Mobile Edition
Print
Get the Mag
Weekly UpdatesIn "Outside the Archive: The World in Fragments," Lucy Reynolds demonstrates how in the found footage work of Bruce Conner, Morgan Fisher, Peter Tscherkassky, and others, the film frame becomes, in essence, an archive: "a manifestation not only of [the history of] cinema, but of the fractured rhythms of the industry and the incoherent images of history itself." (2) Similarly, Hal Foster, in his illuminating study of contemporary archival art, sees the archival artist as someone who "seek[s] to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present." The archival artist, Foster goes on to say, "not only draws on ... archives but produces them as well, and does so in a way that underscores the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private." (3) However, as this essay seeks to reveal, artists do not necessarily have to use recycled materials in order for their work to acquire rich, archival meaning. For instance, Brice Howard, one of the first theoreticians of the videographic image and the director of the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET), conceptualized the video art produced under NCET's auspices between 1967 and 1975 as live (most NCET video was unedited and produced in real-time) processes of archivization. The work produced at NCET--a San-Francisco-based creative community in which artists from a wide variety of disciplines (electronic music, poetry, and dance, just to name a few) collaborated in order to explore the artistic potential of video--demonstrated and documented shifting methods of video practice for the sake of formal elaboration and social edification. (Public television was NCET's most reliable exhibition site). (4) Warner Jepson, an electronic musician who participated in the NCET project, reminisced: "[NCET] was a space for experimenting with new video technology to see what video cameras and monitors could do." (5)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The works made during video art's seedbed stages at NCET were heuristic exercises with new ideas, techniques, and technologies. The finished work became scientific proof for a machine's functionality, a medium's specificity, and an artist's proficiency with the means of production. NCET artists saw their videos as storage vessels that refer to past experiments with particular appartuses. These videographers played the role of artist-archivist as they performed and preserved their personal contributions to video poetics. (6) Their formally adventurous works, recorded in real-time with cutting-edge broadcast technologies, were, as Howard envisioned, "records" of inventive artistic processes. "Now, we may be able to visualize process. Electronic flow introduces us to this possibility," Howard once mused. (7) To watch an NCET video is to witness an archive in the process of becoming.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Howard's use of the word "record" is telling. It reveals how one of NCET's chief aspirations was to capture spontaneous moments of artistic inspiration. This documentary quality of NCET video resonates intriguingly with James Lastra's observations on technological developments in early sound recording. "The possibility of preserving and repeating the previously evanescent and singular," writes Lastra, "emerged as one of the most persistent themes associated with all manner of representational technologies." The preservational capabilities of recording technology, Lastra continues, present us with the "opportunity to understand how tropes of writing [like Howard's record analogy] ... served to negotiate institutional relationships to a new technological capacity." (8) As well as accentuating video's ability to catch fleeting sensory phenomena, NCET's extemporaneous approach to moving-image processing enjoyed remarkable, spectacular appeal. Live NCET video afforded audiences with what Mary Anne Doane has called "the lure of the singular instant," (9) the thrilling sensation that coincides with witnessing the inimitable occur. Film and video's capacity to preserve contingency is endlessly alluring because it lets us see "the imprint not only of the content but of the temporal moment of imprinting, of a 'now' which has become a 'then,' but which, in its screening, becomes a resurrected, revivified 'now.'" (10)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
NCET videos not only provided audiences with this exhilarating attraction of the aleatory. They also became instructive records of processes that artists could revisit and elaborate and that curious viewers could work to emulate. Thus, it is crucial to point out how a record--an enduring account of an event--is ontologically distinct from a recording, which, in its purest form, suggests the relatively detached capturing of a moment. Certainly, a recording can be used as a record if, by chance, it captures a heroic deed, a terrorist attack, or anything else with potential value as entertainment or proof. The recorder's gaze is more or less neutral; the record taker's point-of-view is unapologetically goal-driven. This, of course, does not mean that record taking is opposed to chance. In fact, the record taker's greatest hope is to witness an extraordinary, unexpected thing take place. Howard once recalled how "Very often the most meaningful moments [at NCET] were those in which some incredibly remarkable, mercurial connection was occurring among a number of people, and the process was constantly feeding back upon it." (11) The recorder reacts when or if something remarkable happens; the record taker waits for something remarkable to happen. This distinction is crucial also because it sheds lights on the improvisatory formal methods and the premeditated archival objectives of NCET. NCET not only thought of their work as a liberating alternative to the representational traditions of broadcast television (mimetic representation, scripted performance, and so on) but, once again, as proof of video's budding artistry.
The work of NCET artist-in-residence Stephen Beck points to some of the early technological and formal breakthroughs in video. In the late 1960s, Beck, an electrical engineer, invented the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer. The Direct Video Synthesizer was a camera-less device in which electronic generators were activated to produce a video signal. The operator of the device was then able to create an infinite variety of colors and shapes by manipulating the video signal with modulation devices. The Direct Video Synthesizer immediately bypassed the representational strategies of narrative film and broadcast television by "internally" generating abstract imagery. It was the ideal instrument for Beck's explorations in the "symbolic, ideographic, and non-objective modes of images, those which originate internally in the mind's eye." (12) Each one of Beck's videos marked a step forward in the advancement of this subjectivized "new language of the screen." (13) His early videos were both stunning spectacles and, as Chris Meigh-Andrews has noted, self-conscious documentations of ongoing technical research. (14)
Consider Beck's 1972 production, Ex. This work is both a celebration of the material flexibility of the electronic image and a virtuosie statement of technical dexterity. A white line bent to a ninety-degree angle appears on-screen. This line, stationed in the center of the screen, sits undisturbed for a few seconds before it begins to change from blue to purple and, finally, to green. Beck, by tweaking the Synthesizer's texture amplifier (the mechanism responsible for the transformation of color) immediately underscores what he sees as the "the inherent plasticity of the medium." (15) As the video progresses, the image manipulation becomes more and more pronounced. Amorphous blobs perform a synchronized wave dance. Curved lines expand and intertwine to form distended hourglass figures. Choppy scan lines climb the screen and vibrate like electrocuted garden snakes. And so on.
The mercurial imagery of Ex gives the viewer a powerful sense of authorial presence. Ex is not only a vibrant meditation on the properties of the electronic image but is also a self-conscious assertion of Beck's active role as an author-engineer. For Beck, video is a deeply tactile art. In fact, he views his early work on the Direct Video Synthesizer as a form of sculpture. He writes how the Direct Video Synthesizer "functions not as something artificial, as the term 'synthetic' has come to connote, but as a compositional device which 'sculpts' electronic current in the hands of the artisan." (16) Taking full advantage of the elasticity of video therefore means exposing the hand of the artist. Early structuralist video--in which the means of production (tools, artist, etc.) become the subject of the work--entails a foregrounding of an artist's subjectivity and an aesthetic enunciation of the technologies being used. Ex, which fits quite comfortably in this tradition, is a striking example of what Yvonne Spielmann calls a "performance of video, in which the audio-visual medium is made structurally discernible in its components." (17)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Beck's work is reflective of Horward'sof' Howard's principal goal for NCET video: to create a spectacular yet instructive record of a process. Beck, as he makes clear in his article "Videographics," continually attempts to direct his audience's attention to the fact that the "images that appear are due to the interplay of electronic vibrations, established by the artist, which create them." (18) Beck's archival ambitions--his diligent, ongoing exhibition and documentation of personal strategies with video--are compounded by these educational goals. Beck was determined to contribute to the artistic evolution of this new language of the screen and to expand the literacy of it. (19)
It is not surprising that the idea for one of Beck's last works at NCET, Video Weavings (1974), came about after a friend asked--"How do you do that?" Beck's response was a video that shed light on the inner workings of the medium by drawing an analogy between the 525 scan lines that comprise the video image and the ancient craft of weaving. In an interview, Beck recalled:
FEED