Lutz Becker:Horizon
The young German artist Lutz Becker began experimenting with video feedback techniques in 1965 at the age of twenty-four. In the period 1967-68 he produced three films of these experiments as a student in the film department of the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in collaboration with the BBC. Experiment 5, Cosmos, and Horizon are little more than documents of the cathode-ray tube experiments and thus are not particularly significant as examples of videographic cinema per se. They do, however, clearly demonstrate the degree of control and precision that is possible in this technique, and will serve to illuminate our conception of it.
In cooperation with BBC engineer A. B. Palmer, Becker began his experiments by focusing a TV camera on the blank white raster of its own monitor— the pictureless glowing rectangle produced by a constant strength of electrons. A point of light appearing momentarily on the monitor as a result of unavoidable "camera noise" will be picked up by the camera and reproduced again on the screen. If the monitor raster and camera raster are suitably registered, the reproduced point will coincide in position with the original and will be sustained as the cycle repeats. Depending on the total gain around the feedback loop— that is, the video signal's tendency to exceed the electrical limits of the equipment— the point brightness will either increase until limited in some way, or decrease to extinction.
Lutz Becker: Horizon. 1968. Video feedback. 16mm. Color. 5 min. Tightly controlled phasing between a TV camera and its own output monitor.
If the two rasters are deliberately placed slightly out of register, the reproduced point then appears alongside the original, the next alongside that, and so on. The visible effect is that the point of light moves across the picture as the positional errors are integrated. The direction and velocity of the movement depend on the direction and degree of misregistration. The point can be made to move horizontally or vertically by shifting the registration between the two rasters in horizontal or vertical modes. Changes of raster amplitude (adjusting the strength of the picture signals) produce either a convergent or divergent motion in the picture. If one raster is tilted relative to the other, the movement becomes circular.
By combining these raster-misregistration feedback techniques with careful adjustment of camera controls Becker achieved a wide variety of concrete motion graphics, which he describes as "sustained oscillations in two dimensions.'' Further effects were realized by reversing the magnetic field of one raster scan. Original signals on the left were reproduced on the right, then on the left, and so on. The pattern thus achieved is symmetrical around a central vertical line. Further convolutions were obtained by combining scan reversals with raster misregistrations. These are some of the feedback possibilities employing only a blank scanned raster and attendant noise patterns. An entirely different range of effects can be obtained if a second and a third video source are introduced into the feedback loop.
Closed-Circuit Television
and Teledynamic Environments
"Television can't be used as an art medium," claims Les Levine, "because it already is art. CBS, NBC, and ABC are among the greatest art producers in the world." The art of which he speaks is the art of communication. And, after all, art always has been communication in its most eloquent form. But until television, artists have been inventors first and communicators second. Artists have created things to be communicated: they have not created communication. But television is neither an object nor a "content." Tele-vision is the art of communication itself, irrespective of message. Television exists in its purest form between the sender and the receiver. A number of contemporary artists have realized that television, for the first time in history, provides the means by which one can control the movement of information throughout the environment.
In this respect television is not fundamentally an aesthetic medium, at least not as we've traditionally understood the term. It's an instrument whose unique ability is, as its name implies, to transport audio-visual information in real time through actual space, allowing face-to-face communication between humans or events physically separated by continents and even planets. The self-feeding, self-imaging, and environmental surveillance capabilities of closed-circuit television provide for some artists a means of engaging the phenomenon of communication and perception in a truly empirical fashion similar to scientific experimentation.
This approach to the medium may in fact constitute the only pure television art, since the teleportation of encoded electronic-signal information is central to its aesthetic. The actual transmission of information across space/time is not an issue when video equipment is used only for aesthetic manipulation of graphic images as in synaesthetic videotapes and videographic films. I use the term teledynamic environment to indicate that the artist works directly with the dynamics of the movement of information within physical and temporal parameters. The physical environment is determined by the characteristics of the closed-circuit video system. The artist is concerned not so much with what is being communicated as with how it's communicated and the awareness of this process. Thus television becomes the world's first inherently objective art form.
Les Levine with Iris. 1968 . Three TV cameras and six monitors in an eight-by-five console. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kardon, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Les Levine:Iris
"Machines that show the human organism itself as a working model," says Les Levine, "may eventually destroy the need for psychology as we know it today." Essentially an intermedia artist who works in plastics, alloys, and disposables, Levine was among the first conceptual artists on the New York scene focusing more on idea than icon. Naturally he turned to television, the most conceptual of all creative media. As a video artist Levine is best known for two closed-circuit teledynamic systems, Iris ( 1968) and Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture ( 1969).
In both works the motivation is somewhat psychologicaclass="underline" Levine is fascinated by the implications of self-awareness through the technologically-extended superego of the closed-circuit TV. "I don't tend to think of my work purely in psychological terms," he explains, "but one must assume some psychological effect of seeing oneself on TV all the time. Through my systems the viewer sees himself as an image, the way other people would see him were he on television. In seeing himself this way he becomes more aware of what he looks like. All of television, even broadcast television, is to some degree showing the human race to itself as a working model. It's a reflection of society, and it shows society what society looks like. It renders the social and psychological condition of the environment visible to that environment."
In Iris, three concealed cameras focus on an environment (one's living room, for example) in close-up, middle-distance, and wide-angle. These images are displayed on six black-and-white TV tubes mounted in an eight-foot console that also houses the cameras. Combinations and distortions of images interact from screen to screen in a kind of videotronic mix of the physical and metaphysical elements of the environment. Seeing three different views of oneself in combination with three others is a unique experience.