{"id":4651,"title":"An Interview with Barbara Buckner","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-barbara-buckner","version":"aa4e3b5b40977d2a4b7ef2de3d97fb800ad184c2a9675f391503d16093df6452","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9242903+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"May 1985","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"12","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"10","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0863","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Barbara Buckner","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022An Interview with Barbara Buckner.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/interview-barbara-buckner.","publication":"Marita Sturken. An Interview with Barbara Buckner. Afterimage. vol. 12, no. 10. Visual Studies Workshop. May 1985.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4651.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":38725}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Video artist Barbara Buckner has been working with image processing devices for more than 10 years. She discovered video in 1972 after studying film and began working with processing tools. Over the years, she gained access to and explored the possibilities of increasingly complicated systems; including custom imaging tools such as the Paik/Abe, Jones, Hearn, Siegel, and Rutt/Etra synthesizers. Buckner has worked extensively under the auspices of several production centers, including the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, run by Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller, which is an important center for artists producing works with image-processing devices. Buckner\u0027s work has progressed over the years from shorter explorations of formal imaging concerns to complex works that incorporate her concepts of spirituality and metaphor with a sophisticated use of these imaging tools. Her work is almost all silent, producing a contemplative, meditative quality. She has also begun working with computers and interactivity. Her most recent work is Analogs, an interactive installation using a computer and two video channels, which was first exhibited in 1983 in the \u0022Video Installation \u002783\u0022 show at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, N.Y. Buckner\u0027s work has been shown widely throughout the U.S. and other countries. She has received numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded her funds in 1982 for research into image processing and interactive video disc technology. She has taught at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, SUNY/Binghamton, and SUNY/Buffalo. Her work is distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Museum of Modern Art. She currently resides in the San Francisco area. This article is an edited transcript of three interviews conducted in January. March, and October, 1984, and it includes Buckner\u0027s additions and revisions. An earlier, abbreviated version was published in Sightlines (Vol. 17, no. 3, Spring 1984). This article was funded in part by a grant from the media program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Marita Sturken: When did you begin working in video? Barbara Buckner: I became interested in video and computers while I was at New York University in 1972. I took film and television courses as well as an experimental video course with \u0027Bill Etra. We used to go to his studio and get hands-on-experience with the equipment. This was during the beginning of a lot of video activity; people were just realizing the potential of portable video equipment, especially in the political and social arena. MS: Have you always worked with image processing? BB: I made one film when I was in school that was shown at the Whitney Museum after I graduated. It foreshadowed concerns of transformation and metaphor in future video work. It was about alchemy and the union of opposites-ice and fire, white and black, liquid and solid, man and woman-which culminated in the birth of a new state or synthesis represented metaphorically by a silver head. Using in-camera matting, I created multi-image tableaux and used editing techniques to create incremental changes in color and position. When I saw keyed and colorized videotapes at the Kitchen in 1972, I realized that I could compound and synthesize video images electronically much more easily. The electronic medium allowed me to transform qualities and quantities in a real-time mode, where I didn\u0027t have to rely on the dynamics of editing or a lab to make expensive special effects. It was seeing those real-time image transformations that made me love video immediately. \u0027I had never seen color that was so pure or light that was so radiant; I had never been captured by a medium the way I was captured by the electronic image as I first saw it then. MS: How did you first approach working in video? BB: I began with a desire to create a kind of electronic poetics, where the video image expressed a metaphoric identity emerging from its organic structure, yet had a universal quality drawing on the traditions of poetry, painting, and music. There were always two central concerns-exploring the medium with the tools that were available and expressing inner states of beingness and becoming. MS: I have always felt that the level of abstraction in your work and your choice of imaging tools have a lot to do with your use of metaphor. In many of your tapes there is very little relationship between the original camera image and what results, but in others the hint of that camera image is a significant part of the content. Your titles suggest the metaphors that you are constructing; they clue the viewer into the conceptual level of the tapes beyond the formal level. BB: The more abstract the tapes are, the more the titles function that way. They serve to specify the abstraction. MS: How did you approach these issues of metaphor and formalism in your early work? How did your titles function then? BB: Well, back in 1973, I was using black-and-white equipment: a simple special effects generator with a genlock, a keyer, two black-and-white cameras, and two editing decks. The first piece I produced was called Geography; it used keyed feedback. It was divided into four short segments called \u0022Lilies,\u0022 \u0022Terrace,\u0022 \u0022View from a Hilltop with Fence,\u0022 and \u0022Fire under Snow.\u0022 You could identify them as landscapes because you could see perspective. So what the title Geography did was to give you a framework in which to look at those segments. If you saw little pointed spikes coming out of what looked like a snowbank and I labelled it \u0022Fire under Snow,\u0022 you would most likely see those pointed spikes as fire, not as oscillator patterns or sewing needles. So the language served to specify and make literal the abstracted image. In another work, Tongue Line/Blood Linear, I externally synced two cameras so that the images drifted vertically and horizontally. The cameras were looking at copies of five ancient alphabets whose letters were very hieroglyphic. They were keyed together, drifting horizontally and vertically. What emerged was a tape about ancestry on the level of language and image succession. At the time I was studying ancient Chinese characters, whose meanings change when different pictorial elements are combined. It was a very organic progression, and I thought this corresponded well to video imaging where, if you key two elements together, the resulting third image is visually different from either of the original two, though a sum of them as well. Later in 1973, I bought Bill Etra\u0027s synthesizer and began to use that in combination with the other tools to modulate feedback and manipulate the height and width parameters of images. One work from that period, Sapati (Sanskrit for \u0022he serves\u0022), used modulated feedback to create what looked like spiralling energy fields of jewels intercut with a molten-metal, square structure. Moebius was a synthesizer piece that produced around the same time in direct response to an out-of-body experience. I was lying on the bed with my eyes closed for what seemed like a split second. I had the image of passing through the earth turning inside out, in another time sense that was not detectable in this world. I wanted to try to reproduce that experience, so I drew original graphics, recorded them with two moving cameras, and genlocked layers of keyed material so structures appeared and disappeared at different gray levels. There was a feeling of passing through an animated world, as if travelling. Then at one point, I wanted to create a work that had no edits, in real time, that didn\u0027t use a camera as an image source-that was purist in a sense. I used only one oscillator and one keyer. I created two structures that were mirrors of each other. By changing the oscillator frequency, they appeared to struggle with each other, culminating in a moving wall of three-dimensional knots. What was interesting to me, amazing even, was that whatever inner state I was experiencing could manifest itself physically in the work, even though the tools changed. I had made an inner struggle apparent, where one of the mirror images became the ghost of the other, like a haunting, so I called it Spectre. MS: Do you think it was important for you to work without a camera at some point? BB: Yes. The camera was like a cinematic hangover. I wanted to produce the video image as a self-generating entity, appearing to have as little human intervention as possible. I think of it as being similar to the vision we have when our eyes are closed, seeing the patterns projected by the mind without the intrusion of the external environment. MS: So for you part of understanding video meant understanding that it doesn\u0027t need a camera? BB: Yes, that you could generate something from within the architecture of the machine without using that window on the world that people had used for so long. MS: It seems that many video artists, being basically self-taught, have gone through a process of reducing the medium to very specific functions and exercises at certain times in their development. BB: Yes, we used a system of self-imposed rules to give ourselves a certain kind of discipline, because in a sense we really had no teachers. We were on our own to establish some rules, and later realized that we had the freedom to break those rules. MS: When did you start to use color? BB: In 1976, I went to live in Rhinebeck, N.Y., where I shared a big farmhouse with Gary Hill, David Jones, and Stephen Kolpan as part of Ken Marsh\u0027s Woodstock Community Video. This was an experiment with artists living together, having dialogue, and sharing equipment. We had two editing decks, a color camera, and an Eric Siegel colonizer. The colonizer was single-channel, so without other mixing or keying devices, my focus shifted to concerns such as editing, fast-motion and slow-motion techniques. In Fell Fire, I recorded water and waterfalls in slow motion, played it back at normal speed, and colorized it, so that the water became a demonic, high-speed, molten fire. I was trying to portray the radically purifying aspect of fire. In Fire of Earth, I used slow motion. It had a shot of fire, a close-up of the flame, and then a hand came into the frame and struck a match, which slowly ignited a pile of wood. Because of the slow-motion technique and the Newvicon tube in the camera, the fire balloons into a globe of light at the end. Then, in 1976, I started my residency at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, N.Y., and this was my first opportunity to work with a large array of processing tools. This system was much more complex and offered a lot more possibilities. MS: So, each time, you graduated into new technical possibilities and did a series of pieces that explored that. What kinds of things could you do on the system in Owego? BB: Well, first of all you could set up four to eight cameras as image sources. There was a large switching matrix so you could send signals to various processors, such as multiple keyers and a four-channel and sevel-channel colonizer, and out again into other modules, additional keyers and mixers, with voltage-control devices to handle the processing that I had done manually. This was a period in which my fantasies for synthesis came true. In 1976, I created a series of works that were subsequently shown in the 1977 Whitney Biennial, and they took a definite turn in terms of being conscious spiritual metaphors. MS: So you were coming from perhaps a more formal though certainly not completely formal-approach to using the equipment for metaphoric kinds of images. BB: I think I settled into some techniques that began to serve me well for what I was trying to convey. I began consciously to use color harmonies and tightly edited rhythms to produce a kind of inner hearing and inner-directed vision, since the tapes were silent, ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":38725,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}