Mountzoures' story is itself a masterpiece of imagist prose, often indistinguishable from poetry and only occasionally linear in structure. A parable of war in surrealistic and extra-objective terms, it consists of alternating haiku esque impressions of things observed, events remembered, nightmares experienced, and realities confused in the first-person consciousness of the narrator. One is completely caught up in this strangely beautiful story as it unfolds with a masterly richness of language. At the same time, however, the images are generating their own, quite separate, world of impressions. One is caught in a sensorium of contrasts, a dialogue between visual and aural absolutes from which arises a pervasive sense of abstraction. One is made keenly aware of nuances seldom expressed with such clarity in any art form. The synthesis of harmonic opposites is raised to perfection.
Word-and-image connections are tangential at best, and often starkly antithetical in conceptual content. The narrator might be speaking of old belongings in an attic trunk, for example, while we see a line of men on horseback at the rim of a steep cliff. As the horses plunge down the incline, video de-beaming turns the sky orange and sends mint-green flames streaking behind them. The scene becomes an Expressionist painting of green shadows and purple highlights quivering in a liquid mosaic of hues. This almost Daliesque image of rainbow horses melts into an Impressionist vision of sun-dappled woods. A horse and rider move slowly through trees whose colors suddenly detach and float in midair. Images merge until all that is left of the horseman is a cloud of electronic pigment moving nebulously through a spangled field of Seurat-like pointillist fragments. Elsewhere a man rides a bicycle that melts beneath him; he performs a strange dance ritual on a deserted beach as the sky seems to burst in spectral madness. Never have conceptual information and design information been so poetically fused as in The Empire of Things.
We haven't even begun to explore the potentials of the medium [Coney remarked]. Part of it lies beyond our reach because of stringent union regulations as to who can use the equipment and who can't. Part of it lies beyond the reach of the technicians who are authorized to use it. Videotronics will never come of age, will never be useful for creative purposes, until the knobs are put in the hands of the artist. We haven't even begun, for example, to work with really controlled color design. One built-in characteristic of television is the ability to manipulate spectral colors. There's a tremendous amount that can be done with muted and controlled colors that we haven't even started to do.
Television's biggest problem today is learning how to let go. Essentially that's what I'm trying to do; I want to let go of control without creating a disaster on the set. I want to open television to the extent that film is open. You see a multiplicity of voices and ideas in film on a number of levels of intent, interest, and seriousness. It doesn't always have to be "professional" to be true. And truth is what we're after.
WGBH-TV, Boston: "The Medium Is the Medium"
"The reason we're experimenting," explained Fred Barzyk, "is that a large portion of the public is really ahead of television. They can accept more images and ideas at once. They're watching underground films; they're commercial buffs who are fascinated by how many cuts there are in a Pepsi-Cola ad. These are the people who could easily be turned on to educational television if it had the proper ingredients." With young producer-directors like Barzyk taking an interest in television as an educational experience, the ingredients are certain to be there sooner or later.
It was at WGBH, for example, that the program "What's Happening Mr. Silver?" was originated. A regular experimental feature on pop culture, the program proved so successful that it was carried also by most other ETV stations except KQED in San Francisco, where it was found to be "technically innovative but slightly sick." In 1967 the program's host, David Silver, conducted his weekly show from a bed in the center of the studio floor, in which he reclined naked with an equally nude young lady.
We wanted to experiment with every possible aspect of the medium [Barzyk explained] and intimate behavior in the form of nudity became one factor. We tried to create new problems in the broadcast system so that we could break down the system as it existed. We adopted some of John Cage's theories: many times we'd have as many as thirty video sources available at once; there would be twenty people in the control room— whenever anyone got bored they'd just switch to something else without rhyme or reason.
"The Medium Is the Medium" came out of this show in one sense, because after two years of "What's Happening Mr. Silver" we had so totally bombarded the engineering staff with experimentation. We took the attitude that the engineers would have to change their normal functions. In most of the television industry a video man is a video man, an audio man is an audio man, a cameraman is a cameraman; they never step over each other's bounds. We created a situation in which each one of them was asked constantly what he could do for the station. We told them they were artists. We said each week, "We don't know what we're going to do, here's our raw material, let's see what we can do with it." So out of this the audio man had his sources running, the cameraman had his sources running, and so on.
Initially there is a great deal of resistance from the engineering staff, as might be expected when you change someone's job conditions. We deprived them of their security. I mean, you know what a "good picture" is: flesh tones, lighting, so on. But we deprived them of that. We said on our shows it doesn't really matter. One engineer turned off his machine. He didn't think it was right. A year later he came up to me with three new ideas that we might be able to use. So the pressure is reversed to bring creativity out instead of repressing it; we have the most production-oriented engineers in the whole country, I'd say. In effect we tell them the station is experimenting and we ask them not to be engineers.
It was in this environment that the experimental program "The Medium Is the Medium" took form in the winter of 1968-69. The contributions of Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, and Aldo Tambellini are discussed elsewhere in this chapter; Otto Piene and James Seawright were also among the six artists who participated in the project.
Otto Piene: Electronic Light Ballet
Otto Piene's work with luminescence, pneumatics, and lighter-than-air environments is among the most elegant examples of aesthetic applications of technology. The artist's exquisitely delicate sense of proportion and balance, as demonstrated in his Light Planets, for example, is always stunning to behold. His synaesthetic videotape Electronic Light Ballet was no exception.
Typical of Piene's austere sensibility, only two image sources were used in this piece: a grid of colored dots that melted in rainbow colors across the screen; and a videotape of Piene's Manned Helium Sculpture, one of a series of experiments with lift and equilibrium that the artist conducted as a Fellow at M.I.T.'s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. The helium sculpture involved 800 feet of transparent polyethylene tubing in seven loops, inflated with approximately 4,000 cubic feet of helium, attached with ropes and parachute harness to a ninety-five-pound girl for a thirty-minute ascension into the air, controlled from the ground by ropes attached to the balloons and harness.