Phil Morton and Dan Sandin introduce video equipment and editing techniques to St. Olaf College students—a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. They display constant playful interactions, from deliberately making audio feedback to mimicking the feedback sounds with voice. The workshop is very laid-back and carefree which is typical of the '70s counterculture and DIY Video communities.
Image Processing
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.
In Sonnier’s video tape TV In and TV Out, two images are superimposed, one shot off network television and the other shot from a studio performance situation involving some of the materials and visual qualities of his sculptures. This live image is colorized by a device which adds color to a black and white image and in turn manipulates the color. Colorized color is more opaque and less three-dimensionally tactile than synthesized color, but it is tactile in its video scan-line texture.
“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
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.
‘ODDS AND ENDS’ is a dazzling patchwork of moods, lost and found, for the eye to savor.
Sequences of landscapes shot in an area of 60 km make up mosaics of places and reference axes constantly changing that do not exist in our surroundings. In this video bodies are not near or far. They are large or small. The horizons change and no space is independent from the viewer. Incorporating only memory, the landscape is seen in a variety of speeds and movements that apply a bodily logic to the vision.
The temperature in your eyes will rise when you contract ‘FEVER DREAMS’ and experience the haunted mayhem contained therein.
This title comprises The Stone Boy (2011), Nonsensical (2014), and Coffee, Tea, and Wizardry (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.
A rural sunset at the edge of the water in WandaWega Waters. The natural rhythmic movement of the water’s surface becomes a highly colored abstraction in motion, a meditation on the intersection of nature and technology.
“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.
On March 8, 1972, Phil Morton conducted a morning class over the telephone. He instructed students that he would answer the phone with “video” and the caller had to reply “W3 Form”—students who responded incorrectly were prompted to dial again. This procedure would then be followed by Phil asking students where they are (street name, city, and zip code) and finally asking “what is your information?” Responses contained research topics, projects, and daily lives around students.
Seven digital mandala-chakras superimposed on video works made over several decades that relate to each chakra. This video compiles previous works into a chakra composite.
Performers: Michelle Krell, Ellen Krueger, Cherie McElligott, Ana Mendieta, Elisa Osborne, Monica Wilson
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.
In this hour-long video, Dan Sandin demonstrates and explains in detail on modules of the Sandin Image Processor. Beginning with a playful and amateurish set up segment, Dan introduces his new invention, which he hints will be duplicated by Phil Morton shortly.
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.
“A short image-processed work, Thousands Watch deals with the issue of nuclear suicide. The tape’s central metaphor is derived from a 1936 Universal newsreel of a crowd looking on while a young man stands on the ledge of a tall building, threatening to—and eventually succeeding in—committing suicide. It begins with an image of time-lapsed colorized clouds racing across the sky at a frenzied pace while a low siren wail emerges on the soundtrack. This sound forms a pulsing heartbeat and builds into a tense crescendo as the tape progresses.
Documentation of the installation The Future of Metropolis at Technical University in Berlin, Germany.
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.
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.
We have come to this place of meaning together, celebrating our un-remaindered completeness. Yet, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways: misspoken sounds we unconsciously omit, the limitations of our alphabet, the ignored gaps of an imperfect analog, and most recently, these forgetful bits of the virtual. We celebrate the lineage of our information as we celebrate one another, not realizing that the loudest affirmations might come from these unacknowledged, unavoidable participants. With each generation, they say a little bit more, speaking a little bit louder.
Feathers: An Introduction is a self-portrait centered on the story of Latham's grandmother’s comforter which, old and worn, scatters feathers everywhere. Displaying an arresting stage presence, Latham addresses the viewer as a potential friend or lover, speaking in a soft-spoken near-whisper, and gingerly touching and kissing the camera lens and monitor. Then, almost mocking the video’s intimacy, Latham gives us close-ups of herself chewing a sandwich and shaving her armpits, heightening the sense that she has been playing cat and mouse with the viewer all along.
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.
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.
Showcasing a solo organ recital, Victor Solo features seven sets of organ works. A narrator, possibly the organ player, announces work titles before each set. The video then displays superimposed views of the organist and the interior of the cathedral. Each set features a different angle of the organist and the architecture. Fitting to the tranquil chorale and preludes, the video artist gives minimal treatment with image processing.
In this work, Alfred Hitchcock's 128-minute film Vertigo (1958) has been condensed at the rate of one frame every two seconds. The condensed film was then duplicated four times, shifting the horizontal or vertical orientation of the frame with each duplication. The four films were then reassembled frame by frame, generating a stuttering kaleidoscopic montage where Oedipal narratives of desire and obsession are shifted and displaced.