Rhizome | Blog Posts tagged "1970s"

Essential Repertoire Festival Kicks Off Tonight at Issue Project Room

Ceci Moss | Thu Dec 3rd, 2009 noon

Connie Beckley, Sound Split, 1975

Don't have access to a time machine, but want a taste of the Kitchen's programming during the late 1970s? Look no further than the Essential Repertoire Festival, which begins tonight and runs through the weekend at Issue Project Room. Organized by the experimental music series Darmstadt, the festival will restage works originally performed at the Kitchen's New Music New York concerts from 1979, curated by Rhys Chatham. Composers slated to present their 1970s-era work at Essential Repertoire include “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Connie Beckley, David Van Tieghem, Jill Kroesen, Jon Gibson, Ned Sublette, Peter Gordon, Peter Zummo, Petr Kotik, Phill Niblock, and a special performance of Meredith Monk's Dolmen Music by the M6. Check the full schedule here.

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Required Reading

Ceci Moss | Mon Nov 9th, 2009 1:55 p.m.

Mark Wilson, csq3422, 2008 (archival ink jet on rag paper, 61 x 61 cm, 24 x 24 in)

Julie Karabenick: Early in your career you made paintings and drawings. Now for almost 30 years you've used computers in making your art.

Mark Wilson: When I started using computers in 1980, very few artists were using them. To me, these machines were totally cool and exciting. Back then, there was little software of interest to an artist like myself. To make art with computers, you had to invent new working procedures. I bought a personal computer and learned to write my own software. I was trying to find a unique way of using the computer and software to create geometric images.

After developing some programming skills, the methodology of writing software to create images became utterly natural.

-- EXCERPT FROM "AN INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST MARK WILSON" BY JULIE KARABENICK ON GEOFORM

(Via Plog)

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Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics

Geeta Dayal | Wed Oct 21st, 2009 1 p.m.

Cybernetics is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts. The word itself seems sinister and futuristic, but the term has ancient roots - the Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Cybernetics was famously defined in more recent times by Norbert Wiener in 1948, as the science of “control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” Words like "control” may seem to have creepy overtones, but at its heart, cybernetics is simply the study of systems. "Cybernetics is the discipline of whole systems thinking...a whole system is a living system is a learning system," as Stewart Brand put it in 1980. Cybernetic systems have been used to model all kinds of phenomena, with varying degrees of success - factories, societies, machines, ecosystems, brains -- and many noted artists and musicians derived inspiration from this powerful conceptual toolkit. Cybernetics may be one of the most interdisciplinary frameworks ever devised; its theories link engineering, math, physics, biology, psychology, and an array of other fields, and ideas from cybernetics inevitably infiltrated the arts. The musician and producer Brian Eno, for example, was a big fan of connecting ideas from cybernetics to the studio environment, and to music composition, in his work in the 1970s.

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Wandawega Waters (1978) - Dan Sandin

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 3 p.m.

This is a example of early video art using the color capability of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor - the "Color IP".

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Not of this Earth (1978) - Barbara Latham, John Manning, and Ed Rankus

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 2 p.m.

This is a example of early video art using the color capability of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor - the "Color IP".

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Making of the Computer Graphics for Star Wars (Episode IV) (1977)

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 1 p.m.

The computer graphics for the first Star Wars film was created by Larry Cuba in the 1970s at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Electronic Masks (1976) - Barbara Sykes

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 noon

This is a example of early video art by internationally renowned technologist and EVL/UIC MFA alumni Barbara Sykes using the color capability of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor - the "Color IP".

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Colorful Colorado (1974) - Phil Morton

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 11 a.m.

This is a example of early video art using the color capability of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor - the "Color IP".

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5 Minute Romp thru the IP (1971)

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 10 a.m.

This is an early video piece staring Dan Sandin in which he explains, in general terms, the functionality of the Sandin Analogue Image Processor (IP). This was the instructional video that accompanied the modules for constructing you own Sandin IP.

Sandin was an advocate of education and espoused a non-commercial philosophy, emphasizing a public access to processing methods and the machines that assist in generating the images. Accordingly, he placed the circuit board layouts for the IP with a commercial circuit board company and freely published schematics and other documentation.

The IP is a general-purpose patch programmable analogue computer, which is different from a regular digital computer, and is optimized to process video/television signals and sound. The video is processed through the IP "live" so that the viewer is able to see the effect on video signals. Initially the video is B&W;, at the end Sandin debuts the 'Color IP'.

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Video Selections from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory's First Decade

Ceci Moss | Tue Sep 22nd, 2009 9:30 a.m.

A joint initiative between the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Engineering and School of Art & Design, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory has long operated as a center for interdisciplinary research in art and computer science. Founded in 1973 by artist Daniel Sandin (creator of the Sandin Image Processor, a crucial tool for video artists in the 1970s) and computer scientist Tom DeFanti (developer of the GRASS programming language), over the years EVL has sponsored pivotal research and development in the field of visualization, resulting in output such as the virtual reality theater CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) in 1992, the GeoWall in 2001, Varrier in 1999 and the LambdaTable in 2004.

Admittedly, one day of videos is not enough to cover the breadth of EVL's work from the past 36 years. That said, today we will post selections by EVL's faculty and students from the first decade. These clips capture the playfulness and excitement of their creators, as they experiment with new tools and techniques. All of these videos were sourced from EVL's YouTube account, which includes original work and documentation up to the present day.

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