{"id":5611,"title":"Memories - 25 Years of the Experimental Television Center","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/memories-25-years-experimental-television-center","version":"32b885da48f789ecf6372ecd6be7ed416723935587bcc2cf8ffe9d7e8fa80577","modified":"2026-09-16T05:12:01.3863382+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Ann-Sargent Wooster"}],"authorKeys":["Wooster, Ann-Sargent"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Art in General, NY and Mobius, Boston","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"Organizer","value":"Art in General","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0973","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Memories - 25 Years of the Experimental Television Center.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/memories-25-years-experimental-television-center.","publication":"Ann-Sargent Wooster. Memories - 25 Years of the Experimental Television Center. Art in General, NY and Mobius, Boston. 1997.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5611.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0973","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"View the Catalog as a PDF","url":"https://cdn.experimentaltvcenter.org/vhp/sites/default/files/history/pdf/25yearsoftheexperimental_bib973.pdf","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"25YearsofETC.pdf","url":"https://cdn.experimentaltvcenter.org/vhp/sites/default/files/history/pdf/25YearsofETC.pdf","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"},{"label":"Catalog Essay Ann-Sargent Wooster","url":"#Catalog_Essay_Ann-Sargent_Wooster","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null},{"label":"Memories","url":"#Memories","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":26313},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":76},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":718},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0973","generated":false,"characters":38}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"25th Anniversary of the Experimental Television Center Exhibition at Art in General, November 8 \uFF96 January 25, 1997 Catalog Essay Ann-Sargent Wooster Memories View the Catalog as a PDF Catalog Essay Ann-Sargent Wooster Before MTV, before Industrial Light and Magic, there was a radical group of people who believed that television was an art medium, and felt free to play with the television signal to make funky, sophisticated, chaotic, poetic, raw, cutting edge, disruptive, politically savvy, artistically elegant tapes that were the antithesis of the broadcast television of then and most of now. In a world where time seems to progress ever faster, and inventions proliferate exponen\u00ADtially it is easy to lose track of the importance of the recent past. Tucked away in upstate New York, the Center is outside the mainstream (similar to the problem Piero della Francesca faced working in Urbino). It is easy to forget its ongoing importance, but many of the 1200 artists who have passed through there, including Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Doris Chase, Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota, Shalom Gorewitz, Sara Hornbachcr, Barbara Hammer, Peter Rose, Kathy High, Ernie Gusella, Richard Kostelanetz, Peter d\u0027Agostino, myself and many others, have all been nourished in its crucible. This is the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Experimental Television Center, one of the earliest organizations dedicated to furthering what would be called video art. Founded in 1971, the Experimental Television Center was an outgrowth of the Students Experiments in Television program begun in 1969 by Ralph Hocking at SUNY Binghamton. Using the newly developed small format portable video equipment, this group, and its later transformation into the Experimental Television Center, was based in the radical premise that television should be accessible both as a political tool and as an art medium: As the demand for access increased and with the encouragement of the video artist Nam June Paik, the Center formally organized as a not-for-profit center and moved to downtown Binghamton. The Center was one of many such groups that sprung up in the early years of video both in New York State and across the country. It was at the cutting edge of developing new tools for artists using the video medium. As part of an early research program they constructed a Paik/Abe Video synthesizer, under the direction of Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe for the TV Lab at WNET. They added other early image processing machines - colorizers, keyers, and synthesizers designed by David Jones. These machines allowed television images to be colored like Fauve paintings, stacked into interpenetrating electronic sandwiches, twitching, pulsing and/or fraying or bleeding into abstractions of the original image, or celebrations of the beauty of the pure television signal. Always a step ahead, in 1975 the Center began to develop artist-oriented software for the computer which interfaced with commercially based computers, principally the Amiga Computer. These allowed artists access to an expanded visual language. Many of the elements of image processing pioneered at the center have become the commonplace of commercial television special effects. Toaster special effects and the layered patterns of Avid editing owe their genesis and indeed the very textures and colors of their rhythms of a very particular visual language to the Center\u0027s ongoing commitment to providing a place where free-play and experimentation are the norm. In 1979 the Center moved to Owego, a town in a time warp, more firmly rooted in the 19th century than the 20th. One premise of the Experimental Television Center has been central and constant, the idea of providing a retreat-like situation where an artist has 24 hour access to a collection of computers, sound equipment and cameras. Located on the top floor of an old three story red brick building, the Center is a long narrow loft - with dusty floors and exposed brick walls. The windows at one end overlook a small hooped steel bridge and the slow moving Susquehanna River while the windows on the other look out on to a street light and row of similar red brick buildings. In the center of the room are banks of machines, patch boards, video recording decks, tables, wave form monitors, computers, etc., and trailing a black spaghetti of power cords and flanked by lights, cameras, slide projectors, at least five video cameras. It is both a serene place and a place of feverish activity. It is an oasis out of time, a place for the kind of free play Mohly-Nagy felt was essential for the flowering of creativity and the chance for concentrated work without the distractions of everyday life and the ringing crescendo of dollar signs that accompany the use of commercial production and post-production facilities. The Center has nourished two generations of artists and continues to provide this valuable service today. It is a place that is both anachronistic in its approach to video art celebrating the spirit that drew many people to video in the first place in its early years, and is as up to the minute as finances allow. The maintenance of this artists\u0027 resource center has not been without cost. Operating a shoestring budget, its survival has been touch and go for many years and even as it celebrates its twenty-five year its existence is still threat\u00ADened. I first encountered the Center when I was writing about video and performance for The Soho Weekly News. I of course knew of the work of Nam June Paik, but there was a group of younger artists producing work out of the Center (includ\u00ADing Barbara Buckner, Shalom Gorewitz and later Sara Hornbacher) whose work appealed to me because there was a sensuous and metaphoric quality to their use of abstraction. As a critic, I found myself developing a language to describe their work that was part art criticism, part what was called the new criticism in literature and eventually film theory. I remember sitting in the dark at The Museum of Modem Art watching one of Gorewitz\u0027s early tapes doing thumbnail sketches of the images as they came along with cryptic notes about color scribbled at the edges. After writing about Barbara Buckner for a while, I began talking to her and she basically issued me a challenge, saying you will never understand my work if you don\u0027t understand the machines. She said (a paraphrase) \u0022when I work, I get inside the machines and become one with the electronic signal.\u0022 I disagreed and still do. You can use a machine, and write about what a machine does, without necessarily understanding how to program it. I have never been comfortable with writing about something I haven\u0027t done, and the early eighties I began to work with video. I remember clearly my first residency at the Center in 1983, including the endless five hour bus ride from Port Authority. Gorewitz\u0027s advice: \u0022always bring more videotape than you think you\u0027ll need,\u0022 and he was right. I remember the fear the matrix gave me, sort of like one of those dreams where you see a score card for a huge test that doesn\u0027t make sense. There were no computers then and I concentrated on layering things and turning octopi and squid into weird, delicious pinks and blues. The first residency taught me that it was really important to bring raw material with you, videotapes of all kinds, books, slides, photographs, objects because otherwise the Center\u0027s brick walls, or the river outside the window become a central layer in all your tapes. On my many trips back I\u0027ve scoured the town look for new sources of inspira\u00ADtion in the middle of a residency - old photographs from the monthly flea market, toys from the antique store, a book on the history of chemistry from the bookstore across the street, videotapes from the video rental store or a metal dollhouse that became a stage for a domestic drama with in mystical overtones. There is, of course, a guide: Matthew Schlanger the first time I went to the Center and Hank Rudolph all the years after, who introduces you to the machines and answers frantic phone calls late at night when the machines aren\u0027t working, or supplies an extra pair of hands or eyes when needed. No matter how prepared you are there is always some unexpected chemistry that happens once you are there - it could be playing with a curtain that turns variously into a screen for the shadows of the trees outside the windows, an abstracted device when it is pulled and rippled in front of slides, or a veil for my nude body. There is an aspect of terror in being at the Center, the same terror painters feel in front of a blank white canvas. What will I create? Will it be good enough? Will I understand the machines? There are also the gifts given back hundredfold - the ideas and images that you would create in no other way - the place itself is a gift. There was the time the river froze and sheathed the trees and the sycamore seeds into balls of ice that proved a mystical setting for floating polar bears. Or an afternoon walking down Front Street and a woman calling to me from her yard to give me an armful of lilacs. I am grateful for their continuing presence in the video commu\u00ADnity, both selfishly for the advantages they have given me and my work, and for their support of an important part of the video world. It is easy to forget the origins of ideas and art forms we take for granted today. In the words of the title of one of Gauguin\u0027s paintings, this exhibition is intended to celebrate the work that has been done under their auspices and tell us \u0022where did we come from, where are we and where are we going.\u0022 Ann-Sargent Wooster Memories Mara Alper It is night. The river is dark, the parade of trucks across the green bridge is slow. This is my favorite time here, the time when everything I\u0027ve worked on all day seems to fall into place and become whole. Nothing compares to the quiet solitude in this unique loft above the river. Each visit to the Experimental Television Center is full of spontaneous creativity and exhilaration. I create images I never imagined before - usually at 3 am! Having access to intriguing video equipment 24 hours a day for days on end is a creative dream come true, like being in an electronic playground. It is incredibly productive because of the equipment, the setting, Hank Rudolph\u0027s patient help and the time to work with full concentration. It has been one of the most impor\u00ADtant parts of my creative process with video. The commitment of Ralph and Sherry Hocking and everyone else who has made it a reality for all these years us greatly appreciated. Viva ETC! PeerBode Viva Experimentation. ETC is a place with a view to see technologies, languages, experiences and yourself(s). ETC is some of the best America has to offer: generosity, experimentation, and public learning, making, thinking. Very early ETC activities I remember: Being a snobby serious film student stumbling on a scene at the ETC in 1972 or \u002773, I saw Nam June Paik. John Godfrey, video engineer, and David Loxton, PBS Producer in shirt and tie huddled around a toy souvenir Empire State Building on a lazy susan, multiple black and white cameras, mixing and colorizing and this image sequence became part of a video tape of Nam June\u0027s. There seems to always be a mix of very different types of people at the ETC, working, passing though, making something happen. Ideas, Ideas, Ideas and lots of concrete material stuff and things. After all these years its an approach to making and thinking that hasn\u0027t used itself up. It is particularly valuable to young artists. I still go back and make recording I\u0027m not sure I would/could make anywhere else. Decentralization (at a Center), activism, visual arts, electronic democracy. Over 7 years I got to meet and interact with artists in some 700 residencies. Wow. I think the very first time I came up to the Center the studio was set up as a large automated mariachi band with sirens and lights, cameras and video monitors. The second","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":26313,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}