{"id":7036,"title":"Light and Darkness in the Electronic Landscape: Some Aspects of the Video Image","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/light-and-darkness-electronic-landscape-some-aspects-video-image","version":"2651232de165746deddf1767398c23108aed8d87b6d4626fb02b67248a22c624","modified":"2026-09-13T21:51:53.8865582+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Barbara Buckner"}],"authorKeys":["Buckner, Barbara"],"subjects":["Tool Texts"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Unpublished manuscript.","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0203","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Light and Darkness in the Electronic Landscape: Some Aspects of the Video Image.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/light-and-darkness-electronic-landscape-some-aspects-video-image.","publication":"Barbara Buckner. Light and Darkness in the Electronic Landscape: Some Aspects of the Video Image. Unpublished manuscript. 1978.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/7036.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0203","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":37171},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":60},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":619},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0203","generated":false,"characters":60}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Presented at the Collective for Living Cinema, February 1978 That crystal lattice we call the brain has in it all the raging fires of an exquisite sense - trapped. The land and water mass of the body, riveted to its space in time is alight with phantasms of fire. The authenticity with which I live my life, the phenomena of the waking life and the poignancy of the dreamt life are all chattels of one desire: to have Light and Darkness become life in the traps of space and time. The translation of that entrapment of Light and Dark is the video machine whose very life is hinged upon the metric agony of time and life cycles. The chain of Light and Dark, that serpentine spiral of electron flow which travels the height and breadth of the Brain is the same current which flows at the heart of the Machine. Deep in the heart of the video medium is a pulse which is the life breath - though invisible - in which the video system runs. It is not the wound motor and spring of the film camera, which when released will die the mechanical death. It is not the hand and brush of the painter which must dip and dip again into colored oil for texture and hue. Its source is the white light flow of electrons ever present as the hot line birth frequency of 60 cycles from any wall, from the ecstatic generator. This is the ever present power of the snake of alternating current manifesting in the electronic landscape as negative and positive charges - opposing Loves attracting to themselves magnetic webs of living matter. This is the electronic serpent - gushing, insinuating, resisting and carrying the powers of light and darkness. Its tail is in its mouth. The cycles of light and dark are the powers of regeneration. The upward curve of luminance being the sun which feeds the universe and the downward curve being the abnegation of light or darkness, the mystery from which all things return. These are the birth and death cycles of light eating light as it were, the machine-serpent dance forming full circles of light and life into infinity. A cool fire, the electron stream, is hurled down to create the electronic landscape patrolled and guarded by the snake who is on its belly, who severs the fleeting power of all things in two. Day and night is in the human landscape. Darkness, the snake\u0027s periodic death rattle endures but an instant as the sun goes down and returns to rise again, a departure and return from light to light, the formidable cycle. The magnetic human landscape is lived in by all powers and possible creatures - protozoa, the birds, the lion, and the dreams of other humans. Everything lives in this landscape by virtue of the current. It winds through rivers in the ears, in pools of phosphor behind the eyes, and in the forests of human memory. When light is overthrown the dark is the frugal home to the sojourner in consciousness and the light is seen as the shadow of light, or death. As the eye is the herald of the physical sight the electronic landscape is the whole range of the invisible creatures and kingdoms of sentience, or the creations of the mind, - signals which are received and transmitted in the form of shapes color and sound within and without our bodies. This is the power of thought moving in the magnetic landscape. They are all conduits of a certain passion - the passion being the electronic serpent meting out its works for new creations, the charged mason of electronic architectures, the manifold mazes of human sight and hearing. Television is the mirror of the mind, the moving electronic pictograph machine, the electronic moving picture house. The physics of the video machine are quite literally in the mind of the beholder. As I see it, video appears to be the first visual art and information producing tool that has a built-in cyclical nature. Just as the processing of information in the brain is accomplished by an electrical sweep of scansion (to and fro) through the cerebral cortex, generating electrical activity in the form of alpha, beta and theta waves by which we monitor all sensory and nervous connections, so the video camera and monitor operate on the same cyclic principle of scansion - where each frame of video is scanned 30 frames per second at normal speed in contrast to film which runs at 24 frames per second at normal speed. Two fields make up one frame of video. Each field occurs every 1/60th of a second. The two fields are like two sides to the same story, an interpolation of two views of the same scene, the story being the telling of picture information. Thirty times a second, the electron beam which consists of a focused stream of electrons scans 525 consecutive horizontal lines of picture information. Imagine a scene as seen by your eyes. The scene is composed of varying degrees of luminance which in a black and white picture read as a range of black, white and shades of gray. On the back of the retina there are millions of light sensitive rods and cones which are stimulated and convert the light into electrical impulses. These corresponding voltages are sent along the optic nerve to the brain - which interprets these electrical impulses as a whole picture. This process is similar in the video system. The video camera is the eye of the system which is sensitive to light energy. The camera tube then converts this light energy by scanning the picture elements with the electron beam encoding the light energy as electrical energy or voltage which the monitor then plays back as light energy, or picture information. We see the translation of voltages corresponding to the original picture as seen by the camera. Each of the 525 horizontal lines of information is divided into hundreds of picture elements of varying brightness which are scanned by the electron beam. The number of picture elements along the line determines how much detail or resolution the picture has. For the period of one field, the 262.5 odd-numbered lines are scanned; for the period of the second field, the 262.5 even-numbered lines are scanned. The whole picture may be seen as a metrical mosaic of alternating light and dark which due to the incredible speed of scansion we perceive as a whole picture, at the source of transmission and final reception. After each field is scanned, the electron beam is extinguished and instantaneously returned to the top of the field to begin its scanning pattern again for another cycle. This is called the vertical retrace. This vertical pulse occurs every 1/60th of a second. The horizontal scans and the vertical deflections are timed very precisely by what are known as vertical and horizontal sync pulses. They can be likened to the film sprocket holes which pull down 24 film frames every second in syncopation with the camera or projector. If these sprocket holes are ripped or if the motor or spring is faulty the film will disengage and we will see a blurred image, because the frames are not being pulled down at the correct speed which creates the illusion of normal movement. The process of video image scanning and recording is the process of converting reflected light as seen by a camera eye and coding this light energy as intelligience in the form of a sequence of voltages over time and decoding that arrangement into radiated and transmitted light in the monitor. How different this process is from film. The crucial difference being that between transmitted and projected light. In film, the image is projected from one surface (the film plane) to another surface of the screen. The small image on film is shot through with light and magnified onto the screen. In video the internal transmission entails a light to electrical energy conversion, a process of encoding and decoding a signal of varying voltages a translation of the light substance itself where electrical current transduces to light. The film image is eternally recorded, a fact which does not change. Once chemically developed on film, the image is not recomposed in the present. The chemical is developed: this is the recorded quality of film. Each time a video recording is played back there is a coding process which must be re-lived in order to translate the encoded magnetism on tape to the monitor picture. This is the sense of immediacy inherent in the video medium. This may also explain, in part, why one can look, gaze and finally be numbed into holding one\u0027s vision toward the television screen that has even a still scene on it. The picture processing mirrors or counterpoints the electrical activity and cyclic movements in the brain. Instead of watching the wave break, recede, gather itself up again and break, we have become the wave and have neither memory nor expectancy. For this reason also video is crudely a meditative medium; crudely in that the single-mindfulness is built into the system and works upon the beholder. A video tape recording is accomplished by using video tape as the recording intermediary between the source of transmission - the camera - and the place of reception - the monitor. In its unrecorded or raw state, the videotape is in a state of complete chaos. This is what we see as noise or \u0022snow\u0022 or \u0022salt and pepper\u0022 patterns on the screen when no signal or intelligence is being transmitted. In this state the tape consists of an intelligent surface of unmagnetized particles. When played back, this uncoded energy is transmitting chaotic luminance patterns. When the video tape recorder is set into the record mode, the video recording heads magnetically lay down tracks of information along the tape at a high speed. The non-arrayed, unmagnetized particles on the tape are organized into an arrangement of a coded signal or voltages. Other circuits within the video tape recorder are designed to transduce this magnetic recording into a transmitted signal which the monitor plays back in concert with the recorder. All sync pulses and timing references must be aligned for camera, recorder and monitor. The sync pulses, the invisible hooks which hold the frame in place as they run in place are a prison in the way that natural day and night are - a necessary division of activity. When the image loses sync, there are visionary cataclysms which occur similar to earthquakes and flooding. The eye is the recipient of such natural disasters and wishes to flee the scene (seen). Loss of vertical sync is seen as the vertical rolling of the picture; horizontal sync loss is when the picture collapses into horizontal bars across the screen. The monitor also contains an electron beam which scans the underside of the monitor screen which is coated with a layer of light-emitting phosphors. When the electron beam strikes the phosphors they emit a corresponding intensity of light for each picture element. It is this radiated light which we see as the picture on the face of the screen. The electron beam is the internal sun which illumines the whole interior of the electronic landscape. It is actually extinguished or eclipsed at the end of each horizontal line scan and again at the vertical retrace intervals when the beam is returned to the top of the field to begin its surveyance of the video field. At these times, there is no transmission of picture information. If this were not done, it would result in confusing picture information during the horizontal and vertical retrace intervals. It is the nay-saying part of the electronic pulse, the other half of the face of the sun. The invisible hand of the electronic current dictates the pulse or intelligent choice (energy) to move the system even during the darkest hour. It is the metric sine qua non of this intelligent machine to go on when the sun has turned its face into a cloud. It returns again in an instant to light up the field. These little paths of dread, the invisible chains of light eating light and burying their faces at dusk starve for a time in the mystery of their own disappearance, or metric agony. The beam follows closely the choice of a pre-destined, built-","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":37171,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}