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, 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 video-versus-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.
6 Gerald Millerson, The Technique of Television Production (New York: Hastings House, 1961) and Howard A. Chinn, Television Broadcasting (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953).
7Technical descriptions of the Limbo program were provided by Herb Gardener, WCBS-TV Studio Operations Engineer, in How We Did It, a publication of the WCBS-TV Repertoire Workshop, New York.
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 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?
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.