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Moog Images

Laurie McDonald

1973 00:02:52 United StatesEnglishB&W and ColorMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Image Processing, Sound, Technology, Television

Description

The colorized abstractions of Moog Images were created by feeding Moog synthesizer oscillators into the video inputs of a television monitor. The oscillators were locked into the horizontal and vertical frequencies: thin lines of electronic “pencils” responsible for drawing the video image side-to-side and up and down. By slightly altering the frequencies of the oscillators, different images are formed. Thus, the images directly correlate to sound and are controlled by sound.

“In a TV tube (CRT), the horizontal and vertical frequencies controlled the speed at which the electron beam scanned across the screen, essentially determining how quickly the image was drawn line by line, with the horizontal frequency dictating the speed of the beam across each line and the vertical frequency dictating how often the beam returned to the top of the screen to start drawing a new line, creating a complete picture on the screen.” -AI generated explanation of how a cathode ray tube TV created an image

“This is perhaps video’s most synaesthetic (sic) imagery, for as the sound determines and shapes the picture, the viewer experiences a transmutation of senses; sound is ‘seen’.” 
-Carol Zemel, Artscanada’s “Issue of Video Art” (October 1973)

About Laurie McDonald

Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow). 

As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées. 

Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.