LECTURE BY VIOLAINE BOUTET DE MONVEL
HOSTED BY KEVIN CRYDERMAN
AT EMORY UNIVERSITY - DEPARTMENT OF FILM STUDIES
INTRODUCTION TO FILM COURSE - OCTOBER 2008
ON TUESDAY OCTOBER 21, 2008: 1-2:15 PM AT WHITE HALL 205
The purpose of this lecture is to give a short introduction to video art in contemporary art at its beginning in the middle of the 1960s and in its current state. In other words, we will be concerned with experimental video practices that essentially found their place of expression and disclosure in contemporary art museums, galleries and market, as opposed to movie theaters and television programs - i.e., as opposed to the mass media industry. This opposition doesn't imply that video art never attempted to intrude into the mass media industry. On the contrary, many attempts to subvert real broadcast TV were made at the early stage of video art, especially at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s (when television was still experimental). Otherwise, most of video art belongs to museums and galleries as it happens to be an art of exhibition that often challenges the perception of moving-images in the space. In both cases, video art somehow dissociates itself from mainstream cinema and television, either because it is exploring new means and uses for moving-images outside their application in the mass media industry, or because it is thinking the genesis of mass media narratives in a critical (sometimes ironical) point of view.
Examples of subversion:
TV-AQUARIUM (TV DEATH 1)
TV-Aquarium (TV Death 1), Peter Weibel, in TV + VT Works series, 1970-1972 (made for public Austrian television).
Peter Weibel: "As an aquarium, the TV set signifies the identity of a real and reproduced event. Its images transform the TV set into an aquarium, a still-life, an object of meditation. But the water gradually runs out of the TV cabinet. The gurgling noise grows louder, the movements of the fish become more hectic, finally they are wriggling for their lives on the waterless floor of the cabinet. A warning sinusoidal tone begins to sound – censorship has saved the fish from their doom. I would have filmed the fish until they stopped flapping about, in order to produce the impression of a real death in a real TV set in a real apartment. This deliberate illusion would have shocked the audience, confronted them with real death as opposed to the pictures of death shown on the news, which now seem nothing more than illusion."
TV-News, Peter Weibel, in TV + VT Works series, 1970 (made for public Austrian television).
Peter Weibel:" Between the TV set and viewer, a function exists whereby the user switches on and off the appliance. I have reproduced this function and made it the content of the TV programme. Sandwich character of real process and reproduction process, of reflection and action. On the screen, a series of viewers is seen sitting in front of TV sets. A fault occurs in the last set shown, meaning the next viewer has to get up in order to repair the fault. This repair brings about a disruption in the next viewer’s screen. The disruption propagates itself until it reaches the real TV set, meaning the real viewer has to rise and eliminate the fault. Time delay: the real procedure is the conclusion of the reproduced procedure."
Whereas television started to commercialize its programs in the 1930s and became dominant within twenty years as a mass phenomenon, the video image and the broadcast image intervened into the contemporary art world only in the second half of the 1960s.
Sony 'Portapak' first portable video system, 1965.
Initially, the PortaPak was operated by a crew of two – one person to use the camera and one to operate the videotape recorder. Innovations quickly improved the quality of material shot by video camera and made the units smaller.
Video, as a medium, appeared in 1965 when the first portable video equipment - the 'Portapak' by Sony - was released onto the American market (and by the end of the 1960s, onto the international one). With the introduction of portable video cameras to the mass consumers, video wasn't anymore a technology reserved to the rich industry of television network and cinema (for special effects), but became within a decade an accessible and affordable tool for private and artistic expressions.
Clement GREENBERG, "Modernist Painting" in Voice of America, 1960:
"THE ESSENCE OF MODERNISM LIES, AS I SEE IT, IN THE USE OF CHARACTERISTIC METHODS OF A DISCIPLINE TO CRITICIZE THE DISCIPLINE ITSELF, NOT IN ORDER TO SUBVERT IT BUT IN ORDER TO ENTRENCH IT MORE FIRMLY IN ITS AERA OF COMPETENCE."
As video entered the world of art in the 1960s, artists and critics were mostly concerned with the modernist principle as enunciated and imposed by American art critic and historian Clement Greenberg, for or against which they all had to define themselves. This principle was the one of the medium specificity which, according to Clement Greenberg, was the condition for 'high art', as opposed to 'low art' (popular culture). In other words, to achieve 'high art', one had to define the properties that were inherent to the medium in use. Therefore, for 'video art' to become 'high art', video artists would have to explore the very possibilities offered by the technology of video and electronic, so as to delimit its specific aera of competence, and in doing so, differenciate it from cinema.
One example of the bipolarity that informs the world of art in the 1960s (abstraction vs figuration):
Turnsole, Kenneth Noland, 1961 (synthetic polymer paint on unprimed canvas): an example of post-painterly abstraction in the early 1960s, a movement that followed the precepts of modernism enunciated by Clement Greenberg.
Turquoise Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1962 (serigraphy): an example of Pop Art that Clement Greenberg defined as kitsch and 'unpure' because of its direct reference to and use of the popular culture imagery ('low art' in Clement Greenberg's words).
Andy Warhol started to work with the figure of Marilyn Monroe after her suicide in 1962. The original picture that he used for his numerous serigraphs was a publicity still from the 1953 movie Niagara.
Contrary to post-painterly abstraction, Pop Art was the leading movement in the 1960s art landscape. If in this decade, as we said earlier, artists had to position themselves for or against the principle of the medium specificity advocated by Clement Greenberg, in reverse it also means that they had to position themselves in relation to the popular culture and the mass media industry, especially for a medium like video whose media is television - the channel of all information and entertainments.
Gene YOUNGBLOOD, Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 258:
"JUST AS CINEMA HAS IMITATED THEATER FOR SEVENTY YEARS, TELEVISION HAS IMITATED CINEMA IMITATING THEATER FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. BUT THE NEW GENERATION WITH ITS TRANSNATIONAL CONSCIOUNESS WILL NOT TOLERATE THE MINIATURIZED VAUDEVILLE THAT IS TELEVISION AS PRESENTLY EMPLOYED."
Generally, applying the principle of specifity to any medium always appears at its early stage like an abstraction - figuration is left to a very primary stage, if not absent. With video art, artists somehow abandoned all cinematography and complex scenarios (external literaly contents as in use in mainstream cinema and television) and started to explore new means for moving-images authorized by their new technology: the technology of broadcast image.If cinematography and cinema (especially the economy of public and scheduled projection in movie theaters) were completely left out in early video art thinking, it is because video as a medium had to define itself according to television, its media. The first generation of video artists explored their medium on the basis that the difference between film and video was not only essential but significant.
As sure as Clement Greenberg drew some of the most decisive aesthetic outlines for the art world after World War II in his bipolar vision of 'high art' and 'low art', another academic figure influenced even more deeply and more specifically the early developments of video art. Highly media covered aphorism 'the medium is the message' of Canadian media theorist Marshall Mcluhan, whose popularity reach its pick at the end of the 1960s, profoundly inspired the first generation of new born video artists.
Marshall McLUHAN, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, 1964, p.9:
"'THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE' BECAUSE IT IS THE MEDIUM THAT SHAPES THE SCALE AND FORM OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION AND ACTION. THE CONTENT OR USES OF SUCH MEDIA ARE AS DIVERSE AS THEY ARE INEFFECTUAL IN SHAPING THE FORM OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION. INDEED, IT IS ONLY TOO TYPICAL THAT THE 'CONTENT' OF ANY MEDIUM BLINDS US TO THE CHARACTER OF THE MEDIUM."
In short, early video art was doubly invited to explore the technical possibilities offered by the technology of video and electronic in order to:
1- Become 'high art';
2- Figure out what are the specificities of their medium that had been so far used as a cheap substitute for cinema as it was employed (and still is) on television;
3- In the same movement, criticize the use of mainstream television broadcast in an attempt to subvert it.
As soon as 1963, in Germany, before the first portable video system was released onto the market, South-Korean artist Nam June Paik made experiments on the broadcast image by directly manipulating the TV sets controls or the electronic systems of the monitors. Doing so, he managed to distort the broadcast images and reveal their real source: the electronic signal. Later on, he used magnets that he installed on the TV sets to distort the images. Nam June Paik is also known as the first buyer of the 'Portapak' in 1965 in New York, that he could afford with a Rockefeller Foundation grant. The 'legend' says that he followed the Pope (Paul VI) in visit that same day with his portable video camera from a taxi. Of course, there is no trace of this early videotape.
"Exposition of Music - Electronic Television", Gallery Parnass, Wuppertal (Germany), 1963: Nam June Paik and Otto Götz in front of Kuba TV.
"Exposition of Music - Electronic Television", Gallery Parnass, Wuppertal (Germany), 1963: horizontal (and vertical) distorsions.
Magnet TV, Nam June Paik, 1965: The images that are distorted are a broadcast of Richard Nixon. These distortions were produced by moving a magnet across the cathode ray tube. Many years later, critics and historians saw in these early video distortions a prefiguration of Watergate scandal.
13 DISTORTED TV SETS
13 Distorted TV Sets, Nam June Paik, 1963.
"Paik’s first major exhibition was held from 11 to 20 March 1963 in a gallery run by architect Rolf Jährling in his private residence. The title Paik chose indicates his transition from music to the electronic image. Four 'prepared' pianos, mechanical sound objects, several record and tape installations, twelve modified TV sets, and the head of a freshly slaughtered ox above the entrance awaited visitors. The show ran for ten days and opened for two hours daily between 7.30 and 9.30pm. Newspaper reports indicate that visitors to the show, which was distributed over the entire house (and did not stop at the private quarters of the Jährling family), experienced the show and its setting as a 'total event', many guests taking no more than a perfunctory glance at the room with TV sets. Today, this room is seen as the starting point of the video art that later developed, although Paik, not yet having access to video equipment, was still modifying inexpensive second-hand TV sets to distort the TV programmes as they were being broadcast. Germany had only one TV station up to 1963, and it broadcast for no more than a few hours each evening – possibly explaining the late opening-time of Paik's show. Unlike the Fluxus actions which took place concurrently, Paik’s project did not attract TV coverage."
Participation TV, Nam June Paik, 1963, in "Exposition of Music - Electronic Television": (reconstruction, Lyon Biennial, 1995): the viewer can distort the broadcast image with the sound of his/her voice while speaking into an integrated microphone.
By directly manipulating the images of television broadcast, Nam June Paik revealed one unique property of video and electronic: the possibility of live and instantaneity - the fact that this technology allows its users to control and see immediatly as they are recording or creating their images the result of their recording or manipulation. In other words, the fact that this technology could be used in a participative way with its live quality.
Early videotapes, if they allowed a 20 minutes non-stop recording (against 3 minutes for super 8 film cameras), were fragile. Time deteriorated quickly such tapes and electronic snow replaced the recorded images. This partly explains why the oldest artistic videotapes that have survived these last four decades were directed in experimental video workshops hosted by television stations such as, for instance, WGBH Boston. Since the artists at that time were exploring the possibilities offered by the video, early videotapes could be described as an inventory of effects.
Example of the use of live recording for the creation of effects:
THREE TRANSITIONS
Three Transitions, Peter Campus, 1973 (made in the WGBH studio as an artist-in-residence): Peter Campus used chromakey processors and video mixers to create the videos in the studio. With video, the artist can receive instant feedback while shooting. Being able to watch oneself in the monitor while recording is a major perceptual shift from long delay in viewing film. Here Peter Campus is watching himself live as he goes through the motions for the camera.
"In Three Transitions, Campus presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. He begins with an image created by two cameras facing opposite sides of a paper wall and filming simultaneously. His back to one camera, Campus cuts through the paper. In the double image, it appears as if he is cutting through his back, which is both disconcerting and tongue–in–cheek. Campus then uses the "chroma–key effect" of superimposing one video image onto a similarly colored area of another image. He applies blue paint to his face, and during this process another image of himself is revealed; he then superimposes his image on a piece of blue paper, which he sets afire. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self–destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality."
The teleportation of audio-visual information is a central issue in the production of video art installations.
Examples of closed-circuit video systems:
TV Buddha, Nam June Paik, 1974 (closed-circuit video installation): example of a closed-circuit video system, here in the service of an (ironic) display of eternity.
Interface, Peter Campus, 1972 (closed-circuit video installation): example of a closed-circuit video system which involves the spectator.
"A sheet of transparent glass is set up in a darkened room. On the wall behind this sheet of glass there is a closed-circuit video camera, directed towards it. Four metres in front of the camera there is a video projector which projects the live video signal from the camera onto the sheet of glass. When the visitor moves into the recording area in front of the transparent glass surface, his/her reflection - the wrong way around - and his/her video image - the right way around - appear on it simultaneously and life-sized. Depending on where the visitor is standing, the two images are visible either next to each other or partially overlapping."
He Weeps for You, Bill Viola, 1976 (closed-circuit video installation):
"One of the first video installations by Bill Viola, closely related to his videotape productions of the 1970s. A drop of water emerging from a small brass valve is magnified by a video camera and projected on a large screen. The close-up image reveals that the viewer and part of the room where they stand are visible inside each forming drop. The drop swells and shudders as it reaches surface tension, finally falling and creating a loud resonant sound as it lands on an amplified drum below. A new drop immediately begins forming and the cycle continues in infinite repetition."
Example of a closed-circuit video system which uses real time (mirrors) and time delay:
Present Continuous Past(s), Dan Graham, 1974 (closed-circuit video installation):
"The mirrors reflect present time. The video camera tapes what is immediately in front of it and the entire reflection on the opposite mirrored wall. The image seen by the camera (reflecting everything in the room) appears eight seconds later in the video monitor (via a tape delay placed between the video recorder, which is recording, and a second video recorder, which is playing the recording back). If a viewer's body does not directly obscure the lens's view of the facing mirror the camera is taping the reflection of the room and the reflected image of the monitor (which shows the time recorded eight seconds previously reflected from the mirror). A person viewing the monitor sees both the image of himself or herself of eight seconds earlier, and what was reflected on the mirror from the monitor eight seconds prior to that–sixteen seconds in the past (the camera view of eight seconds prior was playing back on the monitor eight seconds earlier, and this was reflected on the mirror along with the then present reflection to the viewer). An infinite regress of time continuums within time continuums (always separated by eight-second intervals) within time continuums is created. The mirror at right angles to the other mirror-wall and to the monitor-wall gives a present-time view of the installation as if observed from an «objective» vantage exterior to the viewer's subjective experience and to the mechanism that produces the piece's perceptual effect. It simply reflects (statically) present time."
(in Doug Hall/Sally Jo Fifer: Illuminating Video – An Essential Guide to Video Art, New York, 1990, p. 186)
For a number of years, openly narrative audio-visual artworks have emerged in the expression of contemporary art, locating themselves midway between cinema (in the fictional sense of the term) and documentary. In other words, these artworks seem, in the first place, to justify their existence by the staging of a narrative and, by doing so, they have completely changed the face of video art. Single and multi-projection installations have replaced closed-circuit video systems in the galleries and museums and the specificities of one medium don't seem to be a concern anymore for the younger generation of video artists. In fact, artists today are mostly interested in experimenting with the very modalities of narrative. Two facts can help to explain this shift of interest.
First, the globalization and democratization of digital technology that we witness since the 1980s have put on the side the differences between video and film that were essential in early video art practices and thinking. Both mediums have access now in their private use to the same technology for editing (the computer). In other words, since the advent of digital technology, formalist exploration of the specificities proper to each moving-image medium has been pushed into the background because it is no longer a defining element, being both processed in the same canals.
Second, the commercialization of VHS recorders and players during the 1980s has accompanied the edition of all the cinematographic patrimony on videotape (now on DVD or streaming video). Not only this means that consumers could watch a movie on television without having to wait for its broadcast, but also this means that they could watch it at the pace they want, being no longer prisoners of the movie theater's schedule. VHS recorders and players allow their users to stop, slow or fast forward and backward the moving-images. For artists, this means that video could be from then on a tool for exploring cinema (in the general sense of the term).
24-Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon, 1993 (video installation):
"Realistically, no one can watch the whole of 24 Hour Psycho, which consists of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) slowed down so that a single, continuous viewing lasts for twenty-four hours. While we can experience narrative elements in it (largely through familiarity with the original), the crushing slowness of their unfolding constantly undercuts our expectations, even as it ratchets up the idea of suspense to a level approaching absurdity."
source: Russell Ferguson, «Trust Me,» in: Douglas Gordon, Cambridge/MA, 2001, p. 16.
24-Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon, 1993 (video installation): to give an idea of the pace.
End of the lecture with the projection of:
The Third Memory, Pierre Huyghe, 1999: video installation.
One of the most spectacular media events ever was the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery which was covered live on TV. The robbery was commited by John Wojtowicz. Sydney Lumet based his feature film Dog Day Afternoon (1975) on the robbery. 25 years later Pierre Huyghe asked the real bank robber John Wojtowicz to help with filming a reenactment of the holdup. The Third Memory combines live TV footage of the original robbery with excerpts from the film and scenes shot of the reenactment of the holdup.
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 1/6):
1'52 - 2'24: "And yet this most public media has developped a paradox: a new frame of reference as being formed by the video avant-garde, television created not for the masses by huge and wealthy networks, but television created for the few by one person working alone.It began in 1965 with a technological breakthrough: a portable television camera. One person can now be his own director, cameraman, and sometimes star. And with video tape, he could see his creation at once."
3'44 - 4'07: "A portable TV camera can be a toy, an expensive toy, but it can also be an instrument, a paint brush if you will, that expresses a kind of inventive and unorthodox thinking new to television, if not to painting and sculpture."
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 2/6):
0'00 - 0'19: "Feedback, the computer, the synthesizer, our primary nouns of a language spoken by a group which persues through these new means a very old vision, the search for a medium that combines the movement of the performing arts, the visual sophistication of painting and the rythm of music. With video, such a medium has arrived."
2'29 - 2'49: "Many of the proceeding images are based on a video phenomenon called feedback. Feeback is what happens when you complete an electronic circle by turning the camera on the monitor. When the camera sees itself, it creates a never-ending world pool of visual imagery."
3'30 - 3'42: "Color can be generated from black and white images with the use of an encoder. The manipulation of this colorizer provides a rich electronic keyboard."
4'07 - 4'13: "These effects of feedback and colorization provide the artist with tools of infinite variety."
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 3/6):
0'00 - 2'18: Work by Paul Kos (happening).
2-19 - 5'57: Work by Gerald Byerley (process - "the way a work describes how it is made, rather than offering the finished product").
5'58 - 8'06: Work by Joan Jonas (mirorring as a material).
8'07 - 9'15: Work by Richard Serra and Joan Jonas ("switching between two cameras and sync with the model spiky movements").
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 4/6):
0'00 - 2'18: Work by Paul Kos (happening).
2-19 - 5'57: Work by Gerald Byerley (process - "the way a work describes how it is made, rather than offering the finished product").
5'58 - 8'06: Work by Joan Jonas (mirorring as a material).
8'07 - 9'15: Work by Richard Serra and Joan Jonas ("switching between two cameras and sync with the model spiky movements").
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 5/6):
0'00 - 5'13: Three Transitions by Peter Campus, 1973 (made in the WGBH studio as an artist-in-residence).
VIDEO: THE NEW WAVE, producer/director Fred Barzyk, WGBH Boston, 1973 (Part 6/6):
0'00 - 4'42: Scape-Mates by Ed Emshwiller (computer technology).
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL (1989)
DIRECTOR MARCELLO DANTAS 5 PARTS
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL, director Marcello Dantas, Manhattan Transfer/Edit, 1989 (Part 1/5):
PART 1: BILL VIOLA (time and perception)
1'24: "The ultimate destination of all technology is to become invisible" (Bill Viola).
1'38: "I feel that time is the basic material of video" (Bill Viola).
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL, director Marcello Dantas, Manhattan Transfer/Edit, 1989 (Part 2/5):
PART 2: NAM JUNE PAIK (video as electronic television)
3'08: "Nam June Paik never doubted with video as something very serious, as high art. He started out temporing with te TV signal with magnets and assaulting the TV set in a very kind of fun way and never really with any pretence" (Paul Garrin).
4'56: "Nam June Paik said when he started working in the 60s, his goal was to make TV with his fingers, not with his mouth because he said all of TV is made with the mouth (it's all people talking)" (Bill Viola).
7'11 : "When you broadcast, it's not private property. It becomes socialistic on that moment you're going on TV" (Nam June Paik).
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL, director Marcello Dantas, Manhattan Transfer/Edit, 1989 (Part 3/5):
PART 3: THE MEDIUM (in relation to its media: television)
0'42: "In video people have split into two fairly interesting camps: the people who think that video as a museum-oriented or gallery-oriented medium is something that needs to be unique and preserved and the people who are more interested in a straight ahead broadcast, a subversion of broadcast" (John Sanborn).
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL, director Marcello Dantas, Manhattan Transfer/Edit, 1989 (Part 4/5):
PART 4: TECHNOLOGY
4'05: "The media artist no longer is a lonely soul in his or her electronic garret. It's now someone who is involved in mainstream culture" (John Sanborn).
5'22: "Real time was the aspect of video that I first admired. Manipulation of that real time was what got me involved in video editing and the computer control of an individual frame." (John Sanborn).
7'48: "I also give video art a great credit for influencing MTV far and above what's generally acknowledged, because of the non-linear nature of what video art was doing ten years before there was MTV" (John Sanborn).
PROCESSING THE SIGNAL, director Marcello Dantas, Manhattan Transfer/Edit, 1989 (Part 5/5):
PART 5: AUDIENCE
0'00: "Video art appeals to a specialized audience who doesn't need constant narration to tell them what they're seeing" (Ira Schneider).
2'50: "Reverse Television is a project for broadcast television. A series of portrait recordings were made of people sitting in their homes, staring in silence at the camera. [...] Ten continuous minutes were recorded with each person. The portraits would be shown each hour of the broadcast day as image inserts between programs. They would appear unannouced, with no titles, before or after, and the series would run for several weeks. WGBH TV Boston presented Reverse Television from November 14 to 28, 1983" (Bill Viola).
3'42: Excerpts of Reverse Television by Bill Viola.
Tomas Schmit about Nam June Paik's "Exposition of Music - Electronic Television" at Gallery Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany, 1963:
The Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit, here seen sitting in the room full of TV sets, helped Paik set up the exhibition. Schmit's detailed description of the individual TV modifications makes it clear that the impression of chaos conveyed by the TV ensemble is deceptive insofar as the whole presentation was more like a laboratory with various experimental set-ups than a conventional exhibition: "Eleven televisions in the room between the hall and garden; arranged – like the pianos – at random; One TV set is on top of another, the others are on the floor. The starting material is supplied by the normal TV programmes, but they are scarcely recognizable on most of the sets. One of the TV sets shows a negative picture overlaid with a different one. The picture on another has been rolled up, so to speak, into a cylinder round the vertical centre axis of the screen. In what paik calls the most complicated case there are three independent sinusoidal oscillations attacking the image parameters. The group of two: the lower one has horizontal stripes, the upper one vertical stripes (the upper one actually shows the same picture as the bottom one, but is on its side as opposed to its feet). A single, vertical, white line runs through the middle of the screen of the Zen TV. One set lies face-down and shows its pictures to the parquet floor (paik said today: "that one was broken"). In the top eight TV sets the picture composition (in television, the term picture also includes a temporal dimension) is derived from more-or-less pre-defined manipulations of the set's electronics, in the four bottom sets the manipulation is such that external influences determine the picture: one of the four is connected to a pedal switch in front of it; If you press the switch, the short-circuits of the contact procedure bring about a fireworks of instantly disappearing points of light on the screen. Another set is hooked up to a microphone; Anyone who speaks into the mike sees an explosion of light dots similar to the other set, but a continuous one this time.The Kuba TV is the most extreme; It is connected to a tape recorder that feeds music to the TV (and to us): parameters of the music determine parameters of the picture. Finally (on the top storey) you have the 'one point TV' that is connected to a radio; In the middle of its screen is a bright point whose size is governed by the current volume of the radio; The louder the radio, the larger the point, the quieter the radio, the smaller the point becomes."
Beatles Electroniques, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1966-1969.
ELECTRONIC MOON #2
Electronic Moon #2, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1969.
ELECTRONIC OPERA #1
Electronic Opera #1, Nam June Paik, 1969: a topless dancer and three hippies have their images manipulated and distorted, saturated with additional color. Richard Nixon and other well-known figures are twisted up. Voiceovers issue commands to the audience: "This is participation TV." Paik instructs the viewers to close and open their eyes at certain intervals. Just when it appears the work is about to start over again from the beginning, the voice implores viewers, "Turn off your TV set."
Electronic Opera #1 is a part of 'The Medium is the Medium' directed by Fred Barzyk at WGBH in 1969, which is the first international broadcast of artists working on television (PBL): "What happens when artists explore television as a personal medium of expression, they change and expand our vision of television."
GLOBAL GROOVE
Global Groove, Nam June Paik, 1973: "This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book."
"Paik’s introductory statement stands for the tape’s compositional principle and message – global channel zapping, in 1973 a visionary precursor of subsequent developments. The spirit of the tape conveys Marshall McLuhan's theory of a future 'global village', which Paik matched with an idea of his own: 'If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.' A typical Paik mixture, the tape includes excerpts from TV programmes, contributions by artist friends such as John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman and Karlheinz Stockhausen, footage by other video artists like Jud Yalkut and Robert Breer, and excerpts from earlier Paik videos. The combination of mass media and avant-garde was aimed at art-lovers and 'normal' TV viewers alike. The video was broadcast by WNET-TV on 30 January 1974."
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