Responsive Aesthetics: Remediating Digital-to-Analog Television Converters as Artist Tools

Eric Souther

“Responsive Aesthetics: Remediating Digital-to-Analog Television Converters as Artist Tools” documents the research process undertaken to explore the reanimation of a digital-to-analog television converter box as an artistic tool for intervention with the digital broadcast image through real-time datamoshing. We define datamoshing as an exploitation and interruption of the algorithms that comprise high quality digital streaming video, resulting in the visual distortion and alteration of the image. Our goal was to create a responsive datamoshing system that would not only modulate and distort the incoming broadcast image, but also provide artists with a level of control over these variations. We approached this process as artists, rather than technologists. Inspired by a specific visual or aesthetic result, we would reflect on how this result was achieved technically and then experiment with other methods that might offer further enhancement. The final result was the creation of a responsive datamoshing tool for use in exhibition or performance, both on its own or in combination with other systems (i.e., software, apps, image processing machines).

The pioneering live televisual transmission work of Nam June Paik, Earl Reiback, and Aldo Tabellini provided us with a blueprint for our own investigations. Each of these artists intervened with an incoming analog television broadcast at different points in its reception, focusing either on the signal itself or the receiving apparatus. Using fans, oscillators, and electric motors placed within a gallery space, Nam June Paik was able to interfere with the transmission’s electromagnetic signal before it reached the television set, causing onscreen flickering of the image as well as vertical roll and horizontal and diagonal picture distortions. Paik also experimented with altering the broadcast signal after it had been received and rescanned as an image. In Magnet TV (1965), a strong magnet placed on top of the television set caused the scan lines of the broadcast image to bend, while a round handheld magnet placed directly on the TV screen in Demagnitizer (1965) reformulated the scan lines into a spinning disk. By painting the walls of the analog television set’s cathode ray tubes with colored phosphor paint, Earl Reiback disrupted the normal rescanning of the broadcast image all together, revealing only the electrons that comprised the transmission on-screen. In 1969, Aldo Tambellini’s vision to reformulate the live broadcast image into a spiral configuration led him to collaborate with Bell Labs engineers Tracy Kinsel and Hans Reinbold. Together they rewired the internal circuitry of an analog television set’s cathode ray tube. As Tambellini later explained,

[a] set was re-circuited for me so that all regular broadcast imagery was transformed into a constantly moving spiral that is drawn into the center of the tub. After many attempts, we finally got the results we wanted. To me it was nature as we will see it in the future, in circular or spiral form. No Up- No Down-No Gravity. Floating. I called the piece, “BLACK SPIRAL.” (“The Black Gate Theatre”)

Along with Paik, Vostell, and Reiback, Tambellini’s experimentation demonstrated the instability of the broadcast signal while also revealing its aesthetic potential as an artistic material.

Video artist Woody Vasulka would later stress the importance of these early investigations, noting, ‘I P E R S O N A L L Y regard Tambellini’s and Paik’s concerns in the sixties as the true and direct inspiration to our generation of “synthesizing” artists’ (110). Inspired by these interventions, the synthesising artists Vasulka alludes to spearheaded the creation of a number of video tools, also referred to as video synthesisers, widening their investigation to modify a range of electronic signals —live camera signal, video playback, audio tape playback, and internal system signal generation, as well as the incoming broadcast signal.^[1]

Video synthesisers were able to disturb the signal more rigorously and consistently; unlike earlier broadcast signal interventions, these tools offered artists a level of control over their manipulations, as well as the ability to isolate specific effects (i.e., colourise an image or distort scan lines at different modulations). The ability to control variations in the signal was elevated to an aesthetic by these synthesising artists, who were able to both isolate and increase or decrease desired effects at will, leaving Woody Vasulka to observe: ‘There is a certain behavior of the electronic image that is unique […] It’s liquid, it’s shapeable, it’s clay. It’s an art material that exists independently’ (Furlong 14). The flexibility of these systems also extended the language and materiality of image processing into a number of realms. Sherry Miller Hocking notes that image processing systems, like the one installed at the Experimental Television Center in mid-state New York, incorporated numerous video synthesising machines which were ‘used in a wide variety of applications, from real-time documentary recordings, to imagistic narratives, to formal abstractions. They were presented as live performances, prerecorded tapes, interactive sculptures and installations’ (442).

<< previous

next >>

Tip

Tip