Fifield, George

Not Still Art Festival 2000: The Paik/Abe Synthesizer Tools

Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe developed the Paik/Abe Synthesizer at WGBH-TV (Boston) as the first machine designed to distort existing video; Paik was an artist-in-residence and part of The Medium Is The Medium project supported by Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Artists-In-Television Project. The instrument routed seven black-and-white surveillance cameras through non-linear amplifiers into a colorizer/scan modulator and RGB-to-NTSC encoder; it debuted on WGBH Ch. 44 on August 1, 1970 in a four-hour broadcast Video Commune set to Beatles recordings. Paik later built additional synthesizers for the Experimental Television Workshop and WNET; the original is exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bremen in a frame of vintage televisions showing dates of production.

The Digital Atelier Bibliography

The Vision of Fred Barzyk: The WGBH New Television Workshop 1968 - 1978 Groups

Fred Barzyk, with co-producer Olivia Tappan, established the WGBH New Television Workshop as an experimental video art laboratory that gave artists access to broadcast television equipment and encouraged unconstrained creative exploration. The Workshop, aided by Ford and Rockefeller funding and collaboration with WNET, hosted Artists-In-Residence including Nam June Paik, Stan Vanderbeek, Peter Campus, Gus Solomons Jr. and Bill Wegman and produced national projects such as The Medium Is The Medium (1969) and Video: The New Wave. A half-inch studio opened in Watertown in 1974 with Rockefeller, the Massachusetts Council for Arts and Humanities and the NEA; the studio later closed, equipment helped found the Boston Film/Video Foundation, and the Workshop ended in Fall 1993.