{"id":5635,"title":"Tracking Video Art: Image Processing as a Genre","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/tracking-video-art-image-processing-genre","version":"f5961c52a54883176fc28306ee02c92a6dda92966c5a4da6016580b5f807a9a1","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4431989+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Lucinda Furlong"}],"authorKeys":["Furlong, Lucinda"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Art Journal","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"College Art Association","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Fall 1985","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1129","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Tracking Video Art: Image Processing as a Genre.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/tracking-video-art-image-processing-genre.","publication":"Lucinda Furlong. Tracking Video Art: Image Processing as a Genre. Art Journal. College Art Association. Fall 1985.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5635.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1129","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":27630},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":798}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Video wallpaper ... special effects ... computer art ... high-tech 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 electronic imaging tools. None of these terms are particularly useful: they are too general or too specific, or they fall prey to the kind of value judgments and myths associated with \u0022mindless,\u0022 \u0022impersonal\u0022 technology. Even the most common term, \u0022image processing,\u0022 is problematic. Whereas in commercial television that term usually refers to signal-processing methods such as timebase correction, in the video-art world it has become at once a genre and a catchall phrase for every technical process in the book. \u0022Image processing\u0022 encompasses the synthesis and manipulation of the video signal in a way that often changes the image quite drastically. It includes not only altering 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. And yet despite the term\u0027s breadth, \u0022image processing\u0022 conjures up a number of very specific-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. To 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. Although the label is conceptually and technically inadequate, it seems to have stuck for lack of a better one to describe what has become, in effect, a separate aesthetic genre. But the categories that now divide video-documentary, image processing, performance, and installation-were virtually nonexistent at its beginnings; then all forms of video functioned homogeneously as an expression of the activism of the 1960s-as the alternative television movement. As Steina Vasulka has recalled: -You have to understand those early years, they were so unbelievably intense.... This was the \u0022\u002760s revolution.\u0022 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.\u0027 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.[2] 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: \u0022Power is no longer expressed in land, labor, and capital, but by access to information and the means of 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.\u0022 The rejection of commercial television did not manifest itself in direct social action alone. Low-cost portable video equipment was yet 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 video installation) were created. Some were interactive situations designed to expose and circumvent the one-way delivery of commercial television. Others-inspired both by Marshall McLuhan and by Norbert Wiener\u0027s work in cybernetics-reflected these thinkers\u0027 correlations between electronic circuitry and the workings of the human nervous system. The idealism in 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 also by Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Nam June 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 whole. Challenging the institution of television in the late 1960s 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.\u0027 Perhaps the most interesting attitude, though, in light of what was going on in the art world at the time, was the connection made between image processing and the modernist credo of exploring the basic properties of the medium. This treatment of the electronic signal as a plastic medium, a material with inherent properties that can be isolated, is central to the development of what became the image-processing aesthetic. There are many examples of this fundamentally formalist characterization, which, I think, provided a way to lend modernist credentials to an art form that was having a difficult time gaining acceptance-critical attention, funding, marketability-by traditional art institutions. For example, in December 1971 the Whitney Museum of American Art\u0027s first video exhibition, assembled by the late film curator David Bienstock, consisted almost entirely of image-processed tapes. In the program notes, Bienstock wrote: \u0022It was decided ... to limit the program to tapes which focus on the ability of videotape to create and generate its own intrinsic imagery, rather than [on] its ability to record reality. This is done with special video synthesizers, colorizers, and by utilizing many of the unique electronic properties of the medium.\u0027 While various people were thus engaged, however, the rules had changed. The whole idea of a modernist practice was being dismantled. The work was 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 artsynthesized 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.\u0027 Pincus-Witten\u0027s comments are important not only because he pinpoints one reason why this work was rejected but because he acknowledges the important role that designers and builders played in developing relatively low-cost equipment. Prior to the introduction of consumer video products, the design of video equipment was geared towards broadcasting and industry. Much of the equipment now taken for grantedcolor cameras and lightweight Portapaks, for example-were either unavailable or unaffordable for most people. It was even more difficult to acquire the devices associated with image processing-keyers, colorizers, mixers, and synthesizers. What\u0027s more, that equipment was usually more suitable for producing special effects than for artists\u0027 experiments. Since it was rare to find both artist and engineer in one person, artists found themselves seeking out equipment designers who, in one way or another, were mavericks within the electronics industry. As Woody Vasulka recalled in 1978, I discovered that in the United States there\u0027s an alternative industrial subculture which is based on individuals, in much the same way that art is based on individuals.... These people, the electronic tool designers, have maintained their independence within the system. And they have become artists, and have used the electronic tools which they had created.... We\u0027ve always maintained this very close, symbiotic relationship with creative people outside industry, but who have the same purposeless urge to develop images or tools, which we all then may be call art.\u0027 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 work of first-generation tool designers and builders. Furthermore, although the Paik-Abe collaboration in 1970 is touted as the \u0022first,\u0022\u0027 a few people were working on specialized video equipment earlier than or at least contemporaneously with Paik. For instance, in 1969, Eric Siegel modified a color TV set so that images were distorted and colored; he then built a separate device capable of colorizing a black-and-white video image. And Stephen Beck, who completed his Beck Direct Video Synthesizer No. 1 in 1970, actually began working on a prototype in 1968. In addition, Dan Sandin completed in 1973 what he called an \u0022image processor,\u0022 a video version of a Moog audio synthesizer. Bill Etra and Steve Rutt later built the Rutt-Etra Scan Processor, a device that can manipulate the video image as it is displayed on a video monitor. As Ken Marsh pointed out in Independent Video, a technical how-to book of the period, these early devices operated on two basic principles: \u0022the use of electrical signals rather than light as the source of the information to be displayed; and the extensive intermixing of signals in order to display a totally new image.\u0022 Compared with the technical standards of television these devices were quite crude: because the parameters of the video signal were difficult to control, it was impossible to predict exactly how the resulting image would look. Furthermore, most of these tapes could never have been broadcast owing to their technical inferiority. But this was not crucial to most people at that time; most important was a design approach that afforded the artist flexibility. Unlike commercial production devices-in which a specific button is pushed to achieve a specific effect-these devices became interactive instruments whose possibilities could be known only through use. All these early tool builder-artists were \u0022pioneers,\u0022 but their ultimate impact varied. For instance, neither the Siegel nor Beck synthesizers were ever duplicated. Some of them-Beck, Siegel, and Etra-produced and exhibited tapes and were very active in the early video-art scene. But these people eventually took their skills to the commercial sector, and their activity in the video-art","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":27630,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}