I would like to ask about the transfer from analogue to digital, how did it proceed, the first digital tool
was made by George Brown, it was analogue with some digital features, and then he constructed
programmer....so how it proceeded the transfer from improvisation to construction...
It has a little psychological background, now you have to understand, my interest in art were only
literature and poetry, the film for me was extended literature. It was kind of literature in space and the
syntax was positioning the camera cause that's what the film was, just to telling story by decoupage.
But when I went into electronic world, the most challenging was not really the artistic aspiration or
challenge, it was basically the new electronic material on its own expansions, specially that I became
structuralist as far as the material and its definition and kind of emergence.
I was kind of assuming some kind of socio-aesthetic duty to define that, what interest me most what
constitutes this new language which is complete departure, not complete but I went thru literature as
sort of form in avant-garde exercise, not really as poetic or narrative or literary accomplishment that
was done by predecessors that I couldn't possibly compete with like Kafka and all those innovators that
came after plus the new French wave in literature and so on. In film I also realized that this new
expansion of film had some kind of peak in that context, I knew it so I just went further and said, what
is the new territory for me that I could actually possess and this was the moment of emergence of this
time and energy organization in let's say television frame to begin with. Because it's a new frame, it still
had a frame of course like photography, film and...there was one more frame...and so I said in spite of...
So that definition stood in our decade but just in the middle of the decade we entered the situation of
the digital world, this is the middle 70s for us, it started earlier for the industry and military and so but
not really in any aesthetic investigation, which I even if I was looking for the material I also
subconsciously and very consciously tried to look at it as a set of aesthetic primitives. Something that
could actually represent this undefinable idea of aesthetic.
Also it has something to do with linguistics because as a poet I thought, Nietzsche used to be one very
dominant force of poetic expression or material, then of course aided usually by strong force of
psychological state of the human mind plus maybe some narrative system. But then the modern
movement just from the beginning of 19th century tried to reduce it like the French poetists and all that
experimenters, like Czech version of poetist movement, and symbolists in France and modern futurists
and all that stuff which I was very interested in and studied in fact by reading a lot of the material, a lot
of these new poetry and also prose and suddenly this kind of new principle of looking at things and also
in a way of living environment and also the support, because as you know video became very lucky or
it all started at the moment when the idea of social change came from the personalization of the media
like thru small portable equipment.
And of course video immediately separated as far the content, into socially active documentary branch
and then the experimental branch and then the gallery, it usually came from established sort of situation
of the gallery artists and they already had names in painting or performance, there was already very
interesting mix from sound thru all the disciplines, to visual arts and so. But what's called the
experimental part which was looking for its definition and its aesthetic independence because we were
trying to separate, we said no no, it's different what we are doing from what you do not only how it
looks like but how it behaves and how it's made...
So experimental part you mean people who concentrated on the medium, like synthesizer video...
...and they all had to be educated in new media so we have almost involuntarily associated with each
other, it was community. For example in socially conscious part was interested in media, they had to
still consider broadcast so they had to have way how to get this out and they had to study the same
thing, the television system or radio system or whatever so actually the tools united us completely. And
also science and art they were always trying to put it together these people outside, they didn't
understand that they have very little in common. But technology and art have lot to do with each other,
it's a direct ascent to a tool which you can take any form of art activity, you could always employ this
kind of technological tools that we got available. So this united us, the learning period which was very
steep, just to produce something which is normally confined within standards that are television
standards that you are supposed to obey and you are supposed to have a scope and will see the look of
your brightness and contrast and color and that's whole kind of technological priesthood that watches in
television studio. But when the artists came it was either totally incompetent or it was done by third
grade technicians somewhere at the universities, mostly students. And now of course we have number
of dilemma about it because the material that comes from that period from the artists looks actually
very insignificant visually as image compared to paintings and these established things, but now it's
taken by the galleries and the history as the way it looked. But it was just the total incompetence in
production of it.
But this small group of people I am talking about, that was interested in medium, we had to look into it,
what is the contrast, and how the color is made, so this is all still about a dialogue about what category
of aesthetic practice that is. I don't call it art much because for the art scene it was curiosity. And still
maybe is. But this is basically what we went through this analogue period.
Steina was working a little bit different, but she was acquiring the same knowledge because we were
together and taking all this, she was interested in all these aspects but she coming from violin acquired
idea that camera is an instrument like violin and she accepts that violin makes a sound and she accepts
consciously that also camera makes an image as camera as violin makes the sounds, that's my
definition of the understanding. But as far as understanding it and practicing if you look at some early
work of her it is both, looking into the machine and looking out. But she would always not mind using
image of the camera because for her it was irrelevant, she didn't have the same ethics about it.
My dilemma was the camera, even if I used it, it was just referencial, sometimes as a documentarist I
used it as a camera and we both used it as a camera but when I went into my work, the way I was
recognized by the art scene, because they understood that it was not only technical experimentation,
that it was also aesthetic experimentation, so in order to stay in that category for myself and actually, at
that time we were striken by this idea of dissemination of knowledge, as I would say we wanted to take
the fire from gods and bring it to the people.
And that was struggle thru many details like time-base corrector invention which could eventually
interface us with the industry but it happened so rare in these early years...
So there was always this division between television as system that's organized for delivering those
images and it still does which is expanded film basically and those other independent assignments to
the medium like what we were interested in looking what is structuralist attempt to disclose the secrets
of it. To scientists and technologists it was a banal affair. But integrated into this art experience was
kind of challenge. So that was how important it is we still don't know, it could be complete rococo
event, totally mislead by this new medium, but it has the whole connections thru appearance of the
digital code.
Suddenly this transition from analogue to digital, for us it was the tragic moment as well because we
wanted to follow this our religion which is to look at the code itself and define the code which was
quite possible in analogue, suddenly we stepped thru another territory which none of the code of the
structure of the analogue would be applicable. Everything in analogue world has to be changed into
digital code. There's no copulation between these two, simply you have to take one and as soon as you
want to interface it with the digital, you have to break its system, its structure, its continuity, into even
more, not only line by line definition of horizontal sync but you have to go to the range of megaheartz,
to chop its incoming analogue continuity into small and smaller elements and each of these clicks of
these high frequency clocks has to freeze this value and wait certain time until that frozen moment is
translated into a digital leather.
It means you have to freeze and transpose it into a digital leather of digital world for example, see
word.... I don't know if you understand at...without that you don't know how the infinite change of
analogue world, infinite time immunity because it goes in its own time as a total continuity, and if you
look at it unless you freeze it, you could see its state...
...if you have a continuity, let's say a half a waveform of energy, it's a raising energy and it's a falling
energy, it repeats six times a second, as a tone you hear it because it's more pleasant sound than any
other, like if you have square waves, how would you take this continuity and how would you translate
it into a code that has no up and down, it is either high or low, it has these two states. And when it
comes in it has to be organized by that timing of the apparatus that receives it, it means it has to
become synchronous to the timing of the machine called computer and it has to be assigned a certain
value of the moment in which the clock of the machine can accept the value of the changing signal.
It means that the signal has to be able to receive the value and then in certain moment it clocks it,
freezes it momentarily, read it, and sends the information in a state of on and off code to this particular
register which is after a while in a short time filled with these numbers and then let's say.
It has to sample very fast the waveform, fasting up when it eventually goes thru an apparatus, it comes
out the same way, because after that code it's coded into on and off signals by this idea of the logic how
it's put it into the register, called most significant bits and least significant bits, so that structure has to
be recorded in a computer memory and carried thru the machinery on retrieval, and reconstruct
whatever it got at that moment, as a number which is encoded in that register of digital numbers and
retrieve it out thru digital to analogue converters into a continuity of our perceptional real world, or
illusionary world.
But this idea of construction and deconstruction of the code connects it to the outside reality with the
digital computer reality and then to the retrieval into the reality of the human perception on the end.
Now if you cut off the input idea of the world like continuity of the light line by line, into the computer
and you just close the box and say, no, no, there is no input, there is internal organization of bits and
bytes that have different rules and it's now run by some kind of ability to handle and assemble these
bits and bites that would represent perhaps something like real world because now the question is how
do we communicate with human mind and the machine. So this idea of different or redefined
structuring of the material of bits and bytes thru some laws which in the end correspond to human
cognition and have a meaning inhuman observation, even if now you can create different worlds, which
surpass ability of the nature to exist because it can show you all aspect of space and even going to
universe with the fantasy represented thru ability to organize this new code into a kind of perceptual
units that say something not only to science which is interesting in certain events, like analyzing time
and energy in different aspects like looking at particle functions, but now also in this kind of general
narrative sense that either emulates the world as film use to or it finds the challenges in the computer
where it invents its own new existence, new worlds and changes and narratives and communication
and network.
So that's how I would characterize it. For us, as I said it meant slightly tragic thing, we could no longer
work alone because we understood analogue to the degree we needed to and we could learn more about
it but it is not discipline that could take too much time, within a couple of years you've got systematic
work, what I said we played all the time, we played day and night, for us it was not difficult to
understand, we also were lucky to get instruments from some strange situations so we had a scope and
we had a signal generator by trick tronic which was very elite piece of equipment, and we could
sometimes when we build something with designers or alone we could insert the whole sync at the end
just by being that provided by instruments that we didn't have to build because these were more
complex and so forth. So suddenly to leave that convenient life of complete control into this need to be
helped by computer programmer and I even tried and Steina tried to do some programming and I
succeeded in working with programming it even if we built the real time machine later, the Articulator.
But it was compared my time with people that do it every day it took me months to do what they do in
two days.
So what was the idea of Articulator?
To find the code, so then I assembled the same thing as I did my analogue assembly, with something
called Syntax of Binary Images, it interested me what constitutes the language of image, and again I
found very early when you take Boolean algebra, AND, OR, NOR, OR exclusive OR, negative
positive, these are in a way related to film and photography in a sense of mask, matt, negative, positive,
because when you put something which is A, just A and you say minus A, it becomes negative. So the
whole modality of this coding, became very clear and rational once you start photographing it,
transfering into a visual page, assembly.
So again I had to do it in stills, but meanwhile we found all the other aspects of it that you could use
things that you couldn't do in video, like you could freeze any moment or expose just the things that
were in motion, because when you are using the Boolean algebra and other programming, you start go
into this higher and higher codes. But i've been always interested in what's called the media primitives,
the basic tools from which media are based.
Once I understood that I dropped the scholastic part because both these series, Didactic Video and
Syntax of Binary Images, they were for me assignments as I would get it in some imaginary school, but
buy working with both aspects of the media, especially in digital, we had excellent teacher, Jeffrey
Schier who taught us basics that we needed to operate the system, I could even fix it one time because I
built it with my own hands, he would work at night and he would draw schematics every night and
...for like a year and half of daily operations he had system working, and it was real time with field rate
and we could only operate it outside of a computer, we had this LSI, the first computer we could
buy...so we could actually see the phenomenology of frame and field and study it and have a moving
image because we couldn't work with stills, neither of us was interested in stills that much but I had to
do it for its understanding.
So this was the introduction into this world and from there both of us a little bit separated, what united
us was interactivity, but then came this new aspect of it which we never, we always had audio, we were
born in interactivity, and sound and image for us was absolutely essential, and there were very few
works where we separated them but then of course we went into looking into narrative formats, this
was after 70s which was completely exploratory except some strange documentary of sketches of social
underground of New York, all the gay theatre and rock-and-roll and all these things, we have very large
library which we hadn't really experimented enough with, and then we did a lot of interactive experimentation, with laser disk, sent later into memory directly, and the whole era...
