Monday, May 16, 2011

Image Processing and Abstraction in Early Video

Einstine - Eric Siegel (1968)


In Einstine, which was based on the installation Psychedelevision in Color, a photograph of Albert Einstein is colorized and manipulated to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov.

Eric Siegel at EAI

Calligrams - Woody and Steina Vasulka (1970)


A study in aesthetic control of a television signal by Woody and Steina Vasulka.

Vasulka.org

5 Minute Romp Through the IP - Dan Sandin (1973)


In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. Sandin decided that the best distribution strategy for his instrument "was to give away the plans for the IP and encourage artists to build their own copies. This gave rise to a community of artists with their own advanced video production capabilities and many shared goals and experiences." In this segment, Sandin demonstrates the routing of the camera signal through several basic modules of the IP, producing a "primitive" vocabulary of the effects specific to video.  

Dan Sandin at VDB


Video Taping - Ernie Gusella (1974)


Gusella's title creates a pun on the term video "tape" by using a split screen in which one half is the electronic negative of the other. Gusella set up a glass sheet and suspended it from light poles. The glass was covered with black or white tape. As he slowly removes the obscuring tape from one half of the screen, his ghostly negative image emerges, further confusing the viewer. Electronically constructed using a VideoLab - a voltage controllable, multi-channel switcher, keyer, and colorizer built by Bill Hearn - the tape relies on the use of a luminance keyer to "cut out" specfic brightness levels (determined by voltage) from one video signal and replace them with a video signal from a second camera. Keying is a video effect seen commonly on television weather reports, in which the images of the map displayed behind the announcer are electronically matted into the image.  


Ernest Gusella at VDB

C-Trend - Woody Vasulka (1974)


The videotape depicts the experiment of recording images and sounds with a camera pointing out of the window and onto street traffic. But while the visual material is retimed and processed in the Scan Processor — where it is reshaped, compressed, and eventually divided in two differently shaped segments and finally presented as an unfamiliar form—the recorded sound remains unaltered, i.e., "real" street noise. In C-Trend, when the visual information is taken out of the television frame and set adrift, what happens is that the frame itself is exposed to horizontal and vertical blanking. Through raster manipulation, the image content becomes "object" and collapses upside-down.


Complex Wave Forms - Ralph Hocking (1976)


Produced without camera input, this intense electronic landscape transports the viewer into a world that is an abstract study in machine-generated imagery. Produced at the Experimental Television Center. 


Ralph Hocking at VDB


Music on Triggering Surfaces - Peer Bode (1978)


In Music on Triggering Surfaces, Bode constructs an interface between audio and video systems. The luminance information (voltage) from the visual images traversed by the black dot is routed to an oscillator to produce the audio signal, which varies according to the changing luminance. The video image itself then triggers the audio. The shifting grey-scale of the image becomes a two-dimensional sound map or audio score. This tape was produced at the Experimental Television Center.


Peer Bode at VDB


Perfect Leader - Max Almy (1983)


Produced to coincide with the 1984 Presidential Campaign, Perfect Leader is a cautionary tale that brings to life a prototypical politician, as packaged by Madison Avenue. With a driving soundtrack and bold visuals, Almy satirically presents this dynamic simulation of media politics as a fast-paced music clip. The narrator is a disembodied Big Brother, an Orwellian computer program who creates candidate images — dictator, evangelist, moderate — as models for a mass-marketed leader. The image of the potential president is overlaid with graphic symbols of multinational power: technology; economics; warfare. As a woman hysterically intones, "We've got to have a perfect leader," the bland, telegenic candidate is brought into two dimensions on the TV screen. Concise as a commercial, insistent as a pop song, Perfect Leader is Almy's most effective use of television techniques to critique the impact of the media on contemporary life.

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