So that's basically the recordings, they are very experimental, and they are recorded through slit. You
have to make a slit instead of an open frame and then you have to put a rotating mirror at the end of it
and you rotate the mirror with the pull down, it has to be somehow synchronized, and then that's what
you get record of. I have somewhere a reel of it that i'll have to find...Not only this, I was also did
stroboscopic light and did the same recording thru stroboscopic light, when you don't need a slit, you
just get this different recording. But I have some enlargements I did through scanning this in electronic
format. So that's basically that period and then I built different instruments, hand held projectors and all
kind of stuff, which I have some photographs of for publications.
This period is not particularly long...because immediately when I discovered video, I kind of suspended
everything, writing – I just did some writing at that time -, and film, and then I went completely into
video, with this audio synthesizer we already bought, called Putney, so that means in fact the last few
months of the 60s through Harvey Lloyd, there was a project which I was part of, for American Can
Company, kind of trade show that the crew that was there, young people, perverted the whole thing into
a video presentation instead of bringing physical cans there, which eventually was a total disaster for
the company, and it cost the guy that run that apartment of promotion the job but he was a rich man, so
when they kicked him out he took the trip around the globe with his yacht...
So anyway, we created something we called Matrix, but then there was large conflict with the group
called International structures, which was the coalition of other artists. That's a whole episode
explained somewhere, and you can get some information from the other side, there are the whole
different interpretations of what happened. There's a man in Berlin, Ira Schneider, he would show you
the whole different aspect of that time, so he would put the whole different spin on this situation. But I
was told that this was a standard because these people were social activists, all of them, about five
people Frank Gillet was the writer, they immediately made a corporation against Harvey Lloyd, so they
could fill a corporate endightment against the copyright, they had some writings about Matrix before,
so there was that interesting conflict and I was just behind this looking at these people incorporating no
longer individual struggling for social justice but simply trying to get million dollars out of it or maybe
two.
But anyway it was real force and I understood American radicalism is only skin deep, there was no
understanding or sharing, no concept of anything, it was all privatized and accommodized immediately,
but I liked the people that did it, these new avant-gardists, because they just had a passion for the media
that would excuse anything, I knew about that, so that was that, at that time Alfons also introduced me
to a lot of other artists.
And then Steina came from Paris and we started to work on much more systematic thing, and when I
started to bring some video equipment which was originally for the exhibition of American can
company, at night and I would borrow it and then Steina when I was working started to play with it and
then I came home and could see that she was really having production there every day and then she
stopped playing and I said finally, no no no, I don't keep working so I just I don't remember how we got
money, she must have borrowed it from her uncle, and suddenly we both started to work full time.
Occasionally we got jobs here and there, I was editor, I still edited film of course but had new jobs,
these multi-screens that I was editing with Francis Thompson, but we could do it, and then we got
grants because at that time the whole social significance of video became widely accepted by the
funding organizations and the history of art twenty more years was just through funding, it was nothing
with teaching, occasional, there was a period of going to Buffalo to teach, I became professor there, we
had plenty of space there and we had money to build equipment with students, but after six years we
just went to Santa Fe and that's the whole different world. But we did very important things in Buffalo
and New York actually was the most, it was the beginnings that are always important, and Buffalo we
had contributions from our students who told us everything about digital, and build some digital
equipment, and so this kind of period is going to be well covered by this project of Kathy High.
