"the origins of video art"
pages: 116, 117, 118 and 181, 182 and 183.
A HISTORY of VIDEO ART
by Chris
Meigh-Andrews
During the period between 1965 and 1975,
which could be considered as the defining period of video art, there was
significant research activity amongst artists working with video to develop,
modify or invent video imaging instruments or
synthesizers.
The first generation of video
artist/engineers include Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Lars Weck, Eric Seigel,
Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, and Bill and Louise Etra, in addition to
the well-documented collaborative work of Nam June Paik and Shuya
Abe.
The work of these pioneers is important
because, in addition to exploring the potential of video as a means of creative
expression, they developed a range of relatively accessible and inexpensive
image manipulation devices specifically for 'alternative' video
practice.
TURE SJOLANDER AND
MONUMENT
In September 1966 Swedish
artists Ture Sjolander ( 1937-, Sweden) and Bror Wikstrom broadcast Time, a
30-minute transmission of electronically manipulated paintings on National
Swedish Television. Sjolander and Wikstrom had worked with TV broadcast engineer
Bengt Modin to construct a temporary video image synthesizer which was used to
distort and transform video line-scan rasters by applying tones from waveform
generators. The basic process involved applying electronic distortions during
the process of transfer of photographic transparencies and film clips. According
to Modin they introduced the electronic transformations using two approaches.
The geometric distortion of the scanning raster of the video signal by
feeding various waveforms to the scanning coil, and video distortion by the
application of various electronic filters to the luminance
signal.
Sjolander had begun working with broadcast
television with the production of his first multimedia experiment The Role of
Photography, commissioned by the National Swedish Television in 1964, which was
broadcast the following year. With the broadcasting of Time, his second project
for Swedish television, Sjolander was well aware of the significance of his work
and importance of the artistic statement he was making:
Time is the very first video art work
televised at that point in time for the reason to produce an historical record
as well as an evidence of original visual free art, made with the electronic
medium - manipulation of the electronic signal - and exhibited/installed through
the television, televised.
In 1967, Sjolander teamed up with Lars Weck
and, using a similar technological process, produced Monument, a programme of
electronically manipulated monochrome images of famous people and cultural icons
including the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, the Beatles, Adolf Hitler and Pablo
Picasso. (Separate text of this work as below)
This programme was broadcast to a potential
audience of over 150 million people in France, Italy Sweden, Germany and
Switzerland in 1968, as well later in the USA. Subsequently, Sjolander produced
a Space in the Brain (1969) based on images provided by NASA, extending his
pioneering electronic imaging television work to include the manipulation and
distortion of colour video imagery. A Space in the Brain was an attempt to deal
with notions of space, both the inner worldof the brain and the new televisual
space created by electronic imaging.
Sjolander, originally a painter and
photographer, had become increasingly dissatisfied with conventional
representation as a language of communication and began experimenting with
the manipulation of photographic images using graphic and chemical means. For
Sjolander, broadcast television represented truly contemporary
communication medium that should be adopted as soon as possible by artists - a
fluid transformation and constant stream of ideas within the reach of millions.
The televised electronic images Sjolander and his
collaborators produced with Time, Monument and Space in the Brain were further
extended via other means. The television system was exploited as a generator of
imagery for further distribution processes including silkscreen printing,
posters, record covers, books and paintings that were widely distributed and
reproduced, although ironically signed and numbered as if in limited
editions.
It seems likely that these pioneering broadcast
experiments were influential on the subsequent work of Nam June Paik
and others. According to Ture Sjolander, Paik visited Stockholm in the summer of
1966 and was shown still images from Time while on a visit to the Elektron Musik
Studion (EMS). Additionally, Sjolander is in possession of a copy of a letter
dated 12 March 1974 from Sherman Price of Rutt Electrophysics in New York,
acknowledging the significance of Monument to the history of 'video animation',
and requesting detailed information about the circuitry employed to obtain the
manipulated imagery. In reply, Bengt Modin, the engineer who had worked with
Sjolander, provided Price with a circuit diagram and an explanation of their
technical approach to the project, claiming he 'no longer knew the whereabouts
of the artists involved'.
THE PAIK-ABE
SYNTHESIZER
The Paik-Abe Synthesizer, built in 1969 is one of the
earliest examples of a self-contained video image-processing device. As we have
seen, Ture Sjolander and his collaborators had brought together video processing
technology in temporary configuration to produce their early broadcast
experiments, Paik's synthesizer was a self-contained unit built expressly and
exclusively for the purpose. The instrument, or video synthesizer, as it came to
be known, enabled the artist to add colour to a monochrome video image, and to
distort the conventional TV camera image. -.......
Extending a dialogue that they had begun in Tokyo in
1964, electronic engineer Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik began building a video
synthesizer in 1969 at WGBH-TV in Boston, possibly spurred on by the work of
Sjolander in Sweden.
from Chris Meigh-Andrews book, A HISTORY OF VIDEO
ART, Publisher BERG, Oxford-New York. First Edition October
2006
representative video art
works
pages 181, 182 and 183
MONUMENT, TURE SJOLANDER AND LARS WECK
(WITH BENGT MODIN), 1967
( BLACK AND WHITE, SOUND, 10 MINUTES.
COMMISSIONED AND BROADCAST BY NATIONAL SWEDISH TV, 1968)
Monument, characterized by Ture Sjolander
as a series of 'electronic paintings' is a free flowing colage of
electronically distorted and transformed icoic media images. Set to a similarly
improvised jazz and sound effects track, images of pop stars, political and
historical celebrities and media personalities, culled from archive film footage
and photographic stills have been electronically manipulated - stretched,
skewed, exploded, rippled and rotated. The relentless flow of semi-abstracted
monochromatic faces and associated sounds seems to both celebrate and satirize
the contemporary visual culture of the time. In its fluid mix of visual
information it generalizes the television medium, draining it of its specific
content and momentary significance. It
creates a kind of 'monument' to the ephemeral - all this will pass, as it is
passing before you now.
Archive film footage and photographic
stills of familiar faces and people, such as Lennon and McCartney, Chaplin,
Hitler, the Mona Lisa - the 'monument' of the world culture - flicker and flash,
stretch and ooze across the television screen. In some moments the television
medium is itself directly referenced, the familiar screen shape presented and
rescanned, images of video feedback and, at one point, its vertical roll out of
adjustment, anticipate Joan Jonas's seminal tape, although for very different
purposes. The work anticipated a number of later videotapes, particularly the
distorted iconic images of Nam June Paik.
Gene Youngblood described the psychological
power and effect of these transformations i his influential and visionary book
Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970):
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
semi-cohesion, making the viewer constantly aware of his orientation to the
picture. The transformations accur slowly and with great speed, erasing
perspectives, crossing psycological barriers. A figure might stretch like a
silly putty or become rippled in liquid universe. Harsh basrelief effects
accentuate physical dimensions with great subtlety, so that one eye or ear might
appear slightly unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a
constellation of shimmering video phosphores.
Sjolander and his collaborators at Sveriges
Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Company) in Stockholm had worked together on a
number of related projects since the mid-1960s, beginning with The Role of Photography, Sjolander's first experiment with
electronic manipulations of the broadcast image in 1965. This project was
followed with the broadcast of Time (1966), a thirty-minute transmission of
'electronic paintings' produced using the same temporarily configured video
image synthesizer that was later used to create Monument.
The system that Sjolander and his
colleagues used involved the transfer of photographic images (film footage and
transparencies) to videotape using a 'flying-spot' telecine machine. This
process produced electronic images which they transformed and manipulated by
applying square and sine signals with a waveform generator during the transfer
stage, often using this process repeatedly to apply greater levels of
transformation.
For Sjolander and his collaborator Lars
Weck, the broadcasting of Monument was the epicentre of an extended
communication experiment in electronic image-making reaching out to an audience
of millions.
Kristian Romare, writing in a book
published as part of an extended series of artworks which included publishing,
posters, record covers and paintings after the broadcasting of Monument,
describes the scope of Sjolander and Weck,s vision and aspirations for the new
image-generating technique they had pioneered:
SCAN
MODULATION/RESCAN
In this process images are produced using a
television camera rescanning an oscilloscope or CRT screen. The display images
are manipulated (squeezed, stretched, rotated, etc.) using magnetic or
electronic modulation. The manipulated images, rescanned by a second camera are
then fed through an image processor. This type of instrument was also used
without an input camera feed, the resultant images produced by manipulation
of the raster. Examples of this type of instrument include Ture
Sjolander,s ' Temporary " Video Synthesizer (1966-69), the Paik/Abe Synthesizer,
and the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor (1973).