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Camel with Window Memory

Peer Bode

1983 00:04:22 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:33/4" U-matic video
Tags:
Image Processing, Video History, Animals

Description

"The Camel with Window Memory piece was made one weekend in the early '80's. I pulled out my post card collection and began to look at specific postcards run through the new digital video buffer I had built together with David Jones. The buffer had only one frame of memory but it was real time. It had the capability of displaying the image memory space, either as live or frozen.

Camel with Window Memory was a live performance recording: handheld postcard, stop watch for timing and the live or frozen memory mode switch. A second key input to the buffer determined where the image would be live or freeze. I used two synched oscillators to create the square key clip shape. For sound, I sampled two areas of the image for grey level values that were turned into control voltages to control the Brewster and Bernie Hutchins modular audio synthesizer in the studio. The image and sound changes were live as I turned on and off the image freezing, watched the stopwatch and heard the sound changes as I moved the postcard, reactive, as in looking and listening, real time image and sound recording.

The camel and man postcard also was particularly resonant as we were then experiencing gas rationing and gas lines in the states, oil politics of the time then also. I remember reflecting that the camel was historically the traveling water storage unit of the desert, an organic system for storing water, energy and memory."

– Peer Bode

About Peer Bode

Video artist Peer Bode, in a career spanning over five decades, has created an extensive body of work that experiments with electronic media events, active perception systems, and culture. A graduate of Binghamton University’s Cinema Department, Bode studied with Larry Gottheim, Ken Jacobs, Nicholas Ray, Peter Kubelka, Ralph Hocking, Sol Levine, Daniel Barnett and later with Woody and Steina Vasulka, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton at SUNY Buffalo’s Media Study Program.

From 1974-1987, Bode worked at the Experimental Television Center (ETC), which was established in 1969 by his lifelong mentor and friend Ralph Hocking. Bode made his foundational early works with the Paik-Abe Synthesizer and Jones Colorizer at ETC, and later used the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer at Media Study Buffalo. Working together with video engineer David Jones at ETC, Bode built and created extensive recordings with two digital video prototype instruments, which became a significant tools within his oeuvre. The two real time, analog/digital prototypes he built, evolved to become the Jones FB-1 Buffer, used by communities of artists in numerous video studios.

Bode’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including: MoMA, The Whitney Biennial, The Anthology Film Archives, The American Center (France), The II Biennial International Video Festival (Colombia), The European Media Art Festival (Germany), The Impakt Film and Video Art Festival (the Netherlands), The Viper Festival (Switzerland), Image Farm (Japan), and B.S.1 (China). Bode headed the Video Arts Program at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University,1987-2020, where he introduced and co-founded and co-directed, together with Jessie Shefrin and Joseph Scheer, the Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA),1998-2020. Bode is Professor of Art, Emeritus at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.

In 1998 Pauline Oliveros, Peer Bode and Andrew Deutsch founded the electro-acoustic project, Carrier Band. Currently, Carrier Band is comprised of Peer Bode, Andrew Deutsch and Rebekkah Palov.