In our work it was consistently interactive, because we always made the image as by-product of sound
or sound as by-product of the image, in a mutual affinity because it was our credo, it was our attention,
we don't add music to anything, in order to enhance it, we always made sounds to testify about the
activity of this medium. It was concept of our identification or investigation of the material behavior
and so forth. We had all the religion about automatic or automated independent processes like feedback
and cycles of certain events and that all went into control thru digital code or MIDI code thru
translation between motion or camera analysis and all kinds of things, which I didn't finish and I am
still thinking about building this interactive theater that I always wanted to do but never got real
funding because now we are not talking really about hundreds of dollars as we used to but it's
something now that has to be funded because there's no technological base for free anymore or almost
free. Now we separated technology and art completely, and now we can either learn the technology
degree to build it ourselves but it's getting into programming as well, so the whole thing has become
cumbersome as far as art practice.
The original beginning of this interest was Theater of Hybrid Automata which was just the first set up
to explore the space, how you identify, index the space by camera or by laser beam or acoustic
interaction. All kinds of tools we got, Steina was moving pictures on player because we got access to
the protocol in which you can go forward and backward and fast and slow on tape, Umatic system and
thru the translation of MIDI code that she did thru violin and all kinds of experiments that we recorded
in various portions of our life. And then of course music became interested in video and this large
interactivity in the 80s and the beginning of 90s that goes on now on computer, on real-time computer
performance, but still there is no theatre, and it's like Youngblood thinking, that there is something
more to say, and i'll try...and I have nice illness now so I should be protected from duty...
...but things used to come to you, you didn't really have to think about it much, you know, natural
evolution was built into the...use this as much it was offering itself, now leading the industrial evolution
on its own you are suddenly working with parallel interests. It's kind of human interest, like the theatre
at the beginning of the century, where it was anti avant-garde theatre like Meyerchold and Tayrov, they
were interested in leaving the psychology behind, and also theatre as Stanislavsky methods and all
those things. You know suddenly you are confronted with coding system of dramatic language, and I
am trying to enter what I call dramatic primitives, the medium itself would suggest, but there is no idea
of presenting the next ...dramatic conflict, it's the very successful now, it's the performance, that people
can play thru the instrument, or sound, at the same time structural work.
I've always thought if I am really a structuralist, because if you are worried, narrative, telling us story
or telling us subject, the answer is you are working thru structuralist enterprise which doesn't require to
re-answer these basic questions, it's not interested in human psychology that way, it's something used
template for secondary thought and your interpretation is as good as somebody else's, but the structure
itself holds its original suggestions, whatever it is, the interpretation is never given, even in minimalist
art, but that has its dead end as well. Even in interactivity it's kind of dead-ended. But that's my interest
because the others still they go to networking and all that stuff. There is still some room, but it's usually
humor and jokes, so it's kind of dead-ended also. And so I have no opinion now if it could succeed,
only the conditions of justifying the space now are different, there's no way we could get the space of
that size, like a loft in New York for 150 dollars or less, I think that's what we payed, 48 dollars for
fantastic space, with heating.
Image and Sound
I was looking at the instrument and said, what the hell is the property of the internal apparatus, does it
have any aesthetic definition, so I was beginning to understand the waveforms and it looks like in
sound first when imposed on this different time raster, and so this suddenly brings you certain
differences but certain similarities. The difference is that sound is actually more or less random, it
doesn't have a clock it works on its own continuity as undivided in time segments. Video comes line by
line, it does have a piece of definition, which is beginning and end of the line which is the pulse,
negative going compared to positive going information of the line and then each field, field frame,
suddenly it has very significant audible pulse, 60cycle pulse in the NTSC which in fact disturbs the
continuity of the sound.
So when you listen to audio from sound, it's continuously expressed by the 60cycle hum which is
classic new age environment, we hear 60 cycles everywhere even if we block them psychologically but
that's the hum of our electricity. Another precision or definition or limitation is when you want to
intervene with the sound, want to influence by sound electronic image, you find this dilemma that there
are two basic frequencies, in television is the line frequency 1507 on the 15 above audio or barely
audio, you still hear it as a child and your dog hears it all the time in that frequency spectrum, it's the
only time when you stabilize the waveform that comes into it in a cognitive horizontal display
otherwise it just very unorganized like, it becomes total anarchy.
The same applies to the vertical pulse, each field there is a pulse and if you are not synchronized to that
the image is not stabilized vertically, it just rolls horizontally, so the verticality and horizontality play
the paradoxical description.
So if you want to generate for example the cognitive shape or form, without that your mind cannot lock
to the object-like image, like photographic image, can only receive it as textural, just rapid activity on
the screen like the noise. Your struggle is how to prove that these two media are in relationship, how
they are the same material, you have to device instruments like scan processor it was devised by friends
and it comes form the tradition of observing some medical events, and you create either variable raster,
it has to be run by different frequencies to lock them as territory and then you put in some input that
could be interpreted on it or already the computers understand it the same. Or if you work with
television, if you want the medium to communicate with the environment, with the art for example and
show them, hey, there's something going on, then you have to confine this horizontality and verticality
as frequency range into those of a television.
So you have to squeeze yourself into very small area of locked frequencies which have to be always
triggered and taken from the age of each line so they would not really drift drastically. It's not about
how it looks like, it's all about how to conform the material that's not coming from the camera but
coming from the different source like an oscillator or something that can function under this
confinement, and then what gives you control over this shape of that because then you have certain way
of dialogue between photographic image or lens and camera image and something that is
electromagnetic display processing, you use the electromagnetic form of it that enters into horizontal
and vertical deflection which basically draws the line on the screen and you can alter them, slightly of
course because once you go to far it loses its cognitive meaning. Again mind has the limits in which it
accepts the image or say it has nothing to say to me.
So this dialogue not only with your mind but comes with your instrument and within its medium and
sometimes you can put in certain part of the reality, let's say just electronic content of it and then you
modulate the process of the line forming by exchanging the code of the light, the code of the
electromagnetic drawing of it like let deflecting it left and right or up and down and all the modality of
the instrument gives you some kind of language that you can talk about, maybe a code and you say we
have a basic primitives like waveforms and then there are sinusoids, triangles and square and this is our
set of primitives from which we can assemble various textures and events.
And you always feel that you have an alternate nature, as the nature is the reference to your
photography or photo-chemical process or light particle or light affecting molecular structure of...it's
then brought by photo-chemical processes, you are photo-electric area, you distinguish these two areas
and you separate yourself, and so then you look into new code and set of codes.
I approached this by simply making tables for myself because I couldn't truly comprehend it in truly
abstract way, that's what I differ from the scientist. Scientists have complete understanding of this
mental image of the process but I like to go back to the static image in which I kind of suspended
emotion, and just demonstrated to myself in two dimensional way. And then I have to meditate what it
is and so forth and so I built these first tables of analogue images and I called it “Didactic Video” and
meanwhile I was working on different aspects of processing video and audio or exchange of video and
audio.
Because when you take video and you want to affect sound you cannot go directly because you would
induce that 60cycle hum, so you usually have to take what's called the envelope of change. It means the
whole frame change because the time scale in audio is extraordinary more generous than in video, in
video we would talk about inaudible spectrum. So in that infliction of the envelope like slow changes
we can introduce into audio syntheses with success and you still maintain the basic law that this is the
same material but it's just simply differently organized.
