Tambellini began working with videotape in 1966-67 as part of his intermedia presentations. This work was subsequently expanded into live, closed-circuit, and broadcast video experiments. In the spring of 1969, Tambellini became the recipient of a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts in a project to develop relationships between artists and television engineers. He worked with technologists at five educational TV stations throughout New York, producing several experimental programs.
Also in 1969 he was one of six artists participating in the PBL program "The Medium Is the Medium" at WGBH-TV in Boston. The videotape produced for the project, called Black, involved one thousand slides, seven 16mm. film projections, thirty black children, and three live TV cameras that taped the interplay of sound and image. The black-and-white tape is extremely dense in kinetic and synaesthetic information, assaulting the senses in a subliminal barrage of sight and sound events. The slides and films were projected on and around the children in the studio, creating an overwhelming sense of the black man's life in contemporary America. Images from all three cameras were superimposed on one tape, resulting in a multidimensional presentation of an ethnological attitude. There was a strong sense of furious energy, both Tambellini's and the blacks', communicated through the space/time manipulations of the medium.
Black TV is the title of Tambellini's best-known videographic film, which is part of a large intermedia project about American television. Compiled from filmed television news programs and personal experimental videotapes, Black TV has been seen in many versions during the four-year period in which Tambellini constantly re-edited it. "Since my interest is in multimedia and mixed-media live events, and in experimental television, I think of film as a material to work with, part of the communications media rather than an end in itself. In the future we will be communicating through electronically transmitted images; Black TV is about the future, the contemporary American, the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and the expansion of the senses. The act of communication and the experience is the essential."
Aldo Tambellini in control room of WGBH-TV, Boston. Below, a scene from Black (1969), an experimental videotape he produced at the station with 1,000 slides, seven 16mm. projectors, thirty black children, and three TV cameras.
As Tambellini's remarks indicate, Black TV is about perception in the intermedia network. It generates a pervasive atmosphere of the process-level perception by which most of us experience the contemporary environment. Since it involves the use of multiple monitors and various levels of video distortion, there is a sense of the massive simultaneity inherent in the nature of electronic media communication. Black TV is one of the first aesthetic statements on the subject of the intermedia network as nature, possibly the only such statement in film form.
Black Video One and Two are representative of the techniques and approaches involved in Tambellini's videotape compositions. He calls them "video constructions" to emphasize that they are self-contained image- and sound-generating units, which do not take image material either from broadcast programs or closed-circuit cameras. Instead, special circuitry is devised to generate both image and sound electronically on two monitors. These completely synthetic videographics can be juxtaposed with other image material to create a sense of convergence between different worlds. As in most of Tambellini's work, archetypal white globes, spheres, or expanding coils are seen suspended in a black video void. Various forms of video noise are generated to accentuate the purely kinetic aspect of the tapes. Most of this work was first produced in 1967-68, and has been incorporated into Tambellini's intermedia presentations and films.
Black Video Two was exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1967. Two years later, Wise commissioned Tambellini and two engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories to produce a work for his exhibit "Television as a Creative Medium." Tambellini and the engineers, Tracy Kinsel and Hank Reinhold, came up with Black Spiral, a beautiful example of aesthetically manipulated video circuitry. The normal rectangular raster of the TV picture was transformed into a circular raster by modification of the circuitry from an xy coordinate system to a polar coordinate system. As a result, the broadcast picture appeared as a flowing spiral; any movement in the picture caused the spiral to swoop and explode in giant gaseous curls of glowing phosphors. "Television is not an object," Tambellini said. "It's a live communication media. Black Spiral brings you live information. One day we will look at nature as the floating astronauts do in a spiral or circular form where no up or down or gravity exists." The sound was transformed by modulating normal audio signals from the television station with a random audio signal.
"The artist will have to get to this medium and begin to explore all possibilities," Tambellini urges. "After all, television is actually an image made of light which travels through time and space. I'm interested in getting to that particular point to actually show that light is a constantly moving and ever-changing form, that light is energy, and the same energy which moves through us is the energy which moves through the universe. It is the same energy we have discovered in the atom. When creative people begin to get involved with this idea of energy rather than making objects for someone, they will be exploring possibilities for everybody, art will be an exploration for all of mankind."
Eric Siegeclass="underline" Video Color Synthesizer
"I see television as bringing psychology into the cybernetic twenty-first century. I see television as a psychic healing medium creating mass cosmic consciousness, awakening higher levels of the mind, bringing awareness of the soul."
In 1960, as a high school student of fifteen, Eric Siegel won second prize in the New York City Science Fair for a home-made, closed-circuit television system he constructed from second-hand tubes, a microscope lens, and junk parts. The following year he won another prize in the same competition for a home-made system called "Color Through Black-and-White TV." Although highly successful as a technician, he was virtually unknown as an artist until his spectacular "Video Color Synthesizer" was exhibited at New York's Howard Wise Gallery in May, 1969. It was clear the television generation had produced another genius.
The synaesthetic videotape Psychedelevision in Color, made by Siegel on his own home-made equipment, was at least as creative as works by more established artists represented in the exhibit, and according to some critics was the outstanding work of the entire show. "A work of genius," wrote video artist Peter Sorensen in a rave review devoted entirely to Siegel's tape. A reviewer for Time found Psychedelevision ". . . closer to Kubrick's 2001 than to Disney's Fantasia... a glowing visual abstraction."
Eric Siegeclass="underline" Psychedelevision. 1968-69. Synthesized VTR. "Great waves of curling clouds sweep under and over the viewer in turbulent fury."
Siegel's synthesizer is a device that converts the gray scale of a video signal (in this case from a portable videotape recorder playback unit) into changes in hue on the screen of a color TV set.