Two scenes from Ronald Nameth's triple-projection film As the World Turns for intermedia presentation L's G.A. 1968-69.
Two scenes from Robert Whitman's Prune Flat. 1965. Performers' actions were synchronized with their film versions.
Photos: Peter Moore.
Robert Whitman: Real and Actual Images
The higher ordering principle of intermedia, or what might be called "filmstage," is the simultaneous contrasting of an actual performance with its "real" projected image, so that the live performer interacts with his movie self. The New York artist Robert Whitman developed this technique in several variations during the period 1960-67, after which he abandoned film/theatre compositions for experiments of a more conceptual nature.
In The American Moon (1960) the audience viewed a central performance space from six tunnel-like mini-theatres whose open-ings were periodically blocked by plastic-and-paper screens on which films were projected. Persons in each tunnel could see through their screens to the flickering images on the screen of the opposite tunnel. Thus Whitman engaged cubic space, filmic space, real and projected images.
In his most famous work, Prune Flat ( 1965), Whitman utilized a conventional proscenium stage with a large movie screen as backdrop. Two girls performed various movements and gestures in person, while their filmed images performed the same action, and some different ones, on the screen. A third girl was dressed in a long white gown on which was projected a movie of herself removing her clothes. The girl's physical actions were synchronized with the film being projected on her: she pretended to "throw" her skirt into the wings as the filmed image did so, etc. Finally a nude image of the girl was projected on her fully-clothed figure.
Aldo Tambellini: Electromedia Theatre
A pioneer in intermedia techniques, Aldo Tambellini has worked with multiple projections in theatrical contexts since 1963, always striving to cast off conventional forms, using space, light, and sound environmentally. In the spring of 1967 he founded The Black Gate, New York's first theatre devoted exclusively to what Tambellini calls "electromedia" environments.
Aldo Tambellini: Black Zero. 1965 . Shown at the artist's Black Gate Electromedia
Theatre in New York.
His archetype, fully realized in Black Zero ( 1965), is a maelstrom of audio-visual events from which slowly evolves a centering or zeroing in on a primal image, represented in Black Zero by a giant black balloon that appears from nothing, expands, and finally explodes with a simultaneous crescendo of light and sound. Literally hundreds of hand-painted films and slides are used, each one a variation on the Black Zero theme. In addition to electronic-tape compositions, the piece often is performed in conjunction with a live recital of amplified cello music.
In Moon-Dial ( 1966) he collaborated with dancer Beverly Schmidt in a mixture of the human form with electronic imagery in slides, films, and sounds. With Otto Piene, he presented Black Gate Cologne at WDR-TV in Germany in 1968, which combined a closed-circuit teledynamic environment with multi-channel sound and multiple-projection films and slides as the participating audience interacted with Piene's polyethylene tubing. Another version of this piece was conducted along the banks of the Rhine in Dusseldorf, with projections on a mile-long section of tubing.
Wolf Vostelclass="underline" De-Collage
Although he works largely with television, both as object and information, the German intermedia artist Wolf Vostell is most significant for the way in which he incorporates his video experiments into environmental contexts. Actually, his videotronic manipulations are no more sophisticated than the distortion of broadcast programs using controls available on any common TV set. But this is precisely the point of his work: rendering the environment visible as "art" by manipulating elements inherent in that environment.
Since 1954 Vostell has been engaged in what he calls "de-collage" art, or decomposition art. This is not to be confused with destruction art, fashionable during approximately the same period, for Vostell destroys nothing: he creates Happenings or environmental theatre in which already broken, destroyed, damaged, or otherwise derelict elements of the environment are the central subjects. Beginning in 1964 he made the first of several versions of one film titled The Sun in Your Head, described as "a movie of de-collaged television programs combined with occurrences for press photographers and audience."
Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene: Black Gate Cologne. 1968.
Tambellini's electromedia environment combined with Piene's helium-inflated polyethylene tubing at WDR-TV in Cologne, West Germany. Photos: Hein Engelskirchen.
Wolf Vostelclass="underline" Electronic Happening Room. 1968. One of Vostell's de-collaged TV sets in a multiple-projection intermedia environment designed to generate an awareness of man's relationship to technology.
Photo: Rainer Wick.
Basically, Vostell seeks in all his work to involve the audience objectively in the environment that constitutes its life. He seeks to break the passivity into which most retreat like sleepwalkers, forcing an awareness of one's relation to the video and urban environment. He sometimes describes his work as a form of social criticism employing elements of Dada and Theatre of the Absurd.
In Notstandbordstein (1969), the streets, sidewalks, and buildings of Munich became the "screen" on which a film was projected from a moving automobile. Vostell's Electronic Happening Room (1968) was an environmental attempt to confront the participant with all the technological elements common to his everyday life, from telephones to Xerox machines to juke boxes. As in most of his work, complex multiple-projections of films and slides were combined with sound collages taken from the natural environment. In New York, in 1963, he exhibited a wall of six blurred (de-collaged) television sets. In 21 Projectors ( 1967) the audience was surrounded with a staccato barrage of multiple film and slide projections in complex split-second patterns designed to reveal the surrealism of life in the media-saturated 1960's. He describes his archetypal work as one in which "events on the screen and the actions of the audience merge: life becomes a labyrinth."
Multiple-Projection Environments
In real-time multiple-projection, cinema becomes a performing art: the phenomenon of image-projection itself becomes the "subject" of the performance and in a very real sense the medium is the message. But multiple-projection lumia art is more significant as a paradigm for an entirely different kind of audio-visual experience, a tribal language that expresses not ideas but a collective group consciousness. It's obviously the beginning of what Stan VanDerBeek proposed in the "image library, newsreel of dreams, culture intercom."
"The purpose and effect of such image flow," wrote VanDerBeek in his 1965 Manifesto," is both to deal with logical understanding and to penetrate to unconscious levels, to reach for the emotional denominator of all men, the nonverbal basis of human life." In the following pages we'll discuss multiple-projection environments on a level that might best be described as handicraft, with the possible exception of the Vortex Concerts; yet it's clear that the lumia performance is trending toward levels of cybernetic control far beyond the capabilities of a few individuals, no matter how sophisticated their equipment. Significantly, certain members of the now-defunct USCO group have abandoned the physical handicraft of multiple-projection to develop hardware and software for automated lumia display systems. It's the first stage in a pattern-event toward the kind of transnational communication that VanDerBeek holds essential for the success of global man: "Such centers around the world will have artists in residence to [program] the material for dialogues with other centers at a visual velocity of 186,000 miles per second."