Signal Culture Alumni: Selections from Videosyntezy 2
Curated by Debora Bernagozzi
July 15th @ Buntport Theater
Doors 7:30 Screening + Performance 8pm
Statement
Signal Culture is a nonprofit experimental media arts residency program that has recently relocated to Loveland from upstate New York. In the 6 years we were in NY, we welcomed about 400 artists, researchers, and toolmakers from close to 30 countries and around the US. One of the things that makes Signal Culture special is its selection of realtime image and sound processing equipment. When the Intermediale Festival put out a call for analog video works in 2022, a large number of Signal Culture alumni were represented in the exhibition Videosyntezy 2 in Legnica, Poland. This is a sampling of works from Videosyntezy 2, created by our alumni.
Program
Paloma Kop "debris fields (take 2)" (USA)
The process for this video began with footage from Matthew Ryals’ live musical performance, which I brought into my analog video equipment and processed through a series of colorful, echoing feedback loops. The layers of analog video were then re-combined with the source footage, producing an evolving hybrid visual composition which parallels the sound. It progresses through a series of different "scenes" in which the interaction between the source and the churning video feedback is clearly apparent at times, and at other times becomes very abstract. -Paloma Kop
Sara Gevurtz and Thomas Asmuth, "Untitled (water data and sensor-driven abstractions)" (USA)
In Untitled: Water Data and Sensor-Driven Abstractions, the artists created a compilation video from clips that were gathered during a residency at Owego, NY in northern New York state. The artist duo went out on the river that bisects the city and gathered various video both above and below the water. This video creates the beginning of the video journey down the river. The clips that end the video are turbidity readings visualized by audio waves manipulated to get the variations.
Jen Kutler "Cathode Ray Gunpoint" (USA)
Cathode Ray Gun Point is an audio-visual performance piece in which Kutler relates stories by the light of a single match while wearing a lie detection circuit which controls the audio and visual environment. Video of Kutler reciting the text is manipulated by an RGB raster manipulation unit or "wobbulator" made from a vintage cathode ray tube projector and hand wound coils. The "wobbulator" is controlled by the lie detector's signals. The stories told are accompanied by audio generated from the lie detector's signals which return to the air via speakers to manipulate the match's flame.
Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler "Confessions on a Transmission Line" (Turkey)
In Confessions on a Transmission Line, we explore the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality. Using real-time signal processing tools and improvisational strategies, we set up a performance space where our persona interacts with a discarded megaphone. By re-using this object as a tool and instrument to both project and receive transmission frequencies, we are searching for a way to communicate with our queer ancestors and those yet to be born.
Zsolt Gyenes "Ruler" (Hungary)
Based on using analog techique (Doepfer Mixer and Jones Colorizer/Keyer). Audio signals transformed to another medium. Different audio-visual sequences met randomly and formed new relations, correspondences. You can see what you can hear; pure visual music.
Scott Kiernan "The Room Presumed" (USA)
"The Room Presumed" utilizes machine learning and real-time video processing to reveal the paradoxes inherent in the ways we speak about immersive media. In other words, the act of speaking about immersion, as is so often done in the marketing of tech, is somewhat paradoxical. One could imagine instead, that a true state of "immersion" may defy the need for language all together. The work is inspired by a chapter in Howard Rheingold’s 1983 book, Tools for Thought which describes an early 1980s thought-experiment at Atari in which a group of computer scientists envision “virtual reality” without any of the needed tools to produce it. Through this exercise, the subjects became improvisational actors, speaking the roles of “user” and “interface”. Scripted by an ML trained on this account, The Room Presumed distends their unfinished acts and reveals the illusory comforts of a so-called “technological immersion.”
Phillip Stearns "Apieron | Peras 4 MOV" LIVE PERFORMANCE (USA)
Since 2007, I've been refining a high-resolution analog audio-video synthesizer, currently housed in a Nintendo Gameboy case, lovingly referred to as the Slain Boy.
Starting in 2015, I began efforts to adapt the core VGA technology into a full HD analog modular video synthesis system at Signal Culture with support of a NYSCA grant.
The principal concept behind the instrument is feedback, particularly between audio and video signals. Slain Boy accepts audio input, passes it through as series of amplifiers and digital switches, then formats it for display on a VGA device at 1080p30 or 720p30 resolutions. The audio and video outputs are split from the same signal source, so what you hear is what you see and visa versa.
Through an external audio mixer, the Slain Boy's audio outputs are mixed, filtered, and fed back into its inputs, closing the feedback loop to produce oscillations at audio and video rates.
Performance of the device involves operating various knobs and switches on the Slain Boy unit as well as controls on the audio mixer.
I view performing with the instrument as navigating a constantly evolving terrain or landscape within the flow of intermixing signals. Although it may appear as though I'm "controlling" the instrument during the performance, the system is inherently chaotic and defies traditional notions of control. The performing system is a collaborator and guides me into different sonic and visual terrain just as much as I direct our journey together as performer, performing system and audience.
Technologies are often seen as tools, particularly as instruments of control. While in some respects this is true, the reality is far more complicated. Technologies possess their own properties and potentials which will always surpass the imagination and intent of their creators. Part of the underlying philosophy of this instrument, and the body of work created with it, is the idea that domination and control that is sometimes expressed through technologies and tools, is only one very myopic perspective; that there are other ways of approaching technologies, as both collaborators and instruments facilitating cooperation, rather than control and domination.
