Massage the Message

Spielmann used the Vasulkas and Paik as the examples of the two different paths of how to understand video and the electronic medium. Basically, the Vasulkas’ experimental video works were working on investigating the new electronic medium’s internal world, its transformative and “massaging” capabilities. In this path, video artists explored the medium’s manipulative potentials and tried to prove the medium’s extensibility itself. Just like how Hill used video graphics to build a new electronic vocabulary. They viewed video medium independently and demonstrated the interrelation of machines and the video medium. By exploring the structure of interrelation of video medium, those artists experimented the generation of electronic pictoriaility, and its flexibility, instability, and exchangeability. In experiencing the manipulated delay and feedback that happen exclusively in video medium, those artists were trying to achieve a conceptual understanding of the time and movement in electronic media. They explored and discovered the structure specific to video medium, and demonstrated the notion of coherence through construction as well as deconstruction of the audiovisual signal process in generating an electronic pictoriality.

However, the other path, as the work from Nam June Paik, was working more on the possible effect of multiplication on the video-television interaction and its multimedia spectacle performance. Paik had a very different attitude toward how art understand the relationship between video and its implications for conceptual creation. His major difference from the Vasulkas started from their difference views on how to differentiate video and television. Like how Paik did in his work McLuhan Caged, he was doing something more than just manipulating a fluid digital pictoriality inside a computer screen, he inserted video and other media art into his television. Television as a preprogrammed medium of transmission was not in the exploration of the first path of experimental video artists like the Vasulkas. However, Paik’s remediation of the television program as a medium did take a great part in his art approach, which was demonstrating the notion of “message as the massage”, and applied it into his television’s existing program structure.

About the idea of massage the message, the Vasulkas concentrated on the video’s structure and the fundamental matrix inside the video medium. Like what he did with the work Art of Memory, he explored the possibility to massage the shape, color, duration, implications of historical records in his video, and then presented the medium’s capability in massaging or distorting the conceptual content of imagery, in deconstructing the older media’s social functions as well as establishing a new image culture. Well, Paik’s approach to distort a television image by giving the media a magnet massage truly responded to McLuhan’s media theory. Not only the message from the media is new, but also the media’s massage on the message itself. Paik’s art approach was focused on the interference and distorting the electronic pictoriality with the regard to the basic electronic signal. The massage and manipulation and explanation of media as message itself was represented in his artwork. The electronic pictoriality, as the major art investigating point for the Vasulkas, was nothing more than a signal process to Paik, and he was using new machines to insert the electronic pictoriality into his television for displaying a more complex and complicated electronically transformation, which demonstrated his distinguished understanding toward the aesthetical concepts about the specifics of video as a new medium.