Female Video Imagery: Deconstruct & Represent

Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas, and Valie Export are three import female artist in the history of video art. I think they can be grouped together because all of them used video, video installation and video performance as a media to deconstruct the traditional imagery of female body, and then establish their own definition to the woman identity. They questioned the adoption of the electronic media in the process of knowing and seeing a female body. In their controls of imagery making approaches, they disassociated the reflections of their own bodies from historically cultural defined woman imagery. They used video as the live medium and its character of reflexiveness to execute a direct control in transforming, representing, recording, and exhibiting of their redefined female roles, mostly in contrast to the mass media portrait of women in female grace, soft hearted and natural beauty.

Ulrike Rosenbach,

Salto Mortale is a video of Ulrike Rosenbach’s live action as a recording of her performance. With a camera in her hands, Rosenbach swings from a two-meter-high trapeze while recording what comes into her lens. As the way she’s holding the camera, the video appears in a constant moving mode, recording a blurring and transparent imagery that combined by two different pictures of women. One photo is a portrait of Leila Khaled, a famous female Palestinian freedom fighter holding a machine gun. Below and opposite to this photo is a picture of Madonna, which is mounted head down. The camera records both portraits with a swinging motion. At the same time, this video can be seen in a closed-circuit setup, on a monitor placed in the performance space. 

As an active feminism artist, Ulrike Rosenbach explores and investigates the media image of women in this project. Based on a “mythical feminist standpoint” (Lucy Lippard), she explores the changing roles of women throughout our history. Instead of soft, sweet and fragile female roles portrayed in traditional visual media, she visualizes and develops new female identity. By blurring past and present, enhanced by the swinging movement, she shows the groundlessness of women, the infinite energy and possibilities in female identity, suggesting her deny on the stereotypes of women in mainstream media.

Valie Export



Touch Cinema is a performing art project commenting on female identity and the impact of media. The live act was performed in ten European cities from 1968 to 1971. In this revolutionary work, Valie Export was wearing a monitor as a clothe around her naked top body, in away that her upper body could not be seen by the public. However, there’s an open door for the screen/monitor she’s wearing, and anyone can put their hands into the monitor and touch inside the screen. She went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her. 

In Valie Export's performance, she was criticizing the media’s portrait and metaphors on female body. Instead of showing the actual body in a media platform, she invites people to go through the screen to touch the body in person, as breaking the illusion and added implications to the unity of female body. She used her live actions to demonstrate that the female body should not be packaged and sold by male directors and producers, but is controlled and offered freely by the woman herself, which is a concept quite different from social rules and media stereotypes. Also, in Valie Export's performance, the audience are not only feeling the work visually and audibly, they can also have a very direct, tactile contact with the work piece as well as the artist, which in a way that breaks down the boundary between media and audience, content and responses.

Joan Jonas, 

Vertical Roll: By putting fast speed passing images as a cohesive short shots of a female body together, combined with extremely loud metal beats, Joan Jonas used the technique of montage to create a theater for her audience to view and respond to her perspective of female identity. In a startling combination of form and content, this work deconstructed the representation of female bodies under the media definition. Montage, or say, the vertical roll, is the biggest interruption for audience to read the imagery, which is an abstract collage of fragments of female body, compressing tensions, and infinite energy and anger. The artist manipulates the form of media illustration and then controls the physical and mental experience when they watching the video. Patience is needed to finish watching the video or trying to figure out the meaning of body pieces in those flashing frames. By doing this, Joan Jonas deconstructs the original imagery of female body, and reframes the expected audience perspectives, aiming to dislocate the space between audience and media, and then fractures the reality. With the use of electronic distortion, the artist creates a surreal and uncomfortable viewing environment for her audience, in order to convey the messages of being anxious, dizzy, uncontrolled, and even mad. Joan Jonas made her point on media portray on women body strongly in this art piece, distorting, dividing, and destroying the traditional and stereotype of female imagery from television and other mainstream visual media. 

The technique of montage is usually used for condensing time and compressing spaces in a shorter sequence while providing more information. However, in Vertical Roll, Jonas used montage as a way to increase the reading time period, to enlarge the scale of female imagery, to diagnose the weenie fragments, to augment the spaces within the media as well as the distance between media and viewers. 

Life in Floating

Tea Mäkipää (born 1973) is a female artist from Finland. Her works include installations, architectural works and videos and photography. In her lecture on Nov 15th, I was most attracted by her outdoor installation work: "Atlentia" and "Parasite”. Both of these two installation works are dealing with outdoor space and modern living environment. For the "Atlentia", a corner of a house beacons up from the water, with sound of people chatting and singing coming out from the floating house. Live seems nothing different from normal, but in such an abnormal situation. Similar surprises and amazement happened in the "Parasite", with a house attached to a high building in a most scary and breathtaking way. When people walking pass the street besides the cooperating building, they can hear sound from the floating house, people talking, family chatting, laughing and arguing, just like our everyday life, which picturing a normal and sweet living scene. "Atlentia" is commenting on the issue of globe warming, suggesting the future of human family living in water; while "Parasite" is commenting on the unaffordable price for real states and other growing prices for keeping a basic living standard. 

In the parts that are visible, life seems to be continuing. 

Those two works are creating a dream-like vision, but in a decided dangerous moment, reminding us of the vulnerability of life and the possible future of our modern lifestyle. 

Makipaa's work concentrates on the current living issues and the relationship between people and their living environment. Her other works also comments on the human's action and its impact on nature and then the reflections on our own life. I think she is a master of using public spaces for exhibiting the works and address her concerns to the public viewers, then function greatly in educational and criticizing significance. 

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.