- Signals in Syracuse - Video History: Making Connections conference Bibliography
Video History: Making Connections examined three decades of independent video since the late 1960s and opened with Video Rewind, organized by Deirdre Boyle; panels included Paul Ryan, Barbara London (MOMA video curator) and Parry Teasdale, with screenings such as Proto Media Primer (1970) and Calligrams (1970). A concurrent Video Preservation meeting, involving Mona Jimenez and referencing MOMA’s 1991 preservation meeting, addressed cataloging, funding and technical support; David Ross delivered a keynote at Henriks Chapel on Net Art and video’s institutional absorption. Pamela Hawkins organized a Resource Room displaying early analog and digital recording and playback equipment, processors and period publications, and panels treated writing and teaching video history.
- Video History: Making Connections Chronology
Video History: Making Connections convened October 16-18, 1998 at Syracuse University in conjunction with the Common Ground Conference; it brought together over 250 media makers active in the 70s and artists working in new media and interactive technologies. The conference was sponsored by the New York State Alliance for Arts Education; funding and support came from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Technology Planning Grant Program, public funds from the Statewide Challenge Grant Program and the New York State Council on the Arts, the Everson Museum of Art, the Media Action Grant Program of Media Alliance, corporate donors Dave Jones Design and VidiPax, and individual contributors.
- Tracking Video Art: Image Processing as a Genre Bibliography
Lucinda Furlong, Curatorial Assistant in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Film and Video Department, traces the emergence of image processing as a distinct video-art genre from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s; she examines terminology, aesthetic debates, and the modernist and formalist impulses that shaped the work. The text documents early tool-builders and artists (Dan Sandin, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Eric Siegel, Stephen Beck, Bill Etra, Steve Rutt, Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe), key technologies (video synthesizers, Sandin Image Processor, Rutt-Etra, Moog, Z-Grass), institutions (Whitney Museum, Radical Software, Experimental Television Center, SUNY Binghamton, University of Illinois Circle Campus) and funding developments including a $50,000 NYSCA grant to Hocking's Center.
- Video History: Making Connections - Panels
Panels on Saturday, October 17, 1998, under Video History: Making Connections covered early digital photography, writing about video, tool development and restoration, distribution and teaching video history. The Pioneers of Digital Photography session related to an Open Space Gallery exhibition in Allentown, PA, in summer 1998 co-sponsored with Light Work. Presenters included Mary Ross; Paul Ryan; Jim Lindner (President, VidiPax), who traced magnetic materials from wire recording to the present; and representatives of DCTV, Paper Tiger TV and KAKO discussing activist video.
- People
Overview of the emergence of portable video technology in the late 1960s; creative and community-minded practitioners worked alone and collaboratively to provide citizens with means to create and distribute independent programming and came from many arts and sciences disciplines exploring video as an art medium and a tool for social and cultural change. The site presents biographies and interviews of early and contemporary makers; texts range from the medium's formative days to contemporary writings and provide critical and analytical frameworks. Listings link to Interviews and Texts in the biblio database and Biographies in the bio database.
- Tools
In the 1960s media makers confronted technological constraints: early portable video offered limited control over recording and playback, editing systems were expensive and laborious, and special effects such as colorization and superimposition were available only in broadcast studios. Artists working in the time-based medium collaborated with tool designers and engineers to modify commercial equipment and build hand-built imaging instruments that produced novel techniques; the page lists a Tools List and Texts in the biblio database and a Tools Links entry for other web sites.