{"id":5622,"title":"Driven to Abstraction","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/driven-abstraction","version":"b1b57e1766a7bc7c92c33fdcb4693f3afe507e52a4f551b73b92a87523a07b86","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4424151+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Carol Goss"}],"authorKeys":["Goss, Carol"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1026","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Driven to Abstraction.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/driven-abstraction.","publication":"Carol Goss. Driven to Abstraction. 1998.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5622.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1026","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":16882}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Art forms have life spans, beginnings, middles and ends. Cave painting did all right, lasting millennia, while if you started to play the harpsichord too late in its cycle you\u0027d soon be playing piano forte. In the beginning, video didn\u0027t exist. First there was television. As a child growing up in the 1950s we made 8mm movies. My younger sister Marilyn was featured on \u0022All About Baby\u0022, a television program in Chicago in which I appeared peripherally. My father filmed the monitor during the live broadcast: our own private kinescope. In 1968, while studying theatre and art, I directed an anti-Vietnam war one act play, \u0022A Little Higher Around the Ears, Boys\u0022, by Phillip E. Wychodski for WETA public TV TOPIC series in Washington, DC. I sat on David Brinkley\u0027s stool during the Q\u0026A, but I have no videotape of the broadcast. I didn\u0027t think to ask about it. There wasn\u0027t any. In 1973 I worked as a stand-in on \u0022The Exorcist\u0022 at the Warner Brothers lot on 58th Street with Billy Friedkin. This was theatre in an airplane hangar. I went to Kodak in Rochester for a week to do an animated PSA of William Burroughs and Paul Bley, with ex-Disney animator, Ernie Crisp. The film was sent to Kodak\u0027s custom lab for development. When it came back the entire film was streaked with blue shock. Light had mistakenly been allowed to enter the canister and had ruined the film. It was then that I vowed never to let a master out of my hands. Deciding to videotape Burroughs\u0027 and Bley\u0027s performances meant renting a camera, tripod and 3/4\u0022 deck from Sam Adwar or Louis at CTL. Video seemed fine for documentation, if you had plenty of light. Sometime in 1974, at a screening at Anthology Film Archives, I met Nam June Paik. He suggested that I go visit the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton, NY if I wanted more from video. VIDEO SYNTHESIS I took the bus from the city, got off in downtown Binghamton and walked to the Center. It was in a large brick loft building full of monitors in various stages of deconstruction, racks of hand built synthesizers and electronic test equipment. There were no labels or manuals. David Jones, the resident electro-physicist - as I liked to call him - was available though, to give you a quick talk through. Years of working with theatre and film seemed less relevant here than the time I had spent painting. Video cameras were rarified creatures for many of us - who only had access to them occasionally. Deep immersion with this much tech, alone for a week twenty four hours a day, was an undreamed of luxury. In those days ETC\u0027s mandate was: \u0022to facilitate the direct, immediate relationship of the artist to the art-making tools, the electronic image processing systems, in a manner analogous to the ways in which a painter is engaged with the medium of paint\u0022. It was about the process of seeing, or as painter Pierre Bonnard put it, \u0022playing with the optic nerve.\u0022 Once the camera was turned on, the monitor became one\u0027s retina. This phosphorescent screen displayed the interaction you were having with the equipment. The first thing everyone invariably did was feedback. This was the simplest and yet most amazing experience. To train the camera, slightly off center, on the monitor which was displaying the camera\u0027s signal was tantamount to creating life. Anyone that has tried it can testify to the fact that it has nothing to do with digital imaging. There is a degree of tension which must be maintained in order for the displayed movement not to strobe or fall into stasis. This loop between the camera viewing the cathode ray tube and the cathode ray tube displaying the image of the electron beam slightly off center, magically created a dynamic image with multiple iterations of itself - all depending on how you played with the aperture, focus, or angle of the camera. If you did too much the image would go crazy, out of control. If you did too little the movement would die. If you could maintain a harmonious range of movement then images could be made to dance. It was never a solo venture though. One was always aware that one was collaborating with the raw force of electricity. Working alone for 18 hours straight day after day permitted insights that would not have occurred in a more social environment. The feedback images resembled mandalas. Any sixties person would recognize this instantly. The question was, \u0022why?\u0022 Which came first: the Buddhist mandala or the electronic mandala? Was Itzhak Bentov\u0027s theory of the universe as a torus with all energy moving in a helix the basic paradigm, and video feedback and Buddhist meditation mandalas just manifestations of it? There were other philosophical observations to be made. David would leave his block diagrams lying around, and for one with a background in art but not engineering, they were viewed symbolically - not pragmatically. These boards might be \u0022creations\u0022 or, what seemed more likely to me, replications of innate human wiring, made unconsciously \u0022like us\u0022, because that is all we are able to do: iterate our pattern. Sometime during the 70s the USSR published a photograph of \u0022the background radiation of the universe\u0022, made from a satellite. There were two levels of gray in the image and they claimed that there was a temperature differential of 3 degrees between the two gray levels. The image was of a yin yang symbol. ETC had several different kinds of synthesizers at that time. One of them contained oscillators. These could also be used to create sound, as had been done earlier in the Moog and Arp audio synthesizers. Oscillators were generally visualized as horizontal bands, unless one rescanned them at a different angle or found some other way to interfere with them, as I did in \u0022Topography\u0022 (1975). Treated monitors, with their copper coils reversed charged, allowed the raster to be flipped or inverted. The real thrill for me was the colorizers. There were two at the Center: David Jones\u0027 and the Paik-Abe. They were entirely different from each other. I first worked with the Paik-Abe and got such a rush from it that I was never the same afterwards. It is this one machine that hooked me for life on video art. The colors were indescribable. Magical things happened at the borders of shapes and color fields. The intensity, the saturation, and the hues were lush. No one quite knew what made it tick, and I think there were only two or three of them made by Nam June and Shuya Abe. David Jones\u0027 colorizer was very logically organized. It allowed four b/w signal inputs to be keyed into each other with 100% control of hue, saturation, contrast, luminosity and video level on each channel. This provided great range and subtlety. Using the tools available for making images out of sheer electricity with colorizing synthesizers was like creating molten stained glass. In fact, to this day, I dislike projected video and dread the day when LCD screens replace CRTs. We will have lost that wonderful luminosity which only the \u0022evil blue light\u0022 can deliver. In retrospect, much of the excitement of working with early analog video synthesis was the fact that one did not have total control. The process was highly interactive. That is something which has been entirely lost with digital tools. They provide their own limitations, of course, but there is no tug of war going on with a live force.... everything is very domesticated and predictable. James Gleick\u0027s wonderful book, \u0022Chaos, Making a New Science\u0022, chronicles the early discoveries in the 1970s in the field of fractal geometry, from Lorenz to Mandelbrot. It reads like a detective story. Those of us that were doing video feedback during the 70s were encountering the same phenomena as these scientists. Mandelbrot translated his observations into mathematical theory. I translated mine into abstract animation and philosophical musings. Videotape made it possible to contemplate one\u0027s work with hindsight, which is always important for growth and understanding. None of this was possible before the late 1960s. Nobody had \u0022access\u0022. Ralph Hocking has a piece of early television cable in his archives. I think that the twisted wires are over a foot thick. It must weigh hundreds of pounds. This is not the sort of thing that individual artists or scientists got near, and if they did, they would have had to kinescope their work! Video is an eclectic medium. It can be used to record a game show, display a heart murmur, or construct the imaginings of the inner eye. The basic duality is a philosophical one: the camera recording the reflection of light off identifiable objects or light itself as the subject. Light as manifested on phosphorescent pixels. The relationship of time and space and how these patterns inform, reinforce, contrast, and contradict our human perception of rhythm, horizon, balance, etc. This decade of the 1970s, before the proliferation of the personal computers, provided a unique opportunity to media artists. The tools of this period, though restrictive, were liberating at the same time. We were forced to see elementally. The reductionist beauty of abstraction was a given. Our job was to create meaning with color, line, pulse, dark, light, surface, etc. We had more in common with the early artist filmmakers (Leger, Ruttman, Eggeling, Richter, Lye) than we did with contemporaries who used the camera as a documentary tool. The distinction of this decade is more pronounced when one compares it to the work that preceded and followed it. Filmmakers working in abstract or surreal forms were forced to use cell frame animation techniques. Computer animators work with single frames, often with slow rendering times and precise, mechanical outcomes. In both of these processes there is no possibility for real time interaction with the medium. It is to the credit of the 3D computer animation community, though it is currently obsessed with hyper-realism, that it wishes to simulate analogue properties. \u0022Dirt\u0022, \u0022noise\u0022, \u0022glitch\u0022, \u0022randomness\u0022 are all qualities akin to life and alien to the computer. Analog video synthesis has its own aesthetic. It is a realtime event which can be dirty, random and talk back. HOLOGRAPHY I was awarded a grant in 1978 from CCCWES/AIR and the Museum of Holography to produce a 120 degree transmission white light hologram - which permitted movement.\u0026nbsp; It was the first hologram to incorporate a raster scanned video image. This project required the skills of a number of people. The concept of the hologram incorporated opposed movement of two elements: a face and a geometric object. They would both recede into each other from opposite sides of the hologram. For the first image, Hart Perry (The Holographic Film Co.) shot film of my head while I rotated on a large turntable. This film was then transferred to videotape and reduced to a point from left to right by Steve Rutt (Rutt Electrophysics) on his and Bill Etra\u0027s video synthesizer. The videotape then had to be transferred back to film. The second image was an animated icosahedron. It was constructed one triangle at a time in wireframe by Judson Rosebush at his Digital Effects studio on computer (with a time share line all the way from Bethesda, Maryland for number crunching power!). This took hours. The icosahedron was then filmed stop frame by Jeff Kleiser (EFX Unlimited). Jeff then optically registered these film elements on 16mm so that as my head traversed the hologram from left to right, and the icosahedron went from right to left the two images would be superimposed. The hologram is entitled, \u0022Femophagy\u0022 (woman-eating). The final stage of production was for the 16mm film to be compressed into holographic vertical bars and displayed on a single large sheet of film. This film is then bent over 120 degrees of a circle, illuminated and made visible by a 100 watt clear light bulb placed at a certain angle from below the film. The coloration is \u0022rainbow\u0022, and it can only be viewed from a particular angle while the spectator walks around it","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":16882,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}