TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Video noise, by Pia Bolognesi

At the end of the 1960s the acceleration towards new audiovisual experimentalisms led to a deconstruction of the television medium through the technological reactivation of the production processes of the image. Particularly, the dynamic drive aimed at the subversion of the televised message in video works – VT is not TV, as Paul Ryan famously formulated – focuses on the structure of the cathode-ray transmission, altering the aesthetic results in favour of an emphasis on the ontological qualities of the device itself.

Nam June Paik, Aldo Tambellini, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Peter Campus and Bruce Nauman became pioneers of a new form of electronic art based on such techniques as video processing, abstraction of the transmission error, VDC (Video Display Controller) manipulation – generally defined as video synthesis. Magnet TV (1965) by Nam June Paik marked a precise direction in the possibilities of the use of the cathode ray tube and activated a reflection on the materiality of video through computational technology. For over a decade, technique and creative experimentation were inseparably linked, nurturing each other in the expansion of new expressive possibilities. There are several examples of collaboration in the development of video image technologies; the principal examples include the Raster Manipulation Unit or “Wobbulator” (1970) and the Video Synthesizer (1969-71) by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, and the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor by Steve Rutt and Bill Etra – used by Woody and Steina Vasulka in works such as Reminiscence (1974) to obtain one of their best-known three-dimensional illusion video effects.

These trends were enhanced by Aldo Tambellini, especially in his Cathodic Works (1966-76). In 1966, as soon as the Sony Portapak came on the market, this Italian-American artist created a series of videos in dialogue with the origins of his pictorial and sculptural work. In early pieces such as Black Video I (1966) and Black Video II (1967), he used multiple levels of distortion to obtain a sense of the massive simultaneity inherent in the nature of electronic media communication. The artificial forms captured in continuous progression come to life as a sort of aerial painting which acts on the sensitivity of the video recorder’s cathode tube, accentuating its synthetic and abstract peculiarity.

In November 1968, during the exhibition Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum – sponsored by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) and organized by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver – Tambellini, who already used multi-projection systems for his Electromedia Performances, met Tracy Kinsel and Hans Reinhold (engineers at the Bell Laboratories) with whom within a few months he made Black Spiral (1969).

Black Spiral is a seminal videosculpture defined by the artist as manipulated video circuitry. The standard 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 appeared as a flowing spiral while the sound was transformed by modulating TV audio signals with an external random audio signal. The work was presented in May of the same year at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York on the occasion of TV as a Creative Medium, seen as one the first and most important exhibitions on video art in the United States.^[1]

Black Spiral is a symptomatic example, but Tambellini’s Cathodic Works more generally open a parallel investigation of the most obscure aspects of the sound feedback of the image (harsh noise), initially obtained by the video device and later by the reaction with external machines: microphones, an oscilloscope and even the artist’s own voice re-processed on audio tape. Tambellini, at the same time as the Vasulkas in 1973, worked with the technique of reprocessing using the aforementioned Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer. Thanks to a grant from Experimental Television Centre, he produced Clone (1973), a videotape in which he focuses on the bodies and movements of athletes, filmed and perfectly synthesized in combination with the radiographic essence of his first video works. In Clone there is a connection point with a current that will be developed in the 1970s and which investigates the formal aspect of the electronic image through subjective perception. Artists such as Bruce Nauman and Peter Campus were among the first to reflect on the discrepancy between the human body and its artificial representation, thanks to the primary video technologies such as chroma key and closed circuit recording in works such as Three Transitions (Campus, 1973) and Live-Taped Video Corridor (Nauman, 1970), enriching the analytical discourse on the medium with a more intimate and performative aspect.

Video feedback^[2], by Sam Meech

What is video feedback?

Artists, theorists and scientists have provided some wonderful descriptions of video feedback (also known as “Larsen effect”), but for the purposes of this outline, I want to define it in three stages. First, it is the process of looping a video signal back into itself, from output to input. Second, this arrangement results in a range of complex visual phenomena. In the context of media art, then, “video feedback” is both a systematic arrangement of video technology and an aesthetic object. Finally, the practice is an explicit misuse of technology, rather than a conventional production workflow. Video feedback exploits technological limits, employing the happy accident in order to generate and repurpose chaotic textures and unforeseen glitches from the hardware.