"Looking at Iris," he remarked, "many people are greatly surprised at the way they actually look. They see themselves the way they usually see other people on television, and they have to make some kind of judgment about themselves in terms of themselves as a piece of information. That's what Iris does most of all, it turns the viewer into information. The viewer has to reconsider what he thought about himself before. He must think about himself in terms of information. You notice people in front of Iris begin to adjust their appearance. They adjust their hair, tie, spectacles. They become aware of aspects of themselves which do not conform to the image they previously had of themselves."
Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture continues the principles of Iris on a somewhat expanded scale. It involves eighteen monitors and eight cameras mounted in a sleek eight-foot stainless steel console, nine monitors and four cameras on each side beneath plastic bubble shields. As in Iris, the cameras produce close-ups, mid-range and wide-angle views as images shift from screen to screen every few seconds. Each monitor screen is covered with a colored acrylic gel so that a given image may be seen in nine different colors as it swirls through the closed-circuit system.
" Contact is a system that synthesizes man with his technology," Levine states. "In this system, the people are the software. It relies totally on the image and sensibility of the viewer for its life. It is a responsive mechanism and its personality reflects the attitudes of its viewers. If they are angry, the piece looks angry. Contact is made not only between you and your image, but how you feel about your image, and how you feel about that image in relationship to the things around you. The circuit is open."
Levine is rather indifferent to the physical structure of the consoles that house his video systems. "I don't tend to consider my work in aesthetic terms," he says. "I don't make a work with any aesthetic principles in mind. If it happens to be a nice object to look at, that's fine. What a TV set looks like is only of value in terms of iconic imagery. However, what comes on the TV set is the real intelligence of the object, which has no intelligence until the software is injected into it. People don't look at the TV set, they look at the tube and the tube is always pretty much the same shape. But television is constantly re-wiping itself and printing over all the time, so that depending on what information is available at any given moment the image will be different. So there's really no image, no definite image. One could equate it, because of its flexibility, with looking at a person sitting in a chair: he looks as he always looks except that his behavior changes your image of him. Television has this quality: it always somehow looks the same, but it's always doing something different."
Les Levine with Contact: A Cybernetic Sculpture. 1969. Photo: courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.
Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider: Wipe Cycle
Unlike Levine's work, the effect of Wipe Cycle, by the young New York artists Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, was to integrate the viewer and his local environment into the larger macrosystem of information transmission. Wipe Cycle was first exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York in 1969. It consisted of nine monitors whose displays were controlled by synchronized cycle patterns of live and delayed feedback, broadcast television, and taped programming shot by Gillette and Schneider with portable equipment. These were displayed through alternations of four programmed pulse signals every two, four, eight, and sixteen seconds. Separately, each of the cycles acted as a layer of video information, while all four levels in concert determined the overall composition of the work at any given moment.
Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider: Wipe Cycle. 1969. TV camera, closed-circuit system, nine monitors, tapes, broadcasting. Photo: courtesy of Howard Wise Gallery, New York.
"The most important function of Wipe Cycle," Schneider explained, "was to integrate the audience into the information. It was a live feedback system which enabled the viewer standing within its environment to see himself not only now in time and space, but also eight seconds ago and sixteen seconds ago. In addition he saw standard broadcast images alternating with his own delayed/live image. And also two collage-type programmed tapes, ranging from a shot of the earth, to outer space, to cows grazing, and a 'skin flick' bathtub scene."
"It was an attempt," Gillette added, "to demonstrate that you're as much a piece of information as tomorrow morning's headlines— as a viewer you take a satellite relationship to the information. And the satellite which is you is incorporated into the thing which is being sent back to the satellite. In other words, rearranging one's experience of information reception."8 Thus in Wipe Cycle several levels of time and space were synthesized into one audio-visual experience on many simultaneous frequencies of perception. What is, what has been, and what could be, were merged into one engrossing teledynamic continuum and the process of communication was brought into focus.
Allan Kaprow:Hello
The elements of randomness and chance, which Allan Kaprow has explored so successfully in his Happenings and environmental events, were brought into play in a television experiment conducted by Kaprow with the unique facilities of WGBH-TV in Boston for "The Medium Is the Medium." The station has direct closed-circuit inputs from a number of locations in the Boston-Cambridge area: a line to M.I.T., another to a hospital, another to an educational videotape library, and a fourth to Boston Airport. These were interconnected with five TV cameras and twenty-seven monitors that Kaprow utilized as a sort of sociological conduit, demonstrating the possibilities of creativity in the act of videotronic communication, including obstacles to communication.
Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with instructions as to what they would say on camera, such as "Hello, I see you," when acknowledging their own image or that of a friend. Kaprow functioned as "director" in the studio control room, ordering channels opened and closed randomly. If someone at the airport were talking to someone at M.I.T., the picture might suddenly switch and one would be talking to doctors at the hospital. Thus not only the process of communication was involved, but the elements of choice and decision-making as well. Kaprow has suggested a global form of Hello, interconnecting continents, languages, and cultures in one huge sociological mix. The information transmitted in Hello, he emphasized, was not a newscast or lecture but the most important message of alclass="underline" "Oneself in connection with someone else."
8 From an interview with Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider by Jud Yalkut in "Film," East Village Other, August 6, 1969.
PART SIX:
INTERMEDIA
"Shall we... use the new art as a vehicle for a new message and express the human longing which light has always symbolized, a longing for greater reality, a cosmic consciousness, a balance between the human entity and the great common denominator, the universal rhythmic flow?"
THOMAS WILFRED
The Artist as Ecologist