Video History Project

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Carol Goss

Goss worked in film, television and theater prior to making video art at the Experimental Television Center and doing live video synthesis performances in New York City and San Francisco in the 1970s. She co-founded Improvising Artists Records & Video in 1974, credited with making the first 'music video'. She has exhibited internationally as well as lectured on visual perception and symbolic abstraction at Columbia University and Selcuk Universitesi in Turkey.

Her work in abstract and non-narrative forms led her to found the Not Still Art Festival in 1996, an annual event in the Cooperstown region, which has received support from the Decentralization Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, from Media Alliance's Media Action Grant program and Presentation Funds. In 1974 Goss was sent to the Experimental Television Center by Nam June Paik. The same year she had formed an audio and video production company, Improvising Artists with jazz pianist, Paul Bley. Her first abstract program made with analog video synthesizers, TOPOGRAPHY, was exhibited at the Everson Museum of Art's "New Work in Abstract Video" show in 1976.

Goss's work has been exhibited internationally and across the US. She has worked in theater and film in addition to being painter since the age of fourteen. Though making paintings move was Goss's main obsession, performance video was a natural context. In the 1970s she did performances in New York and San Francisco solo and with video artists Walter Wright and Skip Sweeney on a number of prototype video synthesizers. These improvised collaborations were with musicians: Sun Ra, Paul Bley, Glen Moore, Lee Konitz, Jimmy Giuffre, and others.

The nature of early analog synthesis formed an aesthetic of abstract and non-narrative work which continued to evolve in Goss's digital work in the 1980s and formed the premise of the Not Still Art Festival, which she first organized in 1996. Recently, in addition to new video work, web based work, and performance, she's been asked to lecture about abstract motion imaging at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard. www.improvart.com

Cite this record

"Carol Goss." Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2011. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/carol-goss.

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Summary

Carol Goss made video art at the Experimental Television Center and performed live video synthesis in New York City and San Francisco in the 1970s; Nam June Paik sent her to the Experimental Television Center in 1974 and she co-founded Improvising Artists Records & Video with Paul Bley that year. Her analog program TOPOGRAPHY was exhibited at the Everson Museum in 1976; her practice evolved into digital work in the 1980s and she founded the Not Still Art Festival in 1996 in the Cooperstown region with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and Media Alliance. She has exhibited internationally and lectured at Columbia University, Selcuk Universitesi and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe/Harvard.

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Last modified 17 June 2011

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