A short Flicker Film adulterated by some extra images shot in Malawi, Africa. FF was in answer to an assignment given by artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron Davidson who created the soundtrack to which I was asked to make a “Future Film”.

-- Deborah Stratman

See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !

This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs. Sandin decided that the best distribution strategy for his instrument "was to give away the plans for the IP and encourage artists to build their own copies.

Decidedly low-tech, this optical abstraction begins with a shot of an aluminum reflector inside a lamp; a lightbulb in the shot’s center flicks on and off. As the video plays on, nearly identical shots are superimposed, but at a steadily decreasing scale, resulting in an array of nested rectangles. The rhythmic blinking of intense light- accompanied by audible clicks from the plastic light switch- presents the viewer with a swift progression of blinding geometries, (with) dizzying effects.

-- Michelle Grabner, Artforum, May 2010

flight is a frame-by-frame re-editing of an astronaut walking on the moon into a seven-minute long meditation on technological transcendence. The unstable, stuttering image depicts the astronaut's struggle to separate from his body. Comically majestic, the astronaut enacts a late 20th Century ballet. A performance of anti-heroic stumbling, falling down, and disappearance into white light.

This title is also available on Les LeVeque Videoworks: Volume 1.

Free Society is a short experimental music video that juxtaposes images of police harrassment in the U.S. with images of the military quelling revolutionary opposition. Includes comments from televangelist Jerry Falwell.

This title is also available on Paul Garrin Videoworks: Volume 1.

"Actions, states, one B+W video camera, the Paik Abe Colorizer, a video switcher. The two states, a b a b, I put my hand in the camera frame and saw a colored hand shifting. I moved my, the, hand, including back and forth, realizing or connecting to the visual and language potential of front hand and back hand. Giving it some veracity, the pace became about attempting to keep up with the position changes together with verbally reciting front hand back hand, co-coordinating from hand to mouth and mouth to hand."

– Peer Bode

A response to the inability of his local General Motors dealer to fix Morton's 1974 Chevy van to his satisfaction, this tape blends experimental image-processing techniques with documentation of the faulty vehicle. Morton states that he is upset primarily because General Motors "can't get their tech together," and as a video producer involved with using and maintaining high-tech equipment, this strikes Morton as expecially bothersome.

An erotic/mystical misadventure in which the allure of the religious path is strewn with earthly temptations. Struggling with a bogus Zen koan involving flowers in keyholes and jumping through windows, the protagonist will end up entering, by the conclusion, the realm of subatomic particles, thereby achieving transcendence-of-a-sort. On the soundtrack, operatic quotations comment ironically (and sometimes sincerely) on the visual proceedings.

Featuring a swirling spiral from video feedback, this video provides a contemplative visual space for viewers. The spiral appears on and off against colorful oscillation patterns. 

This video shares a close resemblance with Venn’s Apron, which appears to have been made on the same day: January 1,1973. Compared to Venn’s Apron, which has a seemingly improvised approach, this work is paced and structured.

–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung

Klaus Nomi (born Klaus Sperber) was an underground superstar in the East Village arts scene in the 1970s and early 1980s. Known for his dramatic attire and make-up, and his theatrical stage presence, Nomi was a countertenor and could achieve a wide vocal range, allowing him to include operatic embellishments to his musical numbers. He died in 1983 and was one of the earliest artists to die from AIDS.

Ana Mendieta performs a kiss in Old Man's Creek with another performer.

Hydroglyphs pictographic writing in water, is a work that experiments with the lyrical qualities of shapes, colors, and forms occurring in water reflections and how these elements create an electronic painting unfolding in real time. Filmed from a canoe in the Great Swamp of southern Rhode Island, the imagery begins with subtle colorization and builds to a visual complexity that maintains a layered, watercolor effect throughout.

Using the image processor as it was intended as a performance instrument, Icron exploits the processor’s real-time capabilities: the image and soundtrack were generated through simultaneous improvisation, although the color was added later. The title of the piece is a neologism created by fusing "icon" with "chron" as a reference to the effect of temporal changes on images. Snyder combines iconographic elements of broadcast television with the structural features of music by deconstructing the face of a newscaster into scan lines.

IEVE Aura features video art created and recorded at the first Interactive Electronic Visualization Event at the University of Illinois Circle Campus. This title was edited by Phil Morton and includes video and sound art created by Dan Sandin, Bob Snyder, and Tom Defanti.

Aura of IEVE, a companion piece to this title, spotlights the artists working on the Sandin Image Processor, sound keyboard, and computer graphics ("Digital Keyboard"). 

Skip Sweeney was an early and proficient experimenter with video feedback. A feedback loop is produced by pointing a camera at the monitor to which it is cabled. Infinite patterns and variations of feedback can be derived from manipulating the relative positions of camera and monitor, adjusting the monitor control, becoming a swirling vortex. Sweeney and others were intrigued with feedback's ability to generate pulsing images like a living organism.

"A chamber drama set in the confines of an apartment’s sun room, this video further explores visual themes and obsessions found in my earlier works and adds in a few new ones for good measure. Earlier motifs seen here are lightbulbs in pendulum movement, tabletop antics with simple household objects, Christo-like fleshy textures, sketchbook pages torn from their binders, book pages, bookshelves, and flowers. I play a vaguely Walter Mitty-ish figure, who imagines himself as a conductor, as Orpheus, and as conflicted characters in a Greta Garbo movie.

Inconsecreation is a complex mix of videos that fully explores the capability of the Sandin Image Processor’s handling of live-feed, video feedback, oscillation patterns, and recorded footage. The live-feed camera footage consists of a scene where hands are seen manipulating a mixer; the video feedback creates an ever-glowing spiral; the patterns generated from the oscillators form a series of pulsating rhombus shapes; and the pre-recorded material includes footage of a dancer and ocean scene.

A grinding mortar and pestle vignette analogously describes the evolution of digital resolution; from a single color to a high definition image to an infinite splitting of that image back into the pixels themselves.

This title is only available on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Jam #1 highlights the colorizing ability of the Sandin Image Processor. This hour-long video compiles a jam session with a piano and drum set, video footage from movies and nature, and visual feedback. The video mixing juxtaposes and alternates the images to create a kaleidoscopic stream of events, accompanied by the improvised music. With keying techniques, bodies and objects become containers that engulf, assimilate, and disintegrate the alternating visual reality. The final part features a “holographic” aesthetic and ambient electronic soundtrack.

Feedback-generated computer animations wiped and keyed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher.

Jaws is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.

The second in the Jaws series. Feedback-generated computer animations wiped and keyed with images and sounds from electronic oscillators via an analog video switcher.

Jaws 2 is also available on Gruffat's Video Animations compilation.

A Nazi battalion marches in red in front of the ominous floating hand from THE AX HAS FLOWERED. This meditative treatment on genocide can be taken as a palliative or as a poison pill.

Through a process of degeneration of both sound and image, Just endows the iconic American flag with new context and implication. The image is repeated by generations, using different processes such as digital video, computer printout and photocopying, and then combined with degenerated sound. Single frames of original digital images are exported, and evolve through the repetition of process, before being metamorphosed back to digital image by scanning and rendering.

"Bricks, white noise, video. Free floating sync, altered, drifiting camera: video image and time. Keying permutations, switching via gray level values, using a modified b+w Sony special effects generator (SEG). Building the building, one brick at a time. In video what is a brick? In spite of what was then a fierce cultural doxa, an anti-materialist pressure, and being quite anti-anti-materialist I was working hard to coax out significant features as expressive intensity zones, electronic energy points always engaging with the signals."  

– Peer Bode