Image Processing

“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for California Video, a 2008 at the Getty Museum, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidation, making the work unwatchable and threatening to ruin any deck that would play them. Jonathan Furmanski, an Assistant Conservator at the Institute, describes one particularly unruly video installation, Philo T.

Mom and Dad highlights causal conservations between Phil and his parents around family life, road trips, and camping in an interview-like setting, where his parents sit against a plain brick wall facing the cameras. Phil gives a live-demonstration of the image processor to his parents. His minimalistic approach to processing implies a laid back family time instead of his pursuit of an artful, finished product.

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

white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a stroboscopic work made from fifteen films starring Charlton Heston. Each film has been algorithmically condensed down to thirty seconds in length. These fifteen condensed movies have been frame-by-frame chronologically organized and metrically inter-cut with two Heston film frames followed by two white frames.

Blurred images, glowing like a foggy moon and reminiscent of early television broadcasts, are rhythmically set to a relentless, pulsing soundtrack.

This title is also available on Anthony Discenza Videoworks: Volume 1.

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.

I live in the Hudson Valley near the Hudson River. Historically, Muhheakunnuk, a river that runs both ways was a waterway for the colonization of North America. This film combines old footage I shot of the river in winter when the ice flowed with a live video/audio synthesizer performance as a meditation on settler colonialism and its ecosystem.

— Les LeVeque

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Red Green Blue Gone with the Wind is a phosphorescent deconstruction of David O. Selznick's Technicolor classic Gone with the Wind (1939). Through the structural devices of condensation, the frame-by-frame separation of the red, green, and blue Tehnicolor layers, and the de-interlacing of the video field, LeVeque presents a destabilized illumination of the relentless romantic nostalgia for the antebellum past.

This title is also available on Reconstruction Trilogy: Les LeVeque.

as the waves play along with an invisible spine (the workers die) is a stroboscopic work that pulsates black and white at approximately 14 Hz. Buried within that field of pulsation is a 90 second algorithmically condensed version of John Huston's 1956 film Moby Dick. Huston's minimal close-ups of the doomed sailors flicker as afterimage ghosts as approximately 4Hz in the visually unstable field of alternating black and white frames.

So long as the creature lives

it must carry forth its vertebrae

as the waves play along

Concentrating on abstract shapes and color value, Animation 2 is a record of images manipulated through computer animation. By recording the data screens of the animators and the voices of the controllers, Sonnier discloses the process of making the video.

“This tape is about media, and it seems totally unedited, because we hear him talking over the intercom with the engineer… The engineer interjects, ‘Do you want to save any of this stuff?’ Yes, indeed; Sonnier saves and shows it all, the whole process.”

Electric Yogurt documents different modes of childlike play, beginning with footage of a group of people dancing together with arms outstretched against a background of growling, cooing, and coughing. As the dancing continues, the participants get increasingly tangled up in one another and repeatedly chant the word “culture,” eventually transitioning into a trust fall. The enactment of these activities is simultaneously playful and somewhat disturbing, particularly as they parallel symbolic enactments of American nationalism.

As profecias da Orixá Oxum (The Prophecies of the Waterfall Spirit Oxum) was filmed at Iguaçu Falls, Brazil/Argentina, and is intended for viewing in Virtual Reality. The intent of Prophecies is to transport the viewer to an alternate reality that exceeds the boundaries of the everyday visual experience, evoking faces, emotions, the visualization of sound waveforms, and mystery.

Broken up into "chapters," Phosphoresence features an array of abstractions created by manipulating television images. At times almost painterly, the resulting images are set to an ambient electronic soundtrack.

This title is also available on Anthony Discenza Videoworks: Volume 1.

An over thirty-minute static long take of a grass lawn in front of a lake. A camera is set still to capture a day trip of a group of people around the lake. The causal conservation suggests they are having a picnic on a breezy day, where a wind chime occasionally rings, alongside the random blowing of a horn. The video processing focuses on the keying of two distinct areas: the lake and the surrounding grass lawn and trees. 

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.

An incantation.

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Simultaneously dark, surreal, and unnerving, this seventeen-minute tape is a stark departure from the usually playful productions of the Videofreex. Through the use of slow fades, processed audio, and the juxtaposition of often-times violent imagery with a bleak, winter forest, the viewer is thrust into an atmospheric and experimental trip.

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.

This film is an appropriation from the 1953 movie Gentlemen Prefer Blonds. Each sync sound frame of the opening song "A Little Girl from Little Rock" is repeated 32 times and reorientated.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

Teramana spends time with drag performer Dainty Adore O’Hara (Mitchell Allan Marco) in Dainty’s apartment in New York City. Dainty, her friend, and Teramana exchange friendly, humorous banter as they flip through Dainty’s collection of photographs and artworks, and Dainty shows off her dress collection, many of which she made herself. The production date for this title is unknown, but presumed to have been recorded after 1991.

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Imagine that the camera is possessed with a psychosis similar to human schizophrenia; suppose that this disease subtly changes every single frame of film while leaving the narrative superficially intact. Then imagine that these symptoms came on as a result of the trauma of recording bizarre or horrific events, for instance those of the 1941 horror film Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde...

Adapted from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

This title is also available on Paul Bush Pixilated.