TELEVISION AS A CREATIVE MEDIUM by Gene Youngblood
(EXPANDED CINEMA 1970)
"Art has operated in the gap between what we know
and what we dream. The
gap is closing quickly: what we dream is often
what we see. Television will serve
to bridge the gap and to guide the way
toward a more successful environment.
The eyes replace the me's and we
arrive at a condition where what we show
becomes what we say."
EDWIN SCHLOSSBERG
On July 20, 1969,
approximately 400 million world people watched
the same Warhol movie at the
same time. As iconographic imagery
goes there's no appreciable difference
between four hours of Empire
and four hours of LM. There even were similar
hallucinations of
redundancy in our sustained hot cognition of NASA's
primary
structure. The bit-capacity of that Minimal hard-edge picture plane
without gray scale was really amazing. We were getting a lot of
information in dragtime across space-time.
Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces
Recognized as one of the leading intermedia artists and
filmmakers
in the United States, Jud Yalkut has collaborated with Nam
June Paik since 1966 in a series of films that incorporate Paik's
television pieces as basic image material. Yalkut's work differs from
most videographic cinema because the original material is videotape,
not
film. They might be considered filmed TV; yet in each case
the video
material is selected, edited, and prepared specifically for
filming, and a
great deal of cinematic post-stylization is done after
the videographics
have been recorded.
In addition to Paik's own slightly demonic sense of humor, the
films
are imbued with Yalkut's subtle kinaesthetic sensibility, an
ultra-
sensitive manipulation of formal elements in space and time. Paik’s
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Videographic Cinema 329
Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces. (Left column)
Beatles
Electroniques. 1967. VTR/
16mm. film. Black and
white. 3 min.
(Right column) Videotape Study No. 3.
1968. VTR/16mm. film. Black and white.
5 min.
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330 Expanded Cinema
electro-madness combined with Yalkut's delicate kinetic
consciousess
result in a filmic experience balanced between video and cinema
in a Third World reality.
The two films illustrated here— Beatles Electroniques and
Videotape Study No. 3— are part of a forty-five-minute program of
films
by Yalkut and Paik, concerning various aspects of Paik's activities.
The
other films include P+A-I=(K), a three-part homage to the
Korean artist,
featuring his concert Happening performances with
Charlotte Moorman, Kosugi,
and Wolf Vostell; his robot K-456
walking on Canal Street in New York; and
his color television abstractions.
Other films in the Paikpieces program are
Cinema
Metaphysique, a nontelevision film in which the screen is divided in
various ways: the image appears on a thin band on the left side, or
along the bottom edge, or split-screen and quarter-screen; and two
other
films of Paik's video distortions, Electronic Yoga and Electronic
Moon,
shown at various intermedia performances with Paik and Miss
Moorman.
Beatles Electroniques was shot in black-and-white from live
broadcasts
of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised
distortions
on the receiver, and also from videotaped material produced
during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony
videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied
by
an electronic sound track by composer Ken Werner,
called Four Loops, derived
from four electronically altered loops of
Beatles sound material. The result
is an eerie portrait of the Beatles
not as pop stars but rather as entities
that exist solely in the world of
electronic media.
Videotape Study No. 3 was shot completely off the monitor of
the
videotape recorder from previously collected material. There are two
sections: the first shows an LBJ press conference in which the tape
was
halted in various positions to freeze the face in devastating
grimaces; the
second section shows Mayor John Lindsay of New
York during a press
conference, asking someone to "please sit
down," altered electronically and
manually by stopping the tape and
moving in slow motion, and by repeating
actions. The sound track is
a political speech composition by David Behrman.
In his editing of
these films, Yalkut has managed to create an enduring
image of the
metaphysical nature of video and its process of perception.
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Videographic Cinema 331
Ture Sjölander, Lars Weck:
In the fall of 1967, intermedia
artists Ture Sjölander and Lars Weck
collaborated with Bengt Modin, video
engineer of the Swedish
Broadcasting
Corporation in Stockholm, to produce an experimental
program called
Monument. It was broadcast in January, 1968, and
subsequently has been seen throughout Europe, Asia, and the
United
States. Apart from the technical aspect of the project, their
intention was
to develop a widened consciousness of the communicative
process inherent in
visual images. They selected as source
material the "monuments" of world
culture— images of famous
persons and paintings.
The program was created in the form of a black-and-white
videographic film, made with the telecine projector from other film
clippings and slides. The films and slides first were recorded on
videotape and then back onto film for further processing. Image
distortions occurred in the telecine process of recording film on
videotape. The basic principle involved was the modulation of the
deflection voltage in a flying-spot telecine, using sine and square
impulses from a wave-form generator. With the flying-spot method
used by
Swedish television, the photographic image is transformed
into electrical
signals when the film is projected toward a photocell
with a scanned raster
as the source of light. The deflection voltage
regulates the movement of the
point of light that scans the screen
fifty times per second.
In the production of
Monument, the frequency and amplitude of the
flying-spot deflection was
controlled by applying tones from the
wave-form generators. Thus image
distortions occurred during the
actual process of transforming original
image material into video
signals, since the scan that produces the signals
was electromagnetically
altered. In principle this
process is similar to methods
used by Nam June Paik and
others, except that the Swedish group
applied the techniques at an early
stage in the video process, before
signal or videotape information existed.
After the videotape was completed from various film clips, a
kinescope was made, which was edited by Sjölander and Weck into
its
final form. The result is an oddly beautiful collection of image
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by Ture Sjölander and
Lars Weck.
Videographic Cinema 333
Paul McCartney in Monument.
sequences unlike any other video art. We see the Beatles,
Charlie
Chaplin, Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the King of Sweden, and other
famous figures distorted with a kind of insane electronic disease.
Images undergo transformations at first subtle, like respiration, then
increasingly violent until little remains of the original icon. In this
process, the images pass through thousands of stages of
semicohesion,
making the viewer constantly aware of his orientation
to the picture. The
transformations occur slowly and with great
speed, erasing perspectives,
crossing psychological barriers. A
figure might stretch like Silly Putty or
become rippled in a liquid
universe. Harsh bas-relief effects accentuate
physical dimensions
with great subtlety, so that one eye or one ear might
appear slightly
unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a
constellation of
shimmering video phosphors.
More than an experiment in image-making technologies,
Monument became an experiment in communication. Monument
became an
image-generator: newspapers, magazines, posters,
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record albums, and even textile factories began using images
from
the videographic film. Sven Höglund, a well-known Swedish painter,
entered the project after the film was completed. He made oil
paintings
based on the Monument images because he found them
"parallel to my own
creative intentions; I had for a long time been
working on problems
concerning transformations of forms. My
painted versions of the images
became another phase of the
experiment in communication called Monument.
"Other phases were silk-screen prints, illustrated magazine
articles, posters, giant advertisements. In each phase Monument
experiments with pictures in their relation to spectators. The
common
denominator is the mass-media picture, especially the most
commonly seen
pictorial representation, the television picture. The
pictures in the film
are so well known to the public that they have
been invested with symbolic
meaning. People recognize them and
are able to retain this identification
throughout all the transformations
and variations of the electronic image."
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