david fodel

In December of 2008 I did a residency at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York. I invited artist and long-time collaborator and friend Brian Kane to explore the center's vast collection of vintage analog video gear. The video below is a quick attempt at documenting the experience. Excerpts of some of the raw material are included. Some of the resulting material is included in a 5 DVD boxed set which chronicles the activities of the ETC from 1969 to 2008 and includes the work of 75 artists. The documentary footage will also be archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media at Cornell University. Special thanks to Hank Rudolph and Sherry Miller Hocking.

The "full project" doesn't really exist in any substantial form. The project WAS the residency I guess, which according to their guidelines merely consists of creating raw material, which may or may not get used in a finished "piece". The ETC intends the space and equipment to be used in that way, as opposed to a place to come and fine-tune/edit/finalize work.

That being said, what we were aiming for was raw material that was improvised live performance, which in some cases is finished as soon as it hits the eyeballs, eardrums and hard drive. So we have a bunch of that in the can, so to speak.

What I put together for the "documentary" is intended to describe the whole experience to put it into context for someone who might be interested in showing the work. It also seems to work to highlight the history and operation of the ETC itself. Which is really great.

As for the technical interactions occurring in the audio, video and control paths:

The center is almost entirely control voltage based. By using envelope followers one can feed audio in to a module and "extract' a CV signal, which then can be used for manipulating pretty much any aspect of the video gear. We worked primarily with the Dave Jones 6 channel colorizer, and also the Nam June Paik built "Wobulator" which is basically a huge electromagnet wrapped around a CRT and controlled by varying the voltage along several axis of the magnet(s). So that was one way of "syncing" the signals. Since we are using the envelope follower method, the signals fed into it tend to need to be relatively simple... tones or simple beats. We also managed to get the MIDI to CV module running which allowed for a simple way to get note on and off, and a single CC out to the CV stuff. It's a frikkin patchers heaven, if you have patience, and a lot of coffee. The cool thing is that in essence, the audio IS the video and vice-versa. The original practitioners and designers of the center's equipment (and I would encourage anyone interested to explore these folks) were basically just fascinated with the formal aspects of the electronic signal, and were the (dare I say) original transmedial artists. They were patching audio into video and extracting signals in both directions, deconstructing the television into its constituent elements and then rebuilding signals from the ground up.

The 3-screen work I include in the video doc is all raw captures from the center, with some augmentation to the audio. There are digital oscillators feeding the analog controls on the Dave Jones Colorizer, through the MIDI to CV module, as well as similar control running the analog Proc Amp. This is where one can control the final pedestal, chroma, gain and clipping of the video signal before digital capture. I also was doing some stuff feeding the centers signal into my laptop running VDMX, and then feeding that back into the centers system, with some gorgeous results. We also did a lot of weird stuff with live YouTube feeds etc to get that real vintage vs. contemporary thing going on. I was most fascinated with the things that were happening in these loops, the evolving pattern and color, that responded over time to subtle manipulation. That level of performative engagement in a real-time unpredictable environment is to me just irreproducible in the digital realm, but I don't want to start any arguments on that. Something about those soft analog edges and rich colors. Clearly, a lot of what VJ software does is based on how this early analog processing works, so you see a lot of familiar motifs emerging from the gear. Which is really cool to me... like a flash-back of a beautiful moment in ones past.

Anyway, enough of the prosaic rambling. The "studio time" was approx. 4 and a half solid days on site in the studio... sleeping there, eating there, drinking there etc. Immersive for sure. The 6 hours is raw... very. I am hoping to get 4 of what I think are pretty solid installation works out of the material. Slowly evolving large scale "immersive" audio-video works. There might be more in there... Not sure yet :)