Once a set has been thus prepared, the simple flick of a switch results in breathtakingly beautiful imagery, from delicate Lissajous figures to spiraling phantasmagoric designs of surreal impact and dazzling brilliance. Tubular horizontal bands of color roll languidly toward the viewer like cresting waves; flaccid faces melt, twitch, and curl, ears replacing eyes; globs of iridescent colors flutter out of place. When videotape playback systems are used as image sources instead of broadcast programs, the extent of control is multiplied and the visual results are astounding.
However, technical descriptions tend to underplay the sheer intuitive genius of Paik's video art. His techniques are hardly exclusive and are far from sophisticated (engineers say he does everything he shouldn't), and his cluttered loft on New York's Canal Street is scientifically unorthodox to say the least. Yet out of this tangle of wires and boxes comes some of the most exquisite kinaesthetic imagery in all of electronic art. "My experimental color television has instructional resource value," he suggests. “Kindergarten and elementary school children should be exposed to electronic situations as early as possible. My experimental TV demonstrates various basic facts of physics and electronics empirically, such as amplitude modulation, radar, scanning, cathode rays, shadow mask tubes, oscillography, the ohm principle, overtone, magnetic character, etc. And it's a very pleasant way to learn these things."
Electromagnetic distortions of the video image by Nam June Paik. "Out of this tangle of wires and boxes comes some of the most exquisite kinaesthetic imagery in all of electronic art." Photos: Peter Moore.
Perhaps the most spectacular of Paik's videotape compositions was made early in 1969 for the PBL show "The Medium Is the Medium" at WGBH-TV in Boston, where later he became artist in residence. Paik brought a dozen of his prepared TVs into the studio; using three color cameras he mixed these images with two nude dancers, tape delays, and positive-negative image reversals. The nude slow-motion dancers in multiple levels of delayed action suddenly burst into dazzling silver sparks against emerald gaseous clouds; rainbow-hued Lissajous figures revolved placidly over a close-up of two lovers kissing in negative colors; images of Richard Nixon and other personalities in warped perspectives alternated with equally warped hippies. All this was set against a recording of the Moonlight Sonata, interrupted periodically by a laconic Paik who yawned, announced that life was boring, and instructed the viewer to close his eyes just as some fabulous visual miracle was about to burst across the screen.
Later in 1969, Paik produced an impressive teledynamic environment called Participation TV. The first version was shown in an exhibit called "Television as a Creative Medium" at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City; it was then modified into Participation TV No. 2 for the "Cybernetic Serendipity" exhibit in Washington, D.C. The principle of the piece involves three television cameras whose signals are displayed on one screen by the red, green, and blue cathode guns respectively; the tube shows three different images in three different colors at once. Color brightness is controlled by amplitudes from three tape recorders at reverse phase. Thus the viewer sees himself three times in three colors on the same screen, often appearing to float in air or to dissolve in shimmering water as multicolored feedback echoes shatter into infinity. This was repeated on three and four different TV sets arranged around the environment.
"Television has not yet left the breast": Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman in TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1969. Images are modulated by musical tones played on the cello. Photo: Peter Moore.
"The real issue implied in art and technology," he has said, "is not to make another scientific toy, but how to humanize the technology and the electronic medium… I suggest Silent TV Station, which transmits only beautiful 'mood art' in the sense of mood music. What I'm aiming at with my Lissajous figures and other distortions is a television equivalent of Vivaldi, or electronic Compoz. Lumia art will then become a permanent asset in the collections of millions of people. The Silent TV Station will simply be there, not intruding on other activities, and will be looked at exactly like a landscape or a beautiful bathing nude of Renoir. Normal TV bores you and makes you nervous; this soothes you. It's like a tranquilizer. Maybe you could call it video-soma."
Paik's exquisite sense of satirical irony comes through most effectively in his video sculpture pieces. In TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Paik covered cellist Charlotte Moorman's bare breasts with two tiny three-inch TV sets whose images were modulated by the notes played on her cello. "Another attempt to humanize technology," Paik explained. For an exhibit titled "The Machine at the End of the Machine Age" at the Museum of Modern Art, Paik contributed a chair with a built-in TV set in place of the seat: one was able to sit on the program of one's choice. For an exhibit at New York's Bonino Gallery he constructed a video crucifix of glaring and ominous proportions; and in the privacy of his studio loft there sits a box containing a TV set that peeps through the vaginal opening of a photographed vulva. "Art," he says, "is all activities, desires, phenomena, that one cannot explain."
Aldo Tambellini: Black TV
"Our creative involvement with television must begin now so that the electronic energy of communication can give birth to new visions: we will face the realities which astronauts and scientists know to be part of life."
Intermedia artist and filmmaker Aldo Tambellini has worked creatively with television in many ways for several years. He has produced synaesthetic videotapes, videographic films, and closed-circuit teledynamic environments. All of his work, in whatever medium, is concerned with the theme of "black," both as idea and experience. For Tambellini, black is the womb and the cosmos, the color of skin and the color of the new consciousness. "Black is the beginning," he says. "It is birth, the oneness of all, the expansion of consciousness in all directions."
Aldo Tambellini: Black TV. 1964-68.16mm. Black and white. 9½ min. Two years of TV news compressed into a staccato barrage of sight and sound.
Aldo Tambellini: Black Video Two. 1968. VTR. Black and white. Both image and sound were generated electronically. Made in collaboration with engineer Ken Wise. Photos: Peter Moore.