LIVE VIDEO FEEDBACK

Skip — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:44:03 +0000

Streamed live from a set of digital video machines in VFA’s studio… this video feedback is an artificial living flow of electronic light rays… It cannot be controlled… It’s more like surfing waves of light trying to find delicate balance points within the flow… left alone it changes and can wipe out… settings will be modified to allow new and different looks everyday.

Philo T. Farnsworth

Skip — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:42:16 +0000

“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for “California Video,” running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.
Jonathan Furmanski, an assistant conservator at the institute, describes one particularly unruly video installation. “The Philo T. Farnsworth Video Obelisk” (by Skip Sweeney and Video Free America) was recorded on “a phenomenally obscure 1-inch tape that plays only on a specific type of Sony deck. I needed to locate and repair such a deck in order to extract the signal from the tape. The signal itself was loaded with its own problems because the artists created a montage from a variety of sources that caused the video signal to fluctuate dramatically from scene to scene. Artists are not engineers and like to push tools like video equipment until they do something unexpected. And that unexpected thing is often the ‘art.’ “

Video Free America » Feedback

LIVE VIDEO FEEDBACK

Philo T. Farnsworth