The Emergence of Video Processing Tools presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and ’70s. Split over two volumes, the contributors examine the intersection of art and science and look at collaborations among inventors, designers, and artists trying to create new tools to capture and manipulate images in revolutionary ways. The contributors include “video pioneers,” who have been active since the emergence of the aesthetic, and technologists, who continue to design, build, and hack media tools. The book also looks at contemporary toolmakers and the relationship between these new tools and the past. Video and media production is a growing area of interest in art and this collection will be an indispensable guide to its origins and its future.
Table of Contents
Volume 1
Acknowledgments
Preface
Section 1: Histories
Introduction
Kathy High
Beginnings (With Artist Manifestos)
Kathy High
Mapping Video Art as Category, or an Archaeology of the
Conceptualizations of Video
Jeremy Culler
Impulses – Tools
Christiane Paul and Jack Toolin
The Art-Style Computer-Processing System, 1974
Tom Sherman
Machine Aesthetics Are Always Modern
Tom Sherman
Electronic Video Instruments and Public Sector Funding
Mona Jimenez
TV Lab: Image-making Tools
Howard Weinberg
The New Television Workshop at WGBH, Boston
John Minkowsky
The National Center for Experiments in Television at KQED-TV, San Francisco
John Minkowsky
The Experimental Television Center: Advancing Alternative Production
Resources, Artist Collectives and Electronic Video-Imaging Systems
Jeremy Culler
Interstitial Images: Histories
Section 2: People and Networks
Introduction
Sherry Miller Hocking
From Component Level: Interview With LoVid
Michael Connor
Memory Series – Phosphography in CRT 5", Mexico, 2005
Carolina Esparragoza
The Rhetoric of Soft Tools
Marisa Olson
Jeremy Bailey and His ‘Total Symbiotic Art System’
Carolyn Tennant
De-commodification of Artworks: Networked Fantasy of the Open
Timothy Murray
Virtuosity as Creative Freedom
Michael Century
Distribution Religion
Dan Sandin and Phil Morton
A Toy for a Toy
Ralph Hocking
Woody Vasulka: Dialogue With the (Demons in the) Tool
Lenka Dolanova with Woody Vasulka
A Demo Tape on How to Play Video on a Violin
Jean Gagnon
Application to the Guggenheim Foundation, 1980
Ralph Hocking
Thoughts on Collaboration: Art and Technology
Sherry Miller Hocking
Interstitial Images: People and Networks
Index
Color Plates
Volume 2
Section 3: Tools
Introduction
Mona Jimenez
Mods, Pods and Designs: Designing Tools and Systems
Kathy High
Computer-Based Video Synthesizer System, ETC
Donald McArthur, Walter Wright and Richard Brewster
Design/Electronic Arts: The Buffalo Conference, March 10–13, 1977
John Minkowsky
Instruments, Apparel, Apparatus: An Essay of Definitions
Jean Gagnon
Expanding ‘Image-processed Video’ as Art: Subverting and Building
Control Systems
Jeremy Culler
The Grammar of Electronic Image Processing
Sherry Miller Hocking
ETC’s System
Hank Rudolph
On Voltage Control: An Interview With Hank Rudolph
Kathy High and Mona Jimenez
“Insofar as the rose can remember…”
Carolyn Tennant
Analog to Digital: Artists Using Technology
Yvonne Spielmann
Analog Meets Digital In and Around the Experimental Television Center
Kathy High, Mona Jimenez and Dave Jones
Multi-tracking Control Voltages: HARPO
Carl Geiger and Mona Jimenez
Finding the Tiny Dot: Designing Pantomation
Mona Jimenez
Preserving Machines
Mona Jimenez
A Catalog Record for the Raster Manipulation Unit
Mona Jimenez
Copying-It-Right: Archiving the Media Art of Phil Morton
Jon Cates
Proposal for Low-cost Retrieval of Early Videotapes Produced on
Obsolete Equipment and/or Videotape That Will Not Play Back, or
Resurrection Bus (1980)
Ralph Hocking
Interstitial Images: Tools
Author Biographies
Index
Color Plates