{"id":5541,"title":"Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video; Eric Siegel, Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, Bill and Louise Etra","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/notes-toward-history-image-processed-video-eric-siegel-stephen-beck-dan-sandin-steve-rutt-bill-and-l","version":"ed3f61b4e2962f3750d6cef3d79373992d47808baeb9342f9b9f2bc9f9562467","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4370896+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Lucinda Furlong"}],"authorKeys":["Furlong, Lucinda"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Summer 1983","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"11","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"1 and 2","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0347","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video: Eric Siegel, Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, Bill and Louise Etra.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/notes-toward-history-image-processed-video-eric-siegel-stephen-beck-dan-sandin-steve-rutt-bill-and-l.","publication":"Lucinda Furlong. Notes Toward a History of Image-Processed Video; Eric Siegel, Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, Bill and Louise Etra. Afterimage. vol. 11, no. 1 and 2. Visual Studies Workshop. Summer 1983.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5541.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0347","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":44943},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":71},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":885},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0347","generated":false,"characters":71}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Ed.\u0027s note: This is the first in a series of articles about \u0022image processing\u0022 as it developed as a genre of video art. It is a step toward a more comprehensive history that will consider the overlapping activities of artists and toolmakers, and the broader social context in which that activity has occurred. Future articles will cover Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ralph Hocking, Sherry Miller, and the Experimental Television Center, Nam June Paik, and others. Video wallpaper ... special effects ... computer art ... hightech video ... image synthesis ... image manipulation ... image processing.... These are some of the terms that have been used to describe a type of video produced by artists who have been experimenting since the late 1960s with an assortment of electronic imaging tools. None of these terms are particularly useful: either they are too general, or too specific, or else they fall prey to the kind of value judgements and myths associated with \u0022mindless,\u0022 \u0022impersonal\u0022 technology. Even the most common term, \u0022image processing,\u0022 is problematic. While in the commercial sector image processing usually refers to signal-processing methods such as timebase correction, in the video art world \u0022image processing\u0022 has become at once a genre and a catch-all for every technical process in the book. It encompasses the synthesis and manipulation of the video signal in a way that often alters the image quite drastically. It includes not only the alteration of camera-generated images through processes such as colorizing, keying, switching, fading, and sequencing, but combining those operations on synthesized-that is, cameraless-imagery as well. It has come to refer to everything from the most basic analog processing techniques to sophisticated digital computer graphics and effects. Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller once aptly summed up the difficulty that many artists have in describing what they do: \u0022I know what it is, but I don\u0027t know what to call it. I\u0027m tired of saying, \u0027It\u0027s like using electrons to paint with.\u0022 [1] And yet despite the term\u0027s breadth, \u0022image processing\u0022 conjures up a number of very specific-and often pejorative-stereotypes: densely layered \u0022psychedelic\u0022 images composed of soft, undulating forms in which highly saturated colors give a painterly effect, or geometric abstractions that undergo a series of visual permutations. For many of the people who use these tools, such characterizations are superficial and belie the range of concerns that fall within the image-processing umbrella. \u0022Whenever anyone sees a color change or an image manipulated, they call it\u0027image processing,\u0027\u0022 said Barbara Buckner, one of the many video artists who eschew the label. \u0022But there are many works that straddle different genres. People tend to group everything into this one label since it\u0027s convenient, but actually it says very little. It\u0027s like calling something silly; you\u0027re not really saying anything.\u0022[2] If the label is both conceptually and technically inadequate, it seems to have stuck for lack of a better one. But what has effectively become a separate aesthetic genre began as a microcosm of the activism of the 1960s-the alternative television movement. The lines that are now drawn between what have become categories within video-documentary, image processing, performance, and installation-were virtually non-existent then. As Steina Vasulka has recalled:\u0022You have to understand those early years, they were so unbelievably intense.... This was the \u002760s revolution.\u0027 We didn\u0027t have the division in the early times. We all knew we were interested in different things, like video synthesis and electronic video, which was definitely different from community access-type video, but we didn\u0027t see ourselves in opposite camps. We were all struggling together and we were all using the same tools.\u0022[3] Johanna Gill has observed that the desire to use communications tools to change, quite literally, the world took a number of forms-the most direct being to work with community and oppositional political groups.[4] The goals of the alternative media groups were articulated in the first issue of Radical Software, the publication founded in 1970 by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny that until 1974 was the mouthpiece of the movement. Power is no longer expressed in land, labor, and capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) remain in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed. Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternative systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing processes.... Our species will survive neither by totally rejecting nor unconditionally embracing technology-but by humanizing it; by allowing people access to the informational tools they need to shape and reassert control over their lives.[5] The rejection of television did not manifest itself in direct social action alone. In fact, low-cost portable video equipment was so new that using it for any purpose at all was considered radical. As part of a new kind of \u0022media ecology,\u0022 video environments (the precursor of the \u0022installation\u0022) were created. Some were interactive situations designed to expose and circumvent the one-way delivery of commercial television. Others-inspired by Marshall McLuhan and Norbert Wiener\u0027s work in cybernetics-reflected the utopian desire to use technology to meld \u0022man\u0022 and environment. The idealism in this excerpt from Juan Downey\u0027s article \u0022Technology and Beyond\u0022 is typical of what David Antin has called \u0022cyberscat,\u0022 the futuristic jargon spoken not only by Downey, but Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Paik, and many, many others. Cybernetic technology operating in synchrony with our nervous systems is the alternative life for a disoriented humanity.... The process of reweaving ourselves into natural energy patterns is Invisible Architecture, an attitude of total communication in which ultra-developed minds will be telepathically cellular to an electromagnetic wholes.[6] Alternative television also meant creating images that looked different from standard TV. Thus, \u0022image processing\u0022 as we now know it grew out of an intensive period of experimentation that for some, in a vague way, was seen visually to subvert the system that brought the Vietnam War home every night. There were other motives, of course: the swirling colors and distorted forms conjured up the experiences associated with hallucinogenic drugs, suggesting that \u0022new realities\u0022 could be electronically synthesized. And for some, the interest had more to do with the modernist notion of exploring the essential properties of the new medium. Although the various groups and individuals considered themselves part of one \u0022movement,\u0022 their goals proved to be quite contradictory in practice. In New York, the differences began to rigidify when the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) started funding video in 1970-71, and applicants felt compelled to formalize their interests. Because the Council could not then (and cannot now) award funds directly to individuals, there was a scramble to form non-profit organizations in order to benefit from the available funding. According to Gerd Stern, though, NYSCA opted for a pluralist approach in its earliest funding. There was a rapidly increasing number of alternative media groups and unaffiliated artists. Lines were drawn between those developing techniques of working with synthesis and abstract images and the advocates of video as a revolutionary communications tool.[7] If lines were drawn among groups, however, they still had one thing in common: all were operating outside the mainstream gallery structure. If one looks at exhibitions at galleries like Castelli and Sonnabend, for example, it becomes very clear that only those artists who already had a track record in another medium were showing video there. Names like Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Lynda Benglis, Nancy Holt, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman didn\u0027t appear on the pages of Radical Software, they did appear in Artforum. The way many of these artists used television came out of conceptualism. Aiming to circumvent the art market, some worked in various reproducible or non-buyable media such as video, artists\u0027 books, photography, and performance. Of course, it didn\u0027t work; conceptualism was handily coopted. The point is, though, that the only video activity ever really taken seriously in the art world was the work of established figures.[8] There are a number of reasons for this which I do not propose to address here. However, one thing is certain: while various people were experimenting with the manipulation of the video signal with the intent of \u0022exploring the medium\u0027s inherent properties,\u0022 the rules had changed. The whole idea of a modernist practice was being dismantled. The work was thus dismissed not so much because it was inherently \u0022bad,\u0022 but because the ideas informing it had become exhausted. No one in art circles wanted to hear about-let alone look at-video that seemed to be based on the conventions of modern painting. Robert Pincus-Witten argued that point in 1974 at \u0022Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television.\u0022 It appears that the generation of artists who created the first tools of \u0022tech-art\u0022 had to nourish themselves on the myth of futurity while refusing to acknowledge the bad art they produced. Their art was deficient precisely because it was linked to and perpetuated the outmoded cliches of Modernist Pictorialism-a vocabulary of Lissajous patterns-swirling oscillations endemic to electronic art-synthesized to the most familiar expressionist color plays and surrealist juxtapositions of deep vista or anatomical disembodiment and discontinuity.... The important work, then, of the first generation was the very creation of the tool, the video synthesizer.[9] With the exception of Nam June Paik\u0027s well-known collaboration with engineer Shuya Abe, the history of video as it is presently constituted has virtually ignored the \u0022important work\u0022 of that first generation. And it was-and still is-important, for the development of relatively accessible and inexpensive tools depended on the expertise of the people who could design and build them. It was rare to find both artist and engineer in one person. Hence, as Woody Vasulka has observed: \u0022There were symbiotic relationships. The\u002760s uncovered outcasts, individuals. It brought together technical people and artists who were disaffected.\u0022[10] What follows then, is a brief review, based primarily on interviews and published sources, of what some of those tools are as well as profiles of the people who built them. In some instances, foggy memories and lack of documentation have made it difficult ,to verify certain facts. Where I have been obliged to use my own best guess, I have footnoted the discrepancies. --- Three basic types of video-imaging tools were developed for artists\u0027 use in the late\u002760s and early\u002770s: raster manipulation devices, colorizers and mixers, and synthesizers.[11] Both raster manipulation devices and colorizers and mixers function by performing some operation on an incoming signal; synthesizers generate signals internally. Raster manipulation devices allow one to interfere with the video signal as it is displayed on a monitor during the scanning process. Scanning refers to the continuous, regular, and repeated movement of a beam of electrons across the video screen-or raster-horizontally from left to right and from top to bottom. The flow of electrons is controlled by a magnetic field which \u0022pulls\u0022 the image both horizontally and vertically to produce a normal image. One can distort the image by applying additional magnetic force, the crudest way being simply to hold a magnet in front of the monitor. A slightly more controlla","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":44943,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}