Saturday 29 June 2013

New Videos

Some more unfinished experiments


Friday 28 June 2013

Sounding The Body Electric

I went to the opening of this exhibition Sounding The Body Electric (Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe  1957-1984) the other day at The Calvert 22 Foundation, It was pretty interesting including some work by practitioners I was well aware of and some from artists I had never heard of before.
here is a shot of the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio


















Especially of note was some work being shown by
Bulat Galeyev of the Prometheus Institute  whose site I have had bookmarked (and linked on my secret drawn sound/visual music blog) for a long time now, the work clearly used oscillographics and colorization techniques, here is a still form 1982 THE SPAСE DANDELION

















There were also some nice Graphic Scores from various eastern european practitioners 
here is one form 1972 by Boguslaw Schaeffer, I have been teaching for a while about the realtion ship between video synthesis, visual music, drawn sound and graphic scores so it's nice to see these kinds of work be interpreted as related and exhibited together.


















The only small shortcoming of the show (and it is a small one) is that it doesn't explain how much of the work here is influenced by the influx of western ideas and how much were from home grown ideas put on hold due to the political situation from the 20s onwards, having just finished reading the mind blowing Sound In Z by Andrey Smirnov whose research I have followed for years and seen speak many times, I imagine that some of the work and artists from the early 20th century in Russia could have provided at least a distant memory of and age of intermedia experimentation to the next generation, there is small mention of the influence of Léon Theremin and Arseny Avraamov arguably the two most influential players in early Russian electronics, visual music, drawn sound and experimental music however there isn't much discussed about any direct connections. For instance the ANS was still in development right up to 1957 when this exhibition begins to look at work however were any of the Russian and Eastern European Intermedia artists influenced by it's development?  arguably it is the last and most complex of the Russian drawn sound projects that I am aware of. However to be fair all of this research is fairly new and this is a tiny exhibition, I'm just glad it has found it's way to London at all! As Gagarin once said Let's go!

PS I picked up these exhibition Catalogues and books which perhaps go in to greater detail about context




Look What I Found

I just found this London Video Arts Catalogue in a junk shop complete with two LVA video tape hire forms! Times have changed and now LVA is part of LUX, there is some pretty interesting early British video work detailed inside, more separate posts to follow!

Thursday 20 June 2013

Jennifer Juniper Stratford

ChronOproject
Music by AFM Magician / AFM Musician
From the album Eternity
afm-musician.bandcamp.com/album/eternity

Video by Jennifer Juniper Stratford



Tuesday 18 June 2013

Trypton Media

"Tryptonmedia consists of two main artists, Grady and Roslin, whom are passionate and dedicated to visually exploring fractals without the use of computers. Over the past decade they have been bringing psychedelic light to dancefloors all over British Columbia."



Sunday 16 June 2013

Eat Static Intrusion 1994 VHS

Footage of rave visuals computer generated 65 minutes from Eat Static 

Friday 14 June 2013

The Prehistory Of Cinema & The Archology of The Moving Image

Lest stray into the world of  film as I think it can tell us a lot about the development of video work and electronic media, after all one of the many progenitor technologies to video synthesis works are light shows, lumia and visual music works. However before we even get to cinema as an established art there were many artists and engineers experimenting with the new medium and contributing to it's development. Some of these works are almost like mechanical and chemical realisations of ideas that would later be explored in a similar way electronically by artists and engineers at the dawn of the video age.

Probably the best and almost definitive resource in the study of the the prehistory of cinema is Werner Nekes whose site and video series Media Magica, display and describe a dazzling series of optical toys, illusions and various moving image machines. Go buy the series!

 


Another Excellent website is http://www.visual-media.be/ whose links section is fantastic
here is a picture from the site of three children playing with a Chromatrope, as you can see it is very like a video synthesis work and even more similar to lighting effects still used today and that were present in many Lumia displays and their later descendants the light shows of the 1970s.















Antiquarian Holographica is another excellent source of information about a very large collection of artifacts documenting the history of 3D photography, film ,holography and work like laser light shows and even lumia!













And finally for now here is an amazing timeline of historical film colours that really bring home the structures in the mechanics of film that artists somtimes playwith http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/

































all images taken from their respective websites please ask and I will remove if necessary, more at some later date...

The-Drum 'Contact' Album Teaser Trailer





Visuals by

Omega Point
http://ompoint.net/
Logan Owlbeemoth
http://tachyonsplus.tumblr.com/
Theodore Darst
http://theodoredarst.net/

Video Produced by

Theodore Darst & The-Drum

Thursday 13 June 2013

Modulated Horizontal Lines




"Abstract video art created in 1976. Video by Dean Winkler and Chris Lambiase. Music by Terry Riley. This was created in real time using an RE-4 Rutt/Etra analog video synthesizer. After spending our January college break building the facility that housed the RE-4 and related equipment, we created this tape (with lots of patch cords) the night before we headed back to school."


more in the videos description https://www.youtube.com/user/dean358

also see the beautiful

Wednesday 12 June 2013

The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued

Very Exited about this one


















http://kathyhigh.com/pdfs/writing-video-history/The%20Emergence%20of%20Video%20Processing%20Tools.pdf

"The Emergence of Video Processing Tools presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and ’70s. They examine the intersection of art and science and look at collaborations among inventors, designers, and artists trying to create new video tools to capture and manipulate images in fascinating and revolutionary ways. The contributors include “video pioneers” who have been active since the emergence of the aesthetic and technologists who continue to design, build, and hack media tools. The book also looks at contemporary tool makers and the relationship between these new tools and the past. Video and media production is a growing area of interest in art and this collection will be an indispensable guide to its origins and its future."

Friday 7 June 2013

Celeste Byers Wild Wild Wets - Realized Into Redwood

Glitch Moment/ums

http://www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/glitch-momentums

Hand Made Cinema

http://handmadecinema.com/

An excellent site recommended by a member of the video synthesis forum here

UPDATE

I have kind of been coasting with Video Circuits recently, but the good news is I have lots of ideas and content I want to share and talk about, apart from continuing to post allot of videos from artists working with video hardware I want to begin to broaden Video Circuits and begin to discuss more fully the history behind some of the work, I recently gave a talk and made a small publication which I am going to adapt and post on here all about my research. I also have some very interesting images from a studio visit I conducted in London a while back. I have also been gathering parts and equipment for my own video synth which I may post about here when I really get it going.

In the meantime expect more of the usual !