{"id":5883,"title":"Issues in Capturing Related Histories Panel","kind":"book","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5883","version":"df26401232bd0d6c2885a0c5b92bf1bfc7097c55bd05df68297a486e5d52fba4","modified":"2026-09-15T19:02:14.9933417+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":[],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication type","value":"Web Article","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Issues in Capturing Related Histories Panel.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5883.","publication":"Issues in Capturing Related Histories Panel.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5883.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/looking-backlooking-forward","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":56282},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":680}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation: contents Presenters: Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation), Alain Depocas (Daniel Langlois Foundation), Woody Vasulka Joel Chadabe, Alain Depocas and Woody Vasulka JOEL CHADABE: I\u2019m Joel Chadabe, President of Electronic Music Foundation and a composer. This is Alain Depocas, who is the primary archivist at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, and Woody Vasulka, who I\u2019m sure you all know, media artist, pioneer. I say media artist, pioneer, but I\u2019ve never really thought of Woody that way, and I\u2019ve reflected that media art actually comes in two distinct types. There is media art that is an extension of books and film and so on, and then there\u2019s media art that has more to do with interactive installations that fits more into a kind of musical context--that\u2019s performance oriented. That is my perspective of the field; in a sense it\u2019s what I do, and it\u2019s what Electronic Music Foundation has presented a great deal. Now, if we talk about history--what is history? I wrote a book on the history of electronic music, and discovered in the course of writing it, that one understands history from the perspective of the present. That is, you always perceive the present in some way. You ask, \u201CWhat\u2019s going on?\u201D Then, once you decide what\u2019s going on, you say, \u201CHow did we come to this place?\u201D That\u2019s the way people write histories, otherwise history really doesn\u2019t exist at all. What I see right now is a phrase that all of you are extremely familiar with: convergent media. What it means to me is not only a combination of images and music. You can say once those bits and bytes are going down the wire, they can come out as images or sound, and who\u2019s the wiser for it? But the concerns are very much the same. I come to it from a slightly different perspective. I was just at the new Medialab Europe, in Dublin, speaking at a conference. The conference was called the NIME Conference, New Interfaces for Musical Expression. I\u2019m telling you this not only because it\u2019s so interesting musically, but because I think it has such important implications for video, for images, for convergent media in general, and for doing anything that would involve media in performances. The concern there by interfaces for musical expression, are devices--there\u2019re all kinds of things. Basically, if you look upon it as what you touch in a musical instrument, no longer do you need to go through the unpleasantness of holding-- playing a violin like that, or taking a round grip and making it flat to play a piano. You can really produce very ergonomic, very dynamic kinds of devices. They can be video cameras that let you wave your hands in the air. One remarkable installation I saw was by Garth Paine, who incidentally presents his work, not really in a concert situation, but in galleries where he leaves it set up for the public to interact with it. What does that mean? Basically he has created a musical instrument, using as its control input device a video camera that can sense motion in the air or a position in a floor. In fact, he\u2019s letting the public perform this instrument, and this is a very important part of performable new media. If we go back in history and look at the various roads that have converged to bring us to this situation, we get into the history of devices, the history of electronic instruments, even way back to the analog days. These are not really problems of preserving a record of a performance -- for example, of a tape of a specific performance. In every case that I know-- from Sal Martirano\u2019s \u201CSalMar Construction\u201D, to some things that I did in the late sixties and early seventies, to digital stuff in the eighties-- the issue is not freezing a moment that came out of these instruments. For example, to take a recording of one result of Garth Paine\u2019s installation would be ridiculous, because it doesn\u2019t capture the work at all; it\u2019s not the point. The point is to make an object, like a symphony or a piece of music, that then even might have a performance, but it exists. Its identity really is as that object, performed or not. That might be what you want to preserve. But when you\u2019re taking a process where the composition really is the instrument itself, the question is how can you then preserve that? As opposed to preserving some particular instance of what it might produce, which could in fact, be very misleading--if it wasn\u2019t a good sampling. So dealing with the issue of how to preserve performances is certainly something that is of great concern to musicians, for a lot of different reasons. Luigi Nono solved it in a very interesting way. Most musical scores give instructions to a performer. When you read a piano score, it\u2019s not telling you what middle C sounds like, it\u2019s telling you to push a certain level on a piano. In fact, when you\u2019re playing it on a synthesizer, you can get very surprising results. You can connect a middle C on an electronic keyboard to any sound you like. But on a piano, there are certain expectations that something will come out, and these kinds of notations are called tablatures. Nono did not do that. What he did is to specify the sound in acoustic terms very specifically, so that it could be done with other equipment. He pointed us towards one example of preserving an electronic performance, long after his particular equipment becomes difficult to service because of lack of component parts, or lost or damaged in some way. Alvise Vidolin, who is a composer in Padua and a music historian, recreated what Nono did with up-to-date equipment. I was faced with a different solution, in a different kind of problem, with John Cage\u2019s \u201CBird Cage.\u201D I knew that piece very well, because I helped John write it back in 1971-72. I was not only witness to it, but John was a friend of mine. These things are very germane, they\u2019re very important, because if you know the composer and you have a sense for the person\u2019s work, you can recreate it much better. What we did in the studio is to produce twelve tapes--each a half-hour long--that were random combinations of birds recorded in aviaries, and John himself singing his piece \u201CMureau,\u201D which was his randomization of words by Thoreau. In fact, as he listened to himself croaking away there in the studio as we were doing this, he said, \u201CIt makes the birds seem less ridiculous.\u201D The third series of sounds were a kind of random track recorded by some filmmakers from German radio that were accompanying him in writing the piece. Once these twelve tapes were done, they were played back through a Matrix mixer, for any length of time. His score he told me to avoid, not to pay attention to in performance. The mixer was just kind of pushing buttons and turning things that routed a particular tape to a particular loudspeaker. Of course, the tapes were changed continually, so that this process could go on forever. Now, how would you perform that today? Well, we were faced with that problem in opening Engine 27\u2019s performance season two years ago in New York. It occurred to me that [it would be] very hard to find those analog tape recorders; I don\u2019t know where that Matrix mixer is anymore. Well, why not just digitize the whole thing? So we just turned all of the tapes into sound files in the computer, wrote a little program that randomized their diffusion to eight loudspeakers around the hall and it came out absolutely beautifully. It was very similar, in fact, to what we had done with it in performance. Here, then, is solution number two to preserving performances: recreating the performance with up-to-date media. The third solution to recreating a performance, and the only other one I could think of, is to completely rewrite the piece. That is, completely redo it with an understanding of what it was (but new material, new technology) and just capture whatever one would consider the essence of the piece. In that case it takes a great understanding of what the piece is about, and knowing the composer would certainly help. I say composer even though the people who do this kind of art are not necessarily composers in the traditional sense of the word, but media artists, sound artists, whatever. A word on the different between a composer and a sound artist. Although the word [composer] is becoming generalized. Chris Mann, a poet and a friend of mine, is teaching a course in composition at the New School now. There is no reference to music there. Chris is a poet but he is also a performer. \u201CComposition\u201D then takes on a kind of generic term or meaning, which I think is great. But in the traditional sense, a composer is someone who has studied music. I have found that people who have studied music, and who come into the media arts, have a particular take on things. Listening to all those symphonies when you\u2019re studying music gives you a certain sense for timbre and sound--a certain sense of an evolving language-- that other artists who come into composing with sound from a media direction may not have. Talent is talent; so I can\u2019t say that any one approach is generically better. Unfortunately, when you study music for a long time, you carry a lot of baggage into the media arts. On the other hand, when you\u2019re a media artist, you might lack a certain sensibility to timbre and how timbre can evolve in sound and so on. So there are peculiar bridges to cross that, I think, will get ironed out a lot. I guess my point is to bring to the conference a dimension of performance and of dynamic process, as [opposed to] media as an object; to introduce the problem of how to preserve performances, and certainly to understand the context. It\u2019s not like preserving an object; it\u2019s not like fixing up an old tape. There\u2019s nothing really to fix. It depends upon a human understanding of what happened, and one has to really understand the original context and understand the history. Let me introduce Woody Vasulka, who has also done a great deal of live presentation. WOODY VASULKA: There are many reasons to decide that this art of transmission, of the creative activity, would now migrate from our daily artistic practices to this electronic cyberspace. But I\u2019d say it was always, in a way, a struggle with what we call \u201Cthe gallery\u201D, or presentations through institutions. In fact, that was the first departure between film or painting or other kind of--especially film as moving image, into the small format video. Many of us chose this particular route, to establish our independence from this kind of a banal environment, and started working with something quite unique and quite specific--like material of electronic time and energy, products which then make pictures and sounds. A while ago we were approached by Jean Gagnon, associated with the Langlois Foundation, to look at our archive. We thought this is all about electronic images and sound. No, no. Forget it. It was about paper. Here we have a protagonist behind this whole thing. So paper still is the courier of the cultural shift between what was and what is, in this context. I must say, one day it indeed probably will end in the electronic-- I don\u2019t know, what do you think? RESPONSE: Well, I think having several preservation strategies at the same time might be a good \u2026 VASULKA: But really, why paper? Because, then of course, we realize that paper is somehow forever or something? We now struggle for defining what medium will carry this for us. From that point, it was a perfect strategy, in a way, for an institute that preserves the legacy. But of course, we (meaning people in practice) again, try to carve our independence on giving things to institutions, where you have to apply-- there\u2019s a touch to it, certain amount of money, an expenditure; a certain ritual and acceptance or rejection and so forth. So we decided to put everything for free in a way, to this cyberspace. As I say, the deal we have made is very interesting. We kind of sold the paper, but got the rights to maint","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":56282,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}