Inputs and Outputs

After talking about Guerilla Television and Artistic Video, Spielmann introduced the third group of video art, the Experimental Video in the second chapter of her book, Video: A Reflexive Medium. 

In explaining the concept of Experimental Video, the author said, “it understands the new medium dialogically in the interrelation of technology and aesthetics and undertakes experiments in images technology as a possibility of reaching a new language of imagery by talking issue with the form of the medium.” In exploring the dialogs between aesthetical expression and developed technology, the experimental video artists, or say image technicians, focused on inventing a new language to translate their artistic ideas into images. The experiments they’re doing were discovering and deconstructing the relationship between images and messages, and more importantly, the ways of generating ideas by imagery. They experimented the various possibilities to connect thoughts with visual/audiovisual imagery by investigating the forms of video medium. The “new” approaches here are brought by their avant-garde ideas to speak a new digital language in an image world. The new language is constructed differently from the traditional preceding camera-obscura perspective. The conventional methods of producing a visual/audiovisual expression is replaced and expanded through the experimental video medium. The new art approaches are trying to innovate a genuinely electronic vocabulary based on their new discoveries of technical devises to generate and output images.

A video synthesizer generates signals to produce imagery. As a more complex device than audio synthesizer, the video synthesizer covers a much larger amount of digital signals in multiply dimensions. A video synthesizer is like the paint and palette of a video artist. It translates the ideas and concepts into different signals and then generates images and transformations, and makes it possible to achieve numerous effects and distortions by controlling the waveforms. The additive synthesis is the most common technique for generating waveforms. It mixes the output waveforms of oscillators to generate a new waveform that is the sum of their combined outputs. It makes it possible for artists to duplicate any natural waveform by summing sine waves of different frequency and produce unexpected output imagery. The Scan Processor Studies by Woody Vasulka and Brian O’Reilly is a good example for video synthesizer and its product. The No.18 might be the coolest video I’ve ever seen. In the nonstop powerful digital flows, the forever transforming imagery suggests the audience the uncertainty of electronic aesthetics in a very beautiful way. In the vague forms of mountains, oceans, deserts, especially with a screaming woman’s face inside, those mysterious and energetic visuals combined with immortal electronic sound and beats demonstrated the infinite imagination and artistic expressions generated by the imagery and audiovisual world produced by a synthesizer.

Then, the development of image producing devices leads to the two different ways that a video can be generated.

One way is to generate signals by a video synthesizer and an audio synthesizer based on modular processors. Like the video synthesizer built by Eric Siegel, it can manipulate the size, form, and color of the waveforms and then generate a video. The modular designed synthesizer allows parallel and simultaneous prepossessing of high frequency signals.

The other way of creating video changed the control of processing steps, allowing artists to control several different video sources in a sequence simultaneously and separately. The sequencer can depict the structure of an electronic image in the waveform; and the programmer can monitor the arrays from the video sequence digitally and it can store operation sequences in its memory and activate them at any chosen moment. Both of these developments in controlling the processing steps expanded the possibility to visualize the electronic signals and manipulate the information in real-time and deviate the signal from the usual linear sequence. Analog scan processor can present the scan lines in waveforms, and then enable artists to use this reflexive procession to visualize a video’s generic natural processes. Just like how it works in video feedbacks, this way of generating video imagery allows the video to present the circulation of the audio and video signals without external inputs. The method is workable in both externally and internally generated signal processes. In this way, the concept of “images” in video art is replaced by the concept of “image field”, or  “pictoriality”, because of the breakdown of the structure incoherent in imagery and the layers of imagery become so multiply that it is no longer to depend on a bounded surface of imagery.