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. 

Hill's Electronic Vocabulary

Gary Hill uses video as a way to understand or take apart or deconstruct language. He then applies his knowledge of language to “create a link between images and electronics”. How does he accomplish this? How do his videos change or potentially change how we view or understand language? 

Gary Hill used video as a way to show how a linguistic system can be translated into the audiovisual displays in digital formats. He began his experiments with semiotics and explored with linguistic insertions, sounds, syllables, and spoken words in his videos, trying to discover new contexts of meanings above the linguistic level. In the aim of creating a link between images and electronics, Hill exemplified his concept in his early experiment, Electronic Linguistics (1978). He translated electronic sound signals into a “language of imagery”, and by recording the digital signals he represented and visualized his transcription process at the same time. In the experiment, he made his digital “monadic” structure grew into something intensive in the screen, demonstrating the energy and productivity of one single basic unit that make happen to any bigger phrases, which was the working system in both cyber world and linguistics world.

His work Primary (1978) inspired me mostly. When seeing the speaking mouths flashing with corresponding colors and spoken letters, I found myself very unconscious about the speaking worlds and the colors, and especially the relationship between the two parts. I was questioning the very first invention of the word “red”, “blue”, and “green”. They can mean something different if the inventor put another meaning on that certain word. The language is a system of relationships between visualized characters and their decided meanings. But when we watch something in a fast flow and the visual part is very dominant, we may ignore the sound and the meaning behind the spoken language. I’m wondering if the color on screen was green while the spoken word was red, will I feel strange or will I ever notice that? The relationship between words and their meanings are so fragile because people manipulated them, and they can easily change by the differences in cultures and times. While people’s understanding and recognition toward certain things or knowledge are based on linguistic definition and language system, just as we would respond to the real color of red when we hear the word “red”, but what if the really color of blood was not called as red but as green? How would that change people’s knowledge system? Or what should be the right or the correct relationship between words and meanings? Or why does it matter to us? 

Video Art and Forming Memories

In Woody Vasulkas' of Art of Memory, the artist integrated the documentary film and photography into flows of digital manipulated images. Black-and-white newsreel footages of cavalry and flaming buildings were processed into moving, multi-screen polyhedrons; the sky behind the figure suddenly crawls with geometric "rain". Then comes the voice of an important historical feature, on seeing the first explosion of the atomic bomb. Vasulka transformed the historical imagery and audio into new visual displays.

First of all, the obvious theme for this video is a critique on the use of historical recording imagery technology, photography and film. By transforming the footages and images of wars into fluid digital movement and ambiguous shapes, the artist concerned about the military-industrial use of such technology. He was questioning on the present and the preservative aspects of history and our memory about that. His point was to deconstruct the relationship between our memories about the history with those “historical” black and white events footages. By transferring the filmic records into other media and translated them into the state of an electronic pictoriality, he challenged the priority in human notions and entered into the private space of historical documents.

Secondly, the major theme for Vasulka’s work is to investigate the historical distance of the media used and point to the storage function of historical documentary imagery and sound. By transforming old records of images and sound into energetic and fluid electronic movements, he freed or activated those dead visual/audiovisual materials, and then translated them back from being a container of human memory into remembered history. He changed the critical distance in the display of imagery as memory. By making the war footages into waveforms surfaces in the new electronic pictoriality, Vasulka used his computer- generated forms proved how memory distorted the shape of events, and how permeable was the media imagery as a container of supposed truth influenced our understandings. By this, he demonstrated the self-reflexivity of video technology as a new medium. And then brought new notions to the aesthetic content in understanding the distance between the two levels of display, resulting in exploring the construction of our memory based on a picture world and the way to view our imagery cultural. 

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.

Image Technician

Spielmann describes the video artist as an “image technician”. 

How or is the content/concept of these videos connected to their process of their making? 

The image technicians are the group of video artists who explore their experiment videos concentrating on their conceptual, structural, and technical standpoint including the equipment they're using. I believe many great video artists can be grouped together under this definition. However, I doubt the point that every video artist is an image technician or should they. 

My reason is that the video artist as an image technician experiment their use of video media and the creation of digital signal are a big part of their art content; but it is not necessary for every video artist. There's no doubt that image technicians made great significance in the development of video history. A wide variety of electronic instruments  have been constructed by those engineers and visual artists over the past years. Their discoveries on operating television technologies created new and dynamic forms of digital imagery. From layers mixing, video feedback, colourisers, chroma key, analogue effects are invented to modify the visual world to better convey the ideas of video artists. It is true that those image technicians did great efforts in artistic and imaginative explorations to expand the visual dimension and the horizon of the human imagination. Just as the points from El Arte Del Video Video Synthesis, with the development of techniques, modern TV images do not need to be generated from a camera. It is a fundamental changing point for video art, meaning the coming of new tools, new effects, and new languages to break and transfer reality into art making. 

Video synthesis gives the visual artist the power to realise that which is subject to the creative faculties, allowing a freedom of expression and dynamism using form, shape, colour, texture and motion generated by electronic means. Then artists can change the appearance and behaviors of the imagery to work for their decided concepts. For those video artists working as image technicians, their technical capabilities fundamentally influenced their art content and then impacted dramatically on their art making processes.   

Video Feedback

Video feedback is continual and processual series of digital images created by the electronic imagery itself. It is a process that starts and continues when a video camera is pointed at its playback on a video monitor. The image from the camera is delayed slightly in time as it travels through the extensive circuitry of the recording system and then is output to the video playback monitor. Video feedback is not invented; it is a digital phenomena as the form of a dynamic flow of imagery created by the digital world itself.

VanDerBeek gained great significance in his video feedback experiments. Good examples can be found in his work Poemfield NO.2, stared from 4:25. He's trying to create new graphic and new images by the corresponds between videos and movies. He explored the visual possibility of the mix of media, raising the question of what is the illusion? What is the reality? What is magic? He's testing the power of images created exclusively in the digital visual media. By creating a new combination of computer imagery and digital imagery, VanDerBeek expanded a new visual world and a new cultural environment. He explored the relationship between man and machines, and then investigated the video feedback as a new language form.
Also, in Euclidean Illusions, the video feedback started from 1:01. The beautiful image flows suggested the infinite spaces and times in the digital imagery. The unpredictable patterns grow inside the projected picture, creating an endless power box at the same time. The video feedback reminded viewers about the mysterious of digital creation, and its unpredictable power, and also the sense of uncontrollable. The infinite spaces brought up an infinite amount of energy to the media itself. Then let the audience to analyze the current relationship between human and the digital.
 

Manipulations

How special effects and video manipulation contribute to the video content?  Be able to tell what the video concept is the first step to find the right answer. 

Stan Brakhage made his work Dog Star Man from the first person perspective, letting the audience to see the action of seeing with the subject's own eye. The whole video is in a very fast speed of transitions. Everything is blurry and changing. Viewers can hardly see clearly anything but still feel the story. The person's perspective is very low in position, just like the view from a dog. With special effects, like multiply layers, shadows on sides, dark night views, the video can manipulate the seeing world of a dog or a dog-man. By using lots of mixed images, and digital flash effects, the artist created great tension and some fiction feelings in this video. Like those images that mixed with pictures of moon, skin, blood, and some microscope views, they are suggesting the plots of werewolf.  Another interesting effect is the use of red filter. There're many scenes that were edited into a dominated color of red. With showing some abstract patterns and lines in a quick motion, the red scenes can be interpreted as fire, energy, passion, blood, violence and tension, which are all connected to the later images of female body and woman's face, suggesting the possible sex, desire and violence even murder. 

Jonas Mekas's work, Walden (1969), is an example of his dairy form of film-making. The film is a honest portrait of the artist and his life in New York City. The use of texts or titles in his film is important. They work good as transitions for different scenes, and they certainly made the point of the poetic of this dairy film. There's no conversations and talking. Moving imagery plus beautiful written words make the film more peaceful and poetic. As a film diary, the footages recorded the artist direct reaction to the immediate reality, and his daily activities like having dinner, talking in Central Park. Some special effects were used in presenting the footages. For examples, some scenes were made into a faster speed and some shuts had blue or yellow filters. All these effects made the ordinary everyday life not boring but beautiful as memories. This poetic personal diary documented many life scenes, the changes of seasons, friendships and many normal but wonderful things happened in the artist world. All these poetic expression were just celebrating the joy of life, the simple and innocent moments of living, the beauty of nature and friendship.

Peter Kubelka's video about Schwechater beer  is nothing like traditional commercials. The rapid cuts and abstract shadows of negative like images made views very hard to see what exactly going on in that video. The repeated use of color filters and unexpected jump increased the "coolness" of this video and then made this commercial very innovatory. What it looks like to open a beer bottle and drink with friends is commonsense for everyone. Based on abstract shadows and certain movements, views can complete the beer images by themselves. The details of drinking Schwechater is not important. What matter is the coolness of doing so. 

"Crossings and Meetings", (1974), explores the visual and audio spaces in people's action of walking. In this video, Emshwiller implied many special effects to expand and enlarge the world of the images and sound in a simple movement. For example, fast-forward and rewind an action, multiple layers and keying in one frame, and also the heavy manipulation of audio. With all these effects, Emshwiller deconstructed the action of walking, and made the spaces between crossings and meetings infinite. There're complex elements, and numerous micro-movements, and lots of energies in those enlarged spaces and uncounted time periods.