture. As well, tool adaptation allowed certain machines to be more accessible to amateurs, empowering them with a unique means of communication. This breakdown of video's essence and investigation into video signal and systems permitted an intense liberation from traditional picture making, establishing a differentiation from traditional television and mass media. This moment, while sometimes seemingly a formal transgression, offered enough of an insight into an entire system of art and media production that it should be considered more likely a historical one, developing new ways of understanding art production through tool production. Or, as Jack Burnham also wrote: '[The] cultural obsession with the art object is slowly disappearing and being replaced by what might be called 'systems consciousness.' Actually, this shifts from the direct shaping of matter to a concern for organizing quantities of energy and information' (Burnham 1968: 369).

Historical background

Historically, highly developed cultures embraced art and technology with equal respect, and with a reverence for both the sciences and the arts. Rather than creating disciplinary divisions and specialty areas of knowledge, cultures that expressed an interest in furthering a broad notion of 'knowledge' encouraged knowledge producers to embrace multiple areas of study at once. An example of early-thirteenth-century Islamic societies is cited in Gunalan Nadarajan's article 'Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari's The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206)':

The word, 'ilm that is most commonly used to denote 'knowledge' in Arabic, Hill reminds us, included a wide range of fields as astronomy, mechanics, theology, philosophy, logic and metaphysics. This practice of not differentiating between seemingly separate fields is best understood in the context of the Islamic view of the interconnectedness of all things that exist and wherein the quest for knowledge is a contemplation on and discovery of this essential unity of things. (Nadarajan 2007: 165)

Amidst descriptions of the elaborately designed automaton machines of this period, Nadarajan also refers to this quest for knowledge as 'a passionate quest to discover these signs and thus arrive at a better understanding and appreciation of God's magnificence' (Nadarajan 2007: 165). In contrast to this moment of early Islamic societies' sophisticated consideration of the interconnectedness of all learning and disciplines, we find in contemporary Western culture a separation of the disciplinary studies of the sciences, philosophy, engineering and art which potentially limits understanding of the world and natural phenomena. This divisiveness sets up segmented and compartmentalized areas of study where the 'essential unity of things' gets overlooked, and in some instances, where shunning scientific and artistic endeavors make them seem very distant to one another.

I would argue that this split into 'knowledge camps' within Western culture has created an elitist hierarchy of professionals who uphold strict boundaries between distinct disciplinary areas, with 'experts' overseeing knowledge production. This professional rigor, building fields of experts, also goes hand in hand with the goals of capitalism. The need to defy these boundaries and capitalist tendencies has been an underlying theme of many contemporary art movements in the twentieth century. These art movements are the 'historical transgressions' that Burnham speaks of, as they open up knowledge sources to more (common) people, empowering them and making them more self-aware and critical of their society. The Dadaists after World War I, in a reaction against the war, created art situations that broke societal taboos and the institutionalization of distinct disciplines. The Surrealists also were a cultural production movement, working with the irrational and intuitive to create a more thoughtful, political and inventive society. Martha Rosler writes: 'The aim of dada and surrealism was to destroy art as an institution by merging it with everyday life, transforming it and rupturing the now well-established technological rationalism of mass society' (Rosler 1990: 38–39). 'Technological rationalism' had brought a narrow focus that these movements worked to broaden. Experiments with photomontage and experimental photo and film techniques were part of the new expressions by these groups. For example, Dadaist and Surrealist visual artist Man Ray, who bought his first camera in 1915, experimented with various photographic chemical and lighting techniques such as rayograms, double exposure, solarization, and development methods using effects that broke from tradition and expanded photographic arts into new directions.

This revolutionary work of breaking down boundaries and societal norms through art actions was also practiced by other contemporary art groups such as the Situationists International of the 1950s and 1960s, who had 'the wish to "multiply poetic subjects and objects" and "to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects' (Guy Debord, Rapport sur la construction des situations, May 1957). It is the project of revisioning the world according to its smallest, most prosaic, everyday details and artifacts, then remaking the world on those same terms [...]' (Marcus 1989: 126). These anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, even anti-art actions led artists to explore ideas that de-structured society with a critical eye towards 'professionalism' and redefined ways to think creatively about technology and culture. They embraced filmmaking, psychogeography and détournement to express their ideas and expansive cultural critique.