{"id":4666,"title":"Electronic Zen: The Alternative Video Generation Talking Heads in Videospace: A Video Meta-Panel with Shirley Clarke, Bill Etra, Nam June Paik, Walter Wright and Jud Yalkut","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/electronic-zen-alternative-video-generation-talking-heads-videospace-video-meta-panel-shirley-clarke","version":"2635f9538a2e2dab78f3f7a4342ab3da32d525c70559257b0a244fa0cd769051","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9248814+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Jud Yalkut"}],"authorKeys":["Yalkut, Jud"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1024","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Shirley Clarke","url":null},{"label":"Other interviewees","value":"Bill Etra, Nam June Paik, Walter Wright and Jud Yalkut","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Electronic Zen: The Alternative Video Generation Talking Heads in Videospace: A Video Meta-Panel with Shirley Clarke, Bill Etra, Nam June Paik, Walter Wright and Jud Yalkut.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/electronic-zen-alternative-video-generation-talking-heads-videospace-video-meta-panel-shirley-clarke.","publication":"Jud Yalkut. Electronic Zen: The Alternative Video Generation Talking Heads in Videospace: A Video Meta-Panel with Shirley Clarke, Bill Etra, Nam June Paik, Walter Wright and Jud Yalkut. 1984.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4666.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":52254},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":65},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":666},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC1024","generated":false,"characters":65}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Originally recorded on February 4, 1973 for broadcast on WBAI-FM. The following Meta-Panel, so-called because it represents an attempt at an overview of the alternate video scene as of the time of the discussion with a glance into the video future, was one of two hour-long radio discussion panel shows, hosted by Jud Yalkut, for the Pacifica radio station in New York City, WBAI-FM. The shows were part of a weekly series called ARTISTS AND CRITICS, each week dealing with a different art form. During the life of the series, one a month was on the media arts of film or video. The other video panel show, included in this book, was the discussion on the Kitchen, An Electronic Image And Sound Laboratory. This video panel, called now TALKING HEADS IN VIDEOSPACE, was originally recorded for broadcast on February 4, 1973, and its guests were four of the foremost practitioners of video art explorations: Shirley Clarke, proponent of ultimate participation video; Nam June Paik, video pioneer, avant-garde performance artist and co-creator of the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer; Bill Etra, video artist and co-designer of the Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer; and Walter Wright, working with computer generated images since 1965, former computer animator for Dolphin, Computer Image Corporation, and designer of his own video synthesizer system. JUD: Since we have four practitioners of what is called alternate video here, or video art, terms to be defined, we can start out by discussing what do we mean by alternate video at the present time? WALTER WRIGHT: I\u0027ll start by telling you what I do. I\u0027ve been exploring the use of something that might be called a video synthesizer, and it has the possibilities of transforming or building an abstract image, or changing a real image into something more abstract. The process means that I can take a real video image in, or generate one with oscillators, and then add to it electronic color. Nam June Paik has in fact built one of these machines, being the grand-daddy of this. NAM JUNE PAIK: Thank you for mentioning, sir. (Laughter) SHIRLEY CLARKE: Which he sells for a pittance. WALTER: And Bill and I are going to rebuild Nam June\u0027s. PAIK: Thank you very much. I think this should be in good solid hands, who know every institution, and how to do things. Distribution is much more important than production. A guy who can start from the distribution end on, that guy will be really good for it. I like what you, Bill, and you, Walter, are doing because we are a small, small stone in a vast sea, and the problem is how to face that vast sea, you know. And it will benefit everyone, and then the video synthesizer can be a solid media, alright. If they made video into a medium, then we can sell video synthesizers as a medium, because this is much more interesting this way. It can be sold eventually for a few hundred dollars. So it will be much cheaper than a portapak, because it has no mechanical moving parts. So, theoretically, the video synthesizer, from all professional technical points of view, should be, if we make as many as portapaks, which is not too many, we should be able to go 1/3rd price of portapak. SHIRLEY: I have to interrupt you now to ask, does this make an image? What is it, live process? BILL: It will do either. SHIRLEY: But, I mean as against the portapak which records, as sort of a pseudo mini-movie camera? BILL: Carried to its ultimate extreme (Laughter) which is- oh, I don\u0027t know what it would cost to build one now. We\u0027re in the process now of getting together and building one which would go to the ultimate extreme. Television is recorded in a matrix of 526 by 600 and something lines, vertically and horizontally, and we would be able to put a different color and intensity dot into any one of these points and move it around at will, so it wouldn\u0027t necessarily have to have a camera to generate an image. We would be able to actually paint it. SHIRLEY: Like painting. BILL: That\u0027s one of the possibilities. Now you can also take a live image and process it. You could take a person\u0027s face and roll it up into a little ball. SHIRLEY: But does it replace a camera and a recording device? PAIK: I think we can always use camera. BILL: You would need a recording device to record it. SHIRLEY: My first suggestion would be, since you\u0027re going to work in that area, that you give us, into our hands, an object that would be like a little ball that would actually be a lens similar in a way to a microphone in an audio system, that you can squeeze closed. JUD: An image collector. SHIRLEY: Right. An image collector, and you would squeeze it closed to zoom in, and open your hand to zoom out, and through a wire or whatever, send a signal-to a recording apparatus so we could free ourselves finally from the nonsense of looking at video as if it were film, and thus messing up our heads further, (Laughter) since we already see a great many electronic movies, and we don\u0027t see a great many electronic videospaces. PAIK: Yeah, yeah. I agree completely. I completely agree. SHIRLEY: And you really have to change some of our physical devices. There\u0027s no reason any longer to have a camera, right? That was something necessary for movie-making; you had to look through the lens in order to see what you were going to shoot. In film, this was fine, but in video, where the finished product is seen in videospace, i.e. a TV monitor or a video projector. PAIK: That\u0027s it. There is no finished product, because, like your room at the Hotel Chelsea, Shirley, I think that is the most ideal, supreme creation of video so far, because there you feel the space, and there is no product and it\u0027s more interesting. SHIRLEY: To me, there is no product. PAIK: Because that\u0027s the process of a living room. You have integrated videospace with living space. SHIRLEY: I think I\u0027m ready now for when we have the two-way cable access, or even first cable, and then two-way access. No, my image is: I\u0027m up in my Tepee, you know, the roof, and all of you are with me, and various other artists in New York, in China, in Paris, and Tennessee, altogether into a live mix. That, to me, is the essence of video. PAIK: I think that is really a very good use of video, in constant video living. SHIRLEY: Every event that I have seen that fits into the live action process use of video does the thing that no art in front of it ever did before, that makes you understand video, and not fall into the traps of video is like film. It is, but video is also like theater; it\u0027s also like dance; it\u0027s also like music. PAIK: Video is video. BILL: Conceptually, it\u0027s beautiful, Shirley, but structurally nearly impossible. My phone doesn\u0027t work half the time. SHIRLEY: I don\u0027t think that\u0027s important. BILL: No, it\u0027s not important to the concept. It\u0027s important to the reality. SHIRLEY: Our minds go faster than the technological manufacturing keeps up. JUD: That\u0027s been one of the problems with film for ages, that you can\u0027t splice as fast as you can think. SHIRLEY: Yes. I got into film in the mid-50s, and we all went in and spent the next 15 years trying to develop a hand-held sound camera. Now, when I left film a few years ago, we had the great accomplishment of an Auricon which was there before any of us came and separated the sound system so you could record sound separately, meaning that the manufacturing people have never kept up with the artist, and never kept up with the fantasy and mind of man. But, I think it\u0027s going to get progressively less so. Time feeds everything. And our job is just what we\u0027re doing right now, which is to talk to people, get them to understand some of the possibilities so they want them. Then they\u0027ll make sure we get them. Because manufacturers in a free enterprise system produce to the demand. JUD: Eric Siegel\u0027s been pushing very much for the manufacturers to come up with new developments which would meet the needs of the practitioners. SHIRLEY: We never succeeded. BILL: Everyone in this room has done it. I\u0027ve seen Shirley\u0027s remodeling of the Sony camera. WALTER: Manufacture our own. SHIRLEY: That was one of the better moments. BILL: The glove camera. (Laughter) Nam June can\u0027t buy a synthesizer. SHIRLEY: So he made one. PAIK: And went into making synthesizers. Walter is redesigning synthesizers. Walter\u0027s worked with computers and he\u0027s redesigning them. I, as an artist, found an electronics engineer who\u0027s building a synthesizer because I couldn\u0027t get a synthesizer, or at least I couldn\u0027t get anything that approached what I wanted. It would have cost me a half million dollars. JUD: It\u0027s an exact analogy to the old days of light shows. You could never go out and but a machine to produce the effect you wanted to produce. You would end up having to get the components and building from scratch for every single image you wanted to produce. PAIK: Video is very fast, but it\u0027s supposed to be a cool media. SHIRLEY: What I find fabulous is that I\u0027m basically a very impatient person. I\u0027m amazed that I have managed to survive two years of constant mechanical hang-ups. I have yet myself to participate in or attend any event where the equipment worked. I remember spending 72 hours to get that ferris wheel set up to enjoy it for ten minutes, and the show was over. It\u0027s endless, endless. PAIK: That\u0027s what I gave as an answer when somebody, the LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY, interviewed me about what I thought of Art and Technology\u0027s Nine Evenings. I said: It\u0027s marvelous, because it showed how technology is fragile. (Laughter) And this is a great accomplishment so that art does blind words for technology. So I think that\u0027s a great achievement and I\u0027m airing some part of that for my Cage show, because it\u0027s a tribute. And number two is that when the last issue of the 1960s came out of Newsweek, which I read in Tokyo while building that synthesizer, and was fighting with those machines, I read what the editor in-chief of NEWSWEEK said the 1960s did, that two things happened: you had ended on the moon, in which all technology worked perfectly; and number two, you had a great blackout where all technology failed, and he had much more fun in the blackout when everything failed than on the moon landing where everything worked. I think that\u0027s a brilliant observation. SHIRLEY: It is. I think one of the talents that all of us have developed, I know I certainly have, as performers, is that we fill in when the machine fails. BILL: A basic survival tactic. SHIRLEY: Communicating person to person with an audience, which is in a way a marvelous thing, because we can assure ourselves, whereas for awhile electronic music had the problem of bringing the human being back into it, the performance. We\u0027ve got the human being in there always. PAIK: When you had that very difficult session at NET, I think they should have filmed you, then they could have made a wonderful documentary on Shirley Clarke. The greatest show. SHIRLEY: The artist versus the engineer, or something against women. Are there any lady engineers around here. (NOTE: The radio station.) JUD: There are several who work the night shifts quite a bit. SHIRLEY: Oh, good. Because there were none at NET. BILL: It never works, the equipment doesn\u0027t work. SHIRLEY: That\u0027s true, but sometimes it does. BILL: I went to see a friend of mine, Steve Rutt, who\u0027s the inventor who\u0027s working on the machine we\u0027re building, and for a week I got him interested in video. He was into other fields of electronics, and Steve walked around for a week, looking at his scopes around the plant, shaking his head: \u0022It doesn\u0027t work.\u0022 None of it works, and he would play it back on the 1/2\u0022 machine and the playback would change from time to time, and \u0022it doesn\u0027t work.\u0022 and he would look at the broadcast signal, and say: \u0022That\u0027s not what it\u0027s supposed to look like; that\u0027s lousy.\u0022 And the fact is that television is one of these non-perfected media, which get very soft. JUD: Low definition. WALTER: Yes, low definition. SHIRLEY: I don\u0027t mind that, beca","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":52254,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}