Analogue Video Synthesizer 1: Colour which Taken from God is Manipulated by Synthesizer (#criticalwriting #RL)
colour is not merely for shines. it is a shine itself. a pure and uncoloured ray
in which there is a certain power and disposition on it. to stir up a sensation. colour is neither boring nor grumpy. in contrast to life that is indeed boring
and the brainer is (precisely) grumpy (?) colour is always happy. it transcends. it’s translucent on the dreamy imagery on the horizonless videory. not affected by boring discourse of the grumpy artist or curators or art critics. here lies the history of colour, of its synthesis of its imagery of its videory. of its machinery detach from the burden meaning of the syntax of semiotics. here lies the illusionary colour. dancing in every electron gunshot in a dreamy video. in the magnificence cathode-ray tube composed by a radical machine. by a radical software. by a video synthesizer. makes us jump into. a distorted form. colour is a big illusionist in the history of video.
The turning point of the video synthesizer began with the invention of a colour television or what Youngblood called this era the Paleocybernetics Age. The colour television developed from phosphorus-based technology, 75%, was composed of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) kinescope. At the same time, the inner screen is coated by a phosphor that highly reacts to the CRT’s electron beam, producing a scan pattern reaction and a radiant image. Television also adopts wavelengths which are modulated into analogue codes and shot through a phosphoric gun on the screen for stimulating coloured image.
The colour television initiated various experiments on the CRT with the ambition of turning the cathode into a canvas. They tried to create a synthesizer, by modifying kinescope, adding colour additives to fiddling with analogue codes of electromagnetic waves. Eric Siegel, the pioneer of video synthesizers, began developing the Processing Chrominance Synthesizer (PCS) in 1968. PCS was the first colorizer that separated black-and-white signals from cameras, cassettes, or broadcast signals; and added color to the signal. Siegel used PCS to make Psychedelavision in Color, exhibited at the Television as a Creative Medium exhibition at Howard Wise in May 1969. In the third part of Psychedelavision in Color, Einstine was remade after the exhibition because the electron files failed to be stored in the synthesizer.
The remake version of Einstine used coloured video feedback recordings to create psychedelic effects. Einstein’s image was set in blue, purplish red, and green, which dissolved into a burst of new colours, the occasional turmoil of orange and overflowing red distorted the image. The colours moved wildly along with the Rimsky-Korsakov music.
“Psychedelavision is my attempt at video mind expansion. A new science must be created which can reach the inner core of human beings. One of the most important tools in this new science will be television… The American Dream no longer is evolving. It’s in a state of decay. Television must be liberated.” (Youngblood, 1970, p.361)
After PCS, Siegel developed the Electronic Video Synthesizer (EVS, 1970), an electronic-analogue synthesizer with the first open system where video-makers could select patterns and colours. EVS generated independent image from an input (film, direct camera, and other optical media). It was the primary advantage of EVS compared to PCS — PCS took input from optical medium while EVS process it directly and generate electronic images in real-time within controlled technical precision. In EVS, Siegel utilized CRT’s potential to activate phosphorus so the DC circuits could consistently combine incoming signals. As for motion pictures, EVS used a generator and oscillator. Two mixers combined the oscillator and generator waves, while the third mixer unites the inputs from the two cameras. The three signals will be modulated by a colour encoder to construct the colour video signal, resulting in colour patterns that were geometric with an adjusted constant level.
The two Siegel synthesizers are summarised by Woody Vasulka in synthetic vs. representational or so-called Bazenian images (those taken from God/Nature through the camera versus those constructed inside the instrument). According to Vasulka, PCS modulated the colour of images taken from God by using a camera lens to capture what already be seen in the world. Simultaneously, EVS through electronic signals produced new colours that look cosmic and mystical yet still natural. The colour-image was synthetic and generated from various optical media. Moreover, it would construct a new perception of our sense and became natural when we sensed it.
In the same year, Stephen Beck also developed the electronic synthesizer Direct Video Synthesizer with real-time processing like EVS. Direct Video could process electrons directly from a TV and a camera. Initially, the prototype Direct Video Synthesizer (DV#0) was developed in 1969; Beck modified a colour television set with a modulation source to control the RGB electron weapons from a CRT. The modulation source was pulled from the Buchla audio synthesizer to produce sound visuals. In contrast, the oscillator and audio signal from Buchla was combined with an external analogue mixer to form colours. However, DV # 0 struggled to capture audio signals that produce good visuals. Until finally, NCET gave Beck a grant to develop a Direct Video named Direct Video 1 (DV # 1). DV # 1 applied the modular design based on the image model of colour, form, texture, and motion to produce a “direct video” image, which Beck called “voltage to position converter.” The critical feature of DV#1 was modulating the converter from an input voltage that changed the size or position of the waveform and added an edge outliner that was wired by binary logic state.
“The visual design aesthetic model of the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer is constructivist in nature, not distortionist. Based on my personal visions it differs significantly from other video image processors and video synthesizers of the era, which were mostly based on colourising or distorting images originating from TV cameras, rather than constructing it only from electrons.” (Beck, 2000)
After the DV # 1 project was completed, Beck began working on Video Weaver. This digital pattern generator used a string of counters and a Random-Access Memory (RAM) to hold and retrieve a stored pattern without using static scanning. Video Weaver was more commonly referred to as “fame buffer” as there is an electronic loom with a vertical warp and a horizontal weft.
“The pattern is programmed into the memory then ‘woven’ onto the screen by a set of phases shifting counters that slide and shift their count sequence in time to the video raster. A cursor is available to write in the pattern, while various phasing and counter direction parameters are used to offset the scanning order of the resulting video pattern. It differs from a strict frame buffer design in that the counters that read the memory are not locked into a static scanning order, but drift and wrap-around as the raster progresses.” (Siedler, Ars Electronica, 1992)
Video Weaver could generate images by converting analogue signals to digital by processing algorithms in real-time. The Video Weaver was presented in 1992 for the Ars Electronica exhibition Pioneers of Electronic Art, showing the original 1974 design within two ASIC chips that replaced the 60 original 7400 series TTL logic chips.
Along with the creation of cathode canvas, television channels began to broadcast experimental programs with the main idea: television as art, one of which was The Medium is the Medium (1969) by WGBH under director Fred Barzyk. Barzyk invited six artists Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, Nam June Paik, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini, to replace television programs with video art. They were invited to make a short video using WGBH equipment; at that time, WGBH had a basic chromakey tool, which was hard to access. The Medium is the Medium began in March 1969, featuring the work of the six artists with one of the controversial was Paik’s Opera #1.
“In the long-ranged future, such a versatile colour synthesizer will become a standard equipment like today’s Hammond organ, or Moog’s synthesizer in the musical field, but even in the immediate future it will find wide application. […] [I]t might end up by producing a new fertile genre, called Electronic Opera.” (Paik, 2011, 9–10)
Paik brought a dozen televisions that had been added magnets to distort images to the WGBH studio, negative image reversal fields, and tape delays. Magnets on television distorted the path of electrons flowing from the electron gun to the screen. Paik, at the same time, has prepared a recording image consisting of 3 hippies, a bare dancer, and Nixon.
After the image was synthesized, we would see an unusual picture; starting with eight neon loops that move according to the background music created by the electronic signal directly. Then, entering the sequence of 3 hippies with negative images of overlapping green and blue tinge, distorted by magnets with neon loops, which burst through the gap. These images were then replaced by the dancer’s figure and duplicated into the RGB or may be referred to as the RGB dance, followed by a rotating Nixon image, which was giving us a psychedelic effect. Not long after that, a man’s voice announced, “life is boring,” next he gave instructions “close one eyes,” “open one-half ways,” and “turn off your television set.”
However, the cost of using colour experimentation tools in WGBH was expensive. Being frustrated, Paik, with his friend Shuya Abe created a low-cost colour manipulation system called Paik Abe Visual Synthesizer (PAVS).
“Video synthesizer is the accumulation of my nine year’s TV-shit (if this holy allusion is allowed), turned into a real-time video piano by the Golden Finger of Shuya Abe, my great mentor,” (Paik, as quoted in Radical Software, 1970, p.27)
PAVS consisted of several television monitors, surveillance cameras, and two-colour coders with a modular design to manipulate images and a more extensive range of colouring possibilities. PAVS could pick up 10–12 black-and-white input signals. Paik also used Textonix Vectorscope to monitor chroma level, making colours brighter and more complex so that it still could meet with the FCC colour standard.
“It was an artist’s machine — built by an artist for artists — more emotional and less intellectual. The PAVS was about colour — not about counting, positioning and bending raster lines. Rather than the hard-edged, cartoon colour of the Scanimate, it produced gorgeous, electronic watercolour.” (Wright, 2006, p.28–29)
Although PAVS already met FCC standards, its colour control was far from expectations. The final colours produced were inconstant because the two modular encodings in PAVS caused the colours highly dependent on the encoder connected to the camera, which also acted as a synthesizer. PAVS debuted with Video Commune (Beatles Beginning to End) on WGBH’s second channel, WGBX, on August 1, 1970.
Adopting PAVS’ concept, in 1972, Steve Rutt and Bill Etra developed a ‘scan processor’ named Rutt-Etra synthesizer. Rutt-Etra was an analogue computer that can be controlled through electronic voltage, making it possible to manipulate distortion signals in real-time. Rutt-Etra used ramp/sine generators, triangles, square wave generators, audio interfaces, adders, and diodes modules to control the synthesizer’s appearance.
“The concept in the Rutt/Etra is that the Rutt/Etra changes the time in which you see parts of the picture. It’s a machine that manipulates images in time. I see it as a time processor. […] I would allocate that feature as Steve’s and my contribution.” (Bill Etra in Vasulka, 1978, 9)
Rutt/Etra, mechanically, intercepted black and white video monitor sweep signals and modulated these signals using analogue control voltages; hence we could directly change the waveform. The image on the video was ‘scanned’ facing the monitor screen, modulated to be combined with other video signals. Rutt/Etra produced raster scanning controls in a CRT, created raster animations, generated video waveforms and audio content with video waveforms, and produced video waveforms with audio. Rutt/Etra was used intensively by artists Steina and Woody Vasulka in C-Trend (1974). Reminiscence (1974), Vocabulary (1973), Violin Power (1970–1978), The Matter (1974), The Art of Memory (1978), and Voice Windows (1986).
In C-Trend, Vasulka recorded a road scene with a passing car. These recorded images were later scanned using the camera connected to the monitor screen. It resulted in deformed images of their initial shape. All images on C-Trend were fluid, dark spaces filled with vertical lines, and bright spaces generated from deformed images transformed into a new form. The first colour sometimes emerged with the object of a moving car, but it was occasionally being replaced with noise and dark space. Its shape was like three-dimensional, sometimes like a melting vertical plane, curling, tilting, and even broken. On C-Trend, audio still had reality; the sound of a car or bird remained the initial image’s reality.
The colours produced by the synthesizers from Beck to Rutt-Etra are indeed very magical, illusory, but at the same time chaotic since no one can guess or even categorize what kind of colour comes out. It is not clear which of the old colour is new, all of which blend and force us to reproduce new perceptions. Thus, what kind of colour we see?
_______rafikalifi
References:
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Beck, S. C. (1971). A Description of the Voltage to Position Converter, a Portion of the Direct Video Synthesizer, a Real Time Electronic System for Generating Color Graphics in the Television Format. Vasulka Archive, 1–3.
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Renoir, Seoul, South Korea: Nam June Paik Art Center, pp. 8–10.
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Vasulka, Woody; Vasulka, Steina. (1992). Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt, Pioniere der Elektronischen Kunst = Pioneers of electronic art. ‘Stephen Beck: Direct Video Synthesizer and Beck Video Weaver’. Santa Fe: The Vasulkas; Linz: Ars Electronica. Ars Electronica 1992 exhibition catalogue, 122–125.
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Further References:
Bergson, H., Paul, N. M., & Palmer, W. S. (2004). Matter and memory. Courier Corporation.
Deleuze, G. (2013). Cinema II: the time-image. Bloomsbury Publishing.
