The Process Tapes: A program of early video works

"The Process Tapes are video art pieces: lens based, electronic based, video, electronic, analog and digital television. 

By the late 1960’s, new art discourses with names like 'conceptual art' and 'process art' were radically proposing the dematerialization of the art object. These real time video synthesis pieces were part of this vision. Now when looking at these works, these investigations of the transformational image in late 20th Century art, I am struck by their seriousness, jocularity and irony in being both inside and outside illusion.

This material and art historical period was the chance to create, capture and focus on a wonderful body of electronic analog and digital and computer video. I was pursuing strategies of inventiveness, hijacking television and communication media, responding to Contemporary Art, New American Cinema and New Music jewels. The video synthesis community salvaged and repurposed technologies, supported and built new instruments. We were imagining experimental television, moving image potentials, living in alternative cultures and making alternative art. It was a time of electronic and cinematic adventures, evidenced by the work's fragile markings, transformational unfoldings and resonate moments surrounded by a constellation of ideas and exciting experiences. The mode was materialist and utopian. Look at what has entered the spaces of duration. I think of this work as a rescue action. 

At the time, I called the work the The Process Tapes. These were predominantly live, real-time video recordings. Some are shimmering electronic events, others micro-narratives, documentations, performances and cinematics.

Over ninety half inch reel to reel video tapes from The Process Tapes, 1974-86 were digitized by Nilson Carroll at Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), Rochester, NY. This video program is a result of that work, which began in 2023.

Special thanks to VSW, Jessica Johnston, Tara Merenda Nelson and Nilson Carroll.

The videos were recorded at the Experimental Television Center (ETC) in Binghamton, New York and Owego, New York, 1974 -1983, Media Study/Buffalo, 1977-1978. and at the artist's various home studios."

– Peer Bode
Hornell/Alfred, New York
2026

The Process Tapes: A program of early video works includes:

(Blue) Glitz
Pieces (Nov. 15, 1975)
Point Field Line Frame
Snow Key on Snow
Cup Ramp Wave
The Image and Its Reproduction
Interface Windows
Reds & Whites
Front Hand Back Hand
Cup Mix (2 channels)
Horizontal/Vertical Drift
Oscillator Deflections with sound
Vibratory Sweep
Interface 1 2 3
Video Locomotion
Counting and Remapping 00-FF
Camel with Window Memory