{"id":4640,"title":"An Interview with Peer Bode","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-peer-bode-0","version":"dca9cd83213bbdf0be08990bed986661bbd093bca7f7352b131b319e48fbbeda","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9238654+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Cheryl Jackson"}],"authorKeys":["Jackson, Cheryl"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"The Squealer","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Squeaky Wheel","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"1983","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Buffalo, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"Winter","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0493","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Peer Bode","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022An Interview with Peer Bode.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-peer-bode-0.","publication":"Cheryl Jackson. An Interview with Peer Bode. The Squealer. vol. Winter. Squeaky Wheel. 1983.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4640.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0493","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":18626},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":576}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"C.J.\u003E In thinking about the future and new technologies, about how they\u0027re affecting art making and all, it made me start thinking about the past. I wanted to talk to you about older electronic technologies, and their relationship to video art and your work in particular. When and how did you first start producing video? P.B.\u003E Somewhere around 1971, with the early black and white portapak. I was in school at SUNY Binghamton and I borrowed one from the TV Center, which was in Binghamton at that time. I was an undergraduate studying filmmaking, and I was making films, working with Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs. That was when the cinema department was just starting out. It was also a time where a lot of visiting artists were coming in-Peter Kubelka, Paul Sharits came by a number of times, Hollis Frampton, Tony came, some of the Warhol group . . . C.J.\u003E Do you remember any of the discussions that went on-about the differing aesthetic between film and video, and why people were excited about video versus film, for example? P.B.\u003E Actually, not so much, except the filmmakers biases, which were clearly ones I was aware of. It had to do with the fact that filmmaking was a serious medium and had this history and significant work made within it. Video was something that hadn\u0027t proven itself and was also this ugly low-res image. I remember this being said, but actually I never took a course in video when I was at the school. I probably had some of those biases myself. I also remember Stan Brakhage being a very clear spokesperson for that position, that video was this evil blue light and it was this hideous medium that no one should ever work in. He had these theories that he referred to that had to do with the flicker rates of video versus film and how it drove you insane, and that there was even scientific proof of what was wrong with it. I don\u0027t know exactly why it happened, but I graduated and never made any film after that. I made video. That also had to do with the Experimental TV Center being in Binghamton, being aware of the place, doing a little bit of work with Nicholas Ray, a Hollywood film director who taught at Binghamton for two years. We would go down to the TV Center to work on projects. Nick had an understanding of the TV Center and its potentials that I didn\u0027t quite understand or appreciate until years later. This had to do with electronic cinema potential and being able to make films with multiscreens, multi-image, and designing something based on painterly notions of how one would fill a frame and be able to play several narratives at the same time. And what that might mean-the different registers where a narrative might play out, what it is people are saying, what is it people are thinking, and other issues playing themselves out all at the same time. We were thinking about these kinds of ideas and at the same time-at the Center-trying to figure out how to work the keyer. So when I graduated, that was a media center, a community media center, and very importantly, was low-cost access. It was a way to continue to make work and that\u0027s how I started doing video. C.J.\u003E So you decided to stay in Binghamton after college . . . P.B.\u003E Yes. In 1974 I was still living in Binghamton and was involved with the American Dance Asylum. Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Lois Welk were a part of that. . .Bill and Lois had gone through the Brockport Dance program, Arnie had been in San Francisco . . . They decided they wanted to be three hours from NYC and so they drew a circle on a map to see where they should live. In Binghamton they were able to rent a three-story space for $100 per month and they produced work there for several years. Every single month there was a new concert; people were coming from NYC to choreograph and dance. I worked together with them on some of those projects with some video-concerts with a number of monitors and such. That was kind of a way into the TV center, working with them and using the video equipment and, again, really getting support in terms of equipment access from the Center. C.J.\u003E Describe some of those early times at the Center, which was 20 years ago now. P.B.\u003E Ralph Hocking, one of the founders of the Center, came from a sculpture and visual arts background, and one of his interests was wanting to extend what video might be, in terms of a set of tools. He had some contact with Nam June Paik and was interested in some of his ideas . . . like the Paik-Abe Colorizer and the notion of artists\u0027 tools. Ralph helped support some of the development of the PaikAbe Synthesizers. Abe came in and soldered and worked on those devices and Nam June would vacuum. Abe was a designer who worked at SONY and he was the one with the technical know-how. They pulled together something that had to do with kludging old equipment together, like a mixer put together with a color encoder from a camera. Just like what you\u0027d now call a computer hacker, they were the analog electronic hackers. They didn\u0027t invent anything from scratch, but took these chunks from what already existed and ended up with the colorizer-the Paik-Abe Synthesizer-this thing that was multiple channel with switches, etc., and was about live performance kind of things. So Ralph was involved with that, and he was interested in modifying and adding things to the camera, adding external controls to the camera, adding other controls to other boxes like SEGs and other stuff like that. Then David Jones arrived and he got involved designing keyers and various other equipment and this body of tools began to get developed. Walter Wright was there in 1974 and he was someone who had a degree in architecture. He\u0027d been working at Dolphin Studios in NYC, which was a special effects house of its time, doing computer graphics special effects with a system called the \uFF93Scan-A-Mate,\uFF94 which was a fancy raster scan system with extra coils added to the tube and extra finely tuned oscillators. It was the machine that was used to do all the CBS logos and stuff like that in the 60s. Walter knew programming and had very much an architect\u0027s sensibility about building structures and language, basic language issues that had to do with what digital was. He was involved in a project that had to do with coming up with a programming language for hardware that didn\u0027t even exist yet. Dr. Don MacArthur, who was a professor of physics at SUC Cortland was designing some digital hardware. It was called the \uFF93Spatial and Intensity Digitizer,\uFF94 and it was basically an analog-to-digital converter that would digitize the video image. Binghamton is also an industrial electronics center-Singer-Link is there, IBM is there. There was a certain amount of surplus stuff that you could get so cheap. I remember Ralph buying 100 racks that you could slide boards--circuit boards-into... That was the environment at the Center that I walked into. Plus, artists were coming up to use the equipment-the colorizer and the keyers-and this residency structure was starting to happen. But also there would be days at a time when no one would come. A number of us sort of got interested in building things, and putting together some equipment and in a way that came out of the interactions that were happening anyway. The center at that point was a crossover place between lots of different kinds of people. There wasn\u0027t yet a video art field and most of the people who came were not trained in television. They were painters, photographers, and filmmakers. Dancers came. They were interested to see what you could do with these television tools. You also had these people who were into electronics, engineering, architecture. Science and art, which is also sometimes an oil-water situation. It\u0027s interesting to get those types of different people together, communicating, exchanging ideas. And part of what was exciting was that you were always confronting someone who had this body of knowledge that you knew nothing about. Being the early and mid-70s, there was a pluralistic attitude, there was multidisciplinary activity going on. I remember one thing about that time-that aspect of structuralism that wasn\u0027t about a master narrative that you understood the whole world from. But the aspect that was really exciting was a \uFF93systems thinking,\uFF94 a way of looking at a lot of things that are very different and then being able to see them in relationship to each other. It lends itself very nicely to a multidisciplinary approach-what happens when you cross one set of ideas with another set of ideas. Then you add the particular historical moment and what the ideas are in the field at a certain time. There was a lot of talk about crossover and what can come out of them. That was definitely playing itself out at the Center. C.J.\u003E Programmers, architects, designers, artists all working together-that seems really unusual, even unique, by today\u0027s measure. Were the artists treated as equals? P.B.\u003E The artists were privileged, they were the reason, they were the ones coming up to use the facility. It was made available to the community and the community was becoming more and more artists who were coming from other places to come work there in residencies. Absolutely equals. What ended up happening were lots and lots of discussions and conversations between the artists and designer-engineers. The artists would say \uFF93can it do this or I saw that, how about...?\uFF94 There was a genuine interest on the part of the people who were the designers to put tools in there that were very, very flexible and let you do a lot of different things. If you look at what the studio is-one of my discoveries in terms of being able to articulate it after a number of years of working there-is that it\u0027s NOT a studio filled with special unique, odd, idiosyncratic, strange things. A lot of that equipment was a way of simplifying what video is and getting at it at some basic level. In a lot of cases it was starting with a given, like an SEG. The SEG is a specialized tool that exists for particular reasons . . . There are all sorts of ideas, assumptions, conceptual ideas about what video is that are built into that machine, and part of what David did, and Ralph did, and Waiter, Nam June, and Shuya Abe did was ask the question \uFF93How do you generalize this thing further? This is already a specific patch, how do you generalize this so we can do more things?\uFF94 Again, this was in the time frame of structuralist generalized thinking, that set sort of conceptual background of the time. There were also other models of their machines that pushed that notion, like audio synthesizers. Those guys were all aware that audio synthesizers had already done all of this stuff . . . The Moog Synth was out there and it was a totally modular system . . . And so rather than something being for a particular purpose, all the pieces and parts were laid out very generally and you would patch or reconfigure to get many different machines. It was a way to simplify the system, generalizing it so that you got to some basic aspect of what it could do. Which was not about some Modernist essentialism or anything like that, I don\u0027t think. It was really about what video is. I still work at the Center and I\u0027m always amazed at what level I begin to understand what video is again. Even the new camcorders and the new decks, they do amazing things, and they\u0027re important tools. But in another sense they\u0027re about a set of marketing issues that aren\u0027t really about the materials. And from an electronic design point of view, they could be really generalized out more. Professional machines have always been a little simpler. For example, they\u0027re just manual controls rather than just automatic, which keep everybody in some sort of idiot mode. That was part of the design concept at the Center, of what was being put together...to create something that was not necessarily fast, and that was a decision that was made, that you didn\u0027t have to do it quickly, but that you would have flexibil","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":18626,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}