Listen to our first day discussion Jan 15th conversation, a wide-ranging discursive exploration of video art pioneers which proves my ignorance and begins with a discussion of the presentation of Chris’s work Schwelle at Elektra. The sound design by Marija (who is in the room as we talk and others) is a system ‘perturbed‘ by the performer.
Gary Hill has been producing video art work for decades, he is a pioneer: "especially significant due to his incorporation of text into video art, evident in works such as Incidence of Catastrophe 1977-78."
I had never heard of Gary Hill, nor can I find any of his video works online in video form: only stills. Though nothing can excuse the advanced form of cultural ignorance I am confessing to (my girlfriend immediately knew of him!) , there are contributing factors to my debilitating condition: I suspect cultural blind-spots may be enhanced by widespread commercial art-market techniques of producing artificial scarcity with easily replicated digital media. Making limited edition dvd releases of video works, as revealed by the images below, constrains the viewing public:
Gary Hill. Spoonful (2005). Edition of 5 and one artist’s proof.
Pardon me my candor: but in an age of DVDs that cost less than a buck and ubiquitous dvd burners, not to mention online video encoders (youtube and google video) why is it that only "5" of this spoonful works exist? Why not have 5 collector copies in HD format and release unlimited low-resolution copies on bittorrent so that plebes like myself can be nourished at the breast of genius? The negative answer undoubtedly involves economics.
If artists are the philosophers of every epoch then someone should create an installation call Nietzsche Held Hostage in the Bank Vault. Bank vaults such as the MOMA are useful for works requiring a very particular hardware setup that precludes widespread dissemination.
Gary Hill. Inasmuch As It Is Always Already Taking Place (1990) is in the MOMA Permanent Collection
Update note. A very brief excerpt from Gary Hill. Incidence of Catastrophe. (1987-88. 43:51 min, color, sound) can be found online at Electronic Arts Intermix video archives
Bill Seaman early work in Director done at MIT. Animated word. Not accessible in live form online. And neither are his VR works. But it clearly shows that what I am doing is not original. It stems from the same impulse that inspired Kurt Schwitters or any of a herd of typographic experimenters before and since the dawn of computers (and probably even language itself evokes experimental designs in order to ensure its evolution. Hypothesis: symbolic play originates in the desire of things to be thingful).
Bill Seaman. Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue (1995)
Linear Video and Interactive Videodisc
A different approach to distribution: The Vasulkas have their entire idiosyncratic work output online. Their approach shares affinities with my own practise: open online access to the material, experimentation with potential of media as play. Chris recounts a conversation he had with Woody at an exhibit at CKM concerning video, electronic imaging, language, filmmaking, new visual systems and mainframes that vomited pixels in the 70s: formal and contentless. Chris remarks that he liked Tarkovsky which prompts Woody to remark that Chris is ‘one of those content people’.
Vasulkas. Warp (2000)
Chris Marker (author of Ciné Roman), iconoclast, theoretical filmmaker, who in 2007 had a show of photographs reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail
Marker’s most famous work is slow sci-fi allegory about time-travel and memory told using photos (with one motion sequence) and a voice-over. I will undoubtedly be indebted to this technique in future experiments. Dense precursor to Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. It is also publised as coffee table book that reminds me of a flipbook (which has a thriving culture) for the affluent. And it makes me think of Speaking Pictures "Missing Pages" (which I mistakenly called ‘Missing Pieces’) and Tensor Networks which anticpate and pre-render muscular-skeletal time. This bring Chris to think of an old syllabus designed by Marjorie Perloff (David Antin, Bill Viola, Laurie Anderson) and an ancient Chinese alchemical text ‘Secret of the Golden Flower’:
Rational thought benefits from an enhanced acuity of intuitive perception.
La Jetée (1963). Chris Marker’s most famous film. It’s a post-modern parable now on youtube.
Peter Weibel : "b 1944 in Odessa; studies of Literature, Philosophy, Medicine, Logic and Film in Paris (F) and Vienna (A); since 1966 conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, - texts, -objects and -actions; end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, action art, performances and film together with his partner Valie Export; his interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific, artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic, and digital works."
Vienna Actionist. Interrogates the TV as a dead medium; recursive structures that break down the user’s awareness of themselves. Images only the back of spectators heads; surveillance as decontextualized thought. Has moved from nano stuff to an archeology of new media to 1950 interaction sculpture.
Peter Weibel. Imaginary Water Sculpture. 1971.
Expanded cinema was developed by Weibel and Valie Export: her 2003 presentation "Expanded Cinema
as Expanded Reality" defines both past and future adaptions of the term and places her body as a performative element in the work:
“Expanded cinema”, i.e. the expansion of the commonplace form of film on the open stage or within a space, through which the commercial-conventional sequence of filmmaking – shooting, editing (montage), and projection – is broken up, was the art-form that I chose in the mid-1960s when I realised that the course of my life would lead me through the history of art… Today, expanded cinema is the electronic, digital cinema, the simulation of space and time, the simulation of reality. "
Myron Krueger Chris’s assessment: Krueger "… is a problem… He’s the one responsible for all the bad video art. …Because he learned that interaction is the medium…By virtue of valuing interaction over aesthetics…." he destroyed the capacity of aesthetics to claim a place. Glowflow (1969) which Chris cites as one of his best pieces is non-web accessible (i.e. no images online) but is described as: "Reactive Light-sound-installation, Myron Krueger uses the walls of the dark space with four, transparent tubes containing differently colored, phosphorescent liquids. Also mounted to each of the four walls are two columns, containing the tubes (equipped with movement sensors). As visitors pass through this space, they activate visual and audio-effects, which integrate recipients into the work by way of perception and movement." Source: Media Art Net
Caonical text department: Gene Youngblood "Expanded Cinema" (1970) 444 pgs in PDF . Introduction and poem "Inexorable Evolution and Human Ecology" by none other than the illustrious R. Buckminster Fuller.
This text is yet anther morsel of canonical media theory that I missed in my wild years. During the turbulent times of my youthful debauchery, I did read a good percentage of Fuller, including the tome Critical Path. Read enough to have imbibed on Fuller’s relation to Moby Dick as techno-prophet raconteur innovator who voyaged always a little beyond the horizons of normalcy into those nebulous realms known as the future.
Contemporary concerns are much the same as Youngblood’s. His chapter titles are prescient: artist as ecologist, artist as designer, synaesthetic cinema, cybernetic cinema, computer films, hardware and software, human bio-computer, man/machine symbiosis, the earth as software, entropy. It’s as if .Youngblood invented a whole host of genres that had been writhing n the epistemological bloodstream since James Clark Maxwell explored thermal dynamics. Engines creativity and Charles Babbage having lunch with Byron. The entire tumultuous history of academia is a heaving and weaving of similar thematics: establishing redundancy within the species to ensure the survival of ideas (Cloak, Dawkins, Dennet etc..).
Coming at what I anticipate is an audacious explorative text 37 years after its birth, I wonder what lessons can be learned about the perils and joys of invocations concerning emergent chaotic cyber-culture. [Probably yet another confirmation of my irrelevance within the explosive tumultuously fertile spawning of intellectual idioms and fascination with human endeavor. The intrinsic habitual way humanity continues to produce art, dissect media, evolve theories, distribute communiques, develop networks, amalgamate positions and establish rituals of hierarchical grooming done in the same way as it produces babies: inexorably, instinctual, on whim].
Obviously, I am not a pioneer. Web-video is a swaggering adolescent. It lives in the burbs.
[…] work yet. Too simple, no pacing, no surprise. Next step: physicalize the letters (* suggested by Chris Salter ) […]