{"id":4624,"title":"Interview with Carol Goss and Walter Wright","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-carol-goss-and-walter-wright","version":"af29173eed2ff4bd571c314b058ebe6bd6e4f3cb2847cc278d37f7e3693d01d9","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.8829413+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Benton C Bainbridge"}],"authorKeys":["Bainbridge, Benton"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Benton Bainbridge/Pulsating OK","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1021","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Carol Goss","url":null},{"label":"Other interviewees","value":"Walter Wright","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Interview with Carol Goss and Walter Wright.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-carol-goss-and-walter-wright.","publication":"Benton C Bainbridge. Interview with Carol Goss and Walter Wright. Benton Bainbridge/Pulsating OK. detai 1998.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4624.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":22252},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":92},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":559},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC1021","generated":false,"characters":92}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Carol Goss and Walter Wright interviewed by Benton Bainbridge at the Not Still Art Festival Cooperstown, NY, April 25, 1998 Carol Goss and Walter Wright are pioneer performers of the video medium. Their backgrounds in improvisational music, theater, abstract painting and film cross-pollinated with upstate New York\u0027s analog synthesizer and custom electronics tradition when the Experimental Television Center opened in the early \u002770s. Along with other artists and engineers of that era, they conceived that video was meant to be played, and started jamming in studios, galleries, concert halls and bars, trucking around overweight gear and yards of co-ax cable with musicians, dancers and other performers. When I and my cohorts leaped into the live video thing as the \u002790s kicked off, we had the same conviction that cinema was a performable medium, but little knowledge of our predecessors. In the Postmodern \u002780s, the abstract qualities of the medium, a fundamental issue to wrestle with when trying to \u0027play\u0027 video in concert with others, was not really up for discussion. (The critical \u0027bottom line\u0027 was that all video art is about TV, because that\u0027s how most viewers encounter a television monitor. What a load of crap- I grew up with the CRT as computer display, video game output, closed circuit monitor, home theater, and info terminal, and my mom only let me watch TV for an hour a day. . . This critical cop-out is like evaluating all painting against billboards and magazine ads \u0027cos that\u0027s how we absorb most still images.) Joan Jonas, the Vasulkas, Nam June Paik\u0027s televised Fluxus freakouts and Ernie Kovacs\u0027 sight gags were the only video performers the post-mod crits would acknowledge (and Kovacs was really more a performer ON video). Then my prof Reynold Weidenaar turned us on to the Experimental Television Center. Get a residency, he insisted. The first visit proved our suspicions- video was meant to be played, like music. ETC\u0027s weird gear and the layout of the loft enabled us to approach video as a realtime collaborative medium. Kick out the jams! The copious legacy of gear in the studio and tapes in the library made it apparent that this had been something big. So, um, why was this history largely ignored after \u0022Expanded Cinema\u0022? Why was Kit Fitzgerald the only person making the rounds then? Well, now I know things were still happening, just not in New York City. Yup, another great example of the \u0027Art Capital of the World\u0027 being totally clueless. Meeting Carol Goss and Walter Wright was a blast. They unloaded a big chunk of the \u0027secret history\u0027 of live video. Their initial excitement about the handmade toys, giddy experiments with the medium, and later misadventures on stage presaged many of our experiences. In this strange phase when video has become so hip it\u0027s almost commonplace, when the tools are so cheap that everyone\u0027s a VJ or \u0027visualist\u0027, the time has come to hear their story. - Benton Note: comments added after the interview are in [brackets], courtesy of Benton unless otherwise noted. BB- Tell me about your collaboration, \u0022Live Blue Light\u0022. CG- Live Blue Light is really a subterfuge. WW- Go ahead, tell him what it means. CG- Alright, you have to promise to not reveal this, because by saying these words, you\u0027re being indoctrinated into the Evil Blue Light Society. WW- Tell him where it came from. It came from Stan Brakhage. CG- No, it came from George Quasha. WW- Oh, it came from Stan Brakhage! CG- How come it came from George Quasha two years ago and now it\u0027s from Stan Brakhage? WW- Stan Brakhage always referred to video as the \u0027evil blue light\u0027. CG- It\u0027s on the website. . . WW- I know, you got it wrong on the website CG- No, man, you and Peer [Bode] both said it was Quasha. . . WW- Not me! CG- . . .he\u0027s a film person, and he put down video as \u0027the evil blue light\u0027. WW- Well then, Peer must know. CG- Peer\u0027s not here. WW- Right, he can\u0027t defend himself, so it\u0027s his fault. --- WW- What about our first video performance, \u0027Axis in Soho\u0027? CG- We met before that, though. We met at the TV Center. That was sort of a performance. There was no audience, but that\u0027s a performance space, because making art is an act of performance. WW- Well, we did a performance. CG- There was some history that preceded that. So we met at the Experimental TV Center in Binghamton, Walter was Artist in Residence, second ever, 1972, after Nam June Paik. I started doing video before that in New York. He moved up there as Artist-in-Residence, and I came up as an artist having a residency. There were a lot of interesting tools there, analog, that lent themselves to realtime processing of images. At the same time I had a record company with Paul Bley, and we did a lot of recording sessions. I think it was 77,78, we had this gig set up for Sun Ra and some of his Arkestra at Axis in Soho. There were double sets, Paul Bley and Glen Moore did alternate sets. I called Walter up and said, hey, why don\u0027t we do some video at this thing, this is really loose, we can do what we want. . . and what did you do? WW- I brought the Paik/Abe [video synthesizer]. CG- No, you brought the David Jones Colorizer (laughs). WW- I brought the David Jones Colorizer. [I did take the Paik/Abe lots of other places: Visual Studies Workshop, SUNY Buffalo, Grand Valley State Colleges ...] CG- You ran it though, you ran the switcher. It was a 4 input colorizer. We had two cameras, I did a camera, and a guy named Zoa, who showed up and disappeared, he had some long Dutch name. The lights were very bad, so we had hand-held lights, and hand-held cameras. That was the first time we did it. It\u0027s a good tape, you should check it out. BB- This is the one on the IAI label? WW- That\u0027s right! In distribution. . . BB- This was your first collaboration? CG- Well, we both had performed individually in other contexts in that period. BB- Where did your collaboration go from there? WW- It went nowhere for a long time. CG- Oh yeah, til last year, 1997. 20 years later. We picked up where we left off. WW- When I moved to Boston, Carol came to Boston. Since I was now in the area, we visited, and she had her Amigas and all that set up, and we said why don\u0027t we do something with it? There\u0027s no abstract video art out, there\u0027s nothing going on, if we don\u0027t, nobody will! CG- It takes 20 years to gestate these ideas. WW- We got together again at the Experimental Television Center. I\u0027d been going back there yearly between the holidays when it\u0027s closed. Being one of the early ones I could sneak in between Christmas and New Year\u0027s. So Carol and Vanessa [Carol\u0027s daughter] came down, and we did a studio jam for three days. Kept Vanessa up to three or four in the morning, she was a real work horse. We just kept going, making tape. . . CG- By the way, live performance is a really big let-down. You do this stuff for an hour and a half, and that\u0027s it! WW- And you\u0027re just getting warmed up. This is our particular mode, since none of this is pre-set, we\u0027re doing this all as an improvisation. When it\u0027s all hooked up and it\u0027s all running, that\u0027s great, but it might take 3 or 4 hours or it might take the next day. Vanessa Goss-Bley - I want to go back to the Experimental Television Center. It was not what I thought it was going to be like. I thought there\u0027d be lots of lights, but it looked like an apartment to me. I could live there! I brought my own CDs, played music and danced. I was fooling around on the keyboards, you can make all the colors and pick different clips out from the video. He [Walter] had the Shredder there. I was fooling around and making all the colors change, and that was fun, and I asked my mom if I could do it again and she said no CG- [just kidding]. CG- The Live Board, colorizers, switchers- it\u0027s all sitting in our studio, you can use it anytime you want. You just have to spend 18 hours getting going. VG-B- I like staying up until three in the morning, it\u0027s not every night I get to do that. WW- Now we know why she likes doing this. So, that was exciting. We thought maybe we could do this as part of a Not Still Art [Festival] thing and get it down to an hour or so. CG- In the beginning, in the 70s, the thrill, just the pure absolute joy of the screen, the pixels, the palette. . . Walter had an architecture background, I have a theater and film, but mainly painting, background. We were very stimulated by the pixel, by the electrons, by the electricity. When we went into performance, to improvise with musicians who were improvising, so you had absolutely no preset references- everything had to be intuited. The sense of form of a piece was something that everybody was breathing together. There were no Aristotlean crescendos, diminuendos, finales- we didn\u0027t have that, [though] you have a musical background and I do too. That kind of performance is what we are still doing. A live performance I did in California with Skip Sweeney a year after that we tried something different. We wore headphones, we had three cameras and we had Bill Hearns\u0027 Synthesizer, The Video Lab. We had more cable than the audio people from the record studio. They were really miffed. The video cables were coming in truckloads, they couldn\u0027t stand that. WW- Cable envy. CG- We tried to cue things. I did the switcher with headphones and microphone talking to the camera people. We did that with the first piece and that was terrible. You\u0027d say, \u0022The sax is doing a solo, try to zoom in. . .\u0022 By the time they figured it out, the solo was over. Everything was out of sync. After that first piece, we took off all that gear. So we tried it more than one way. The only thing I haven\u0027t done is to script, to score. I don\u0027t know that I\u0027d want to hit a cue, I like the process evolving in realtime. WW- I\u0027ve done some [live video] based on a script. We did some in Michigan were we used a prerecorded background video rear screen projected behind us. We were in front of it, working over top of it. Because you knew the background video, we could have a sheet for transitions, so if the background video was such that if it made slow transitions, you could keep along with it, we could keep pace. You would have base images to work with. In Virginia we did ones with written note scores. One of the guys doing music was a painter, so he painted the scores. Kind of like Cage. He painted them out in colors and symbols, and we were to interpret what he meant by it. In a way it was an improvisation, but he would tell us where we were in the score. The ones in Michigan were done at the Michi-ana Improvisational Music Festival, a small event at the University of Indiana at Southbend. There\u0027s a composer, now head of the department, his name\u0027s David Barton, and he hosts this conference. A lot of the people who come are not musicians. Because musicians tend not to improvise. . . [Carol gives him a look] WW- His musicians tend not to improvise. Not you! Think about all musicians. Think about the schools. Think about all the classical musicians. They do not improvise! Think of academia. CG- That\u0027s a downer! WW- So anyways, this conference, a lot of the people were not musicians, they were video people. The festival has been going on for the last 10 years, so when I was in Indiana, I would attend it regularly. It\u0027s a music, video and dance festival. It\u0027s usually around SIGGRAPH time, in July. CG- Why don\u0027t we perform there next? WW- We could certainly do that, he has all the equipment, and you don\u0027t have to stop at 11 o\u0027clock at night, you can go until four in the morning. CG- Walter, why didn\u0027t you think of this? WW- Oh, because it\u0027s a long trek out there. CG- Oh, I\u0027ve gotta go to Wisconsin! WW- And Chicago, right? Well, we\u0027ll do it! CG- You booked our next gig. Thank you, Benton! WW- I was in Indianapolis 88 through, whatever, I stayed out there about 6 years. Those were people I knew when I taught in Michigan. They\u0027re a group that has been together almost 20 years. 12, 15 years. CG- Walter thinks we should have this guy Dr","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":22252,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}