CONTENTS

SPECIAL SECTION

ABOUT THE COVER

About the Cover: Peter Callas, Obaluaye, from Seringue, animated film, 1994 . Seringue is a work in progressabout the history and cultural identity of Brazil . It includes an investigation of the coded methods used toconceal the identities of Yoruba Orishas within the appearance of Catholic saints . Shapannon is the Orishaof pestilence and fever-the god of smallpox and contagious diseases . Because he is so feared, his name isnever uttered . He is known instead as Obaluaye or Omolu. People possessed by Obaluaye cover their headsand bodies with long fringes of straw and dance as though possessed by convulsions, itching and shiveringof fever . There is a syncretic connection between Obaluaye and Saint Sebastian in some regions of Brazil,which comes from the association of smallpox sores with the Christian martyr's bleeding flesh, caused byarrow wounds . Seringue is being produced with the assistance of the Australian Film Commission, while theartist is an artist-in-residence at the Zentrum fur Kunst and Medien Technologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe,Germany .

CORRECTION

In the review published in Leonardo 27, No. 4 (1994) of the book Hand and Mind: What Gestures Revealabout Thought by David McNeill, the year of publication was incorrectly indicated . The correct year of thisbook's publication is 1992 .

EDITORIALROGER F . MALINA : The Fourth World : 1

The Promises and Dangers of the World Wide Web

THE LEONARDO GALLERYMICHAEL DASHKIN, KATHLEEN H. RUIZ, MECHTHILD SCHMIDT, 3

MADELINE SCHWARTZMAN, LEAH SIEGEL, KENT ROLLINS, ANNETTE WEINTRAUB,KATHRYN GREENE, KENNETH SEAN GOLDEN, KEVIN CRAWFORD

,4

ARTIST'S NOTESTEINA VASULKA : My Love Affair with Art: Video and Installation Work 15

ARTIST'S ARTICLESTEVENS SEABERG : The Demon's Face: 19

An Artist's Discovery of the Metaphors of Child Abuse

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVEFRANK POPPER : The Artist and Advanced Technology 27

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVEFRANCESCO GIOMI : The Work of Italian Artist Pietro Grossi: 35

From Early Electronic Music to Computer Art

GENERAL ARTICLEMANGHO AHUJA ANDA. L. LOEB: Tessellations in Islamic Calligraphy 41

DOCUMENT sRAY BRADBURY A Feasting of Thoughts, 47 f

A Banqueting of Words : Ideas on the Theater of the FutureQd

t

LEONAkDOVolume 28 Number 11995 J

JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ARTS, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY J1

BULAT M. GALEYEV : Light from an Extinct Star: 51Music and Technology in the Former Soviet Union

VLADIMIR M. FEDOTOV : Polyphony in the Paintings of M.K. Ciurlionis 53

LEVON A. GRIGORYAN : Color-Thermal Associations in Music 57

STANISLAV KREICHI: The ANS Synthesizer : Composing on a Photoelectric Instrument 59

VICTOR ULIANICH : Project FORMUS : Sonoric Space-Time 63and the Artistic Synthesis of Sound

RUSSIAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 67

ABSTRACTSLAWRENCE M. CARTEL : Nuvo Japonica 68

LAIN MOTT: The Talking Chair: Notes on a Sound Sculpture 69MAKEPEACE TSAO: Artistic Creation and Scientific Discovery : One Practitioner's Experience 70

REVIEWSDAVID CARRIER, ROGER F . MALINA, STEPHEN WILSON, RUDOLF ARNHEIM, 73

SONYA RAPOPORT, BULAT M. GALEYEV

COMMENTARY 80JOHN F . KALBEN

ARTIST'S NOTE

My Love Affair with Art:Video and Installation Work

My love affair with art was all-consumingfrom the time I was 8 or 9 years old until my late teens . I livedby it. I went to every concert, play, opera and gallery show Icould . Nothing else in life made any sense to me . I neverchose to be an artist, Ijust knew I would not work in a bankor wait on tables . I loved playing my violin, but when facedwith the prospect of being a professional musician, I realizedI had made a dreadful mistake . I found myselfin New York inthe mid-1960s going from gig to gig, wondering if there wasnot more to life than black dress and meager fees .

DISCOVERING VIDEOI had met Woody Vasulka in the early 1960s in Prague, whereI was studying music at the time, and by the mid-1960s we hadmoved to New York. Woodywas a filmmaker, and through hisfilm contacts he came across video in 1969 . Both of our liveswere changed forever. Woody introduced me to his new dis-covery-what a rush! It was like falling in love ; I never lookedback. As soon as I had a video camera in my hand-as soon asI had that majestic flow of time in my control-I knew I hadmy medium .We already owned a two-track audiotape recorder, which

allowed delays and speed changes . We immediately pro-ceeded to process and manipulate videotape along the sameprinciples we had applied to audiotape . During the same pe-riod, we were taking the portable video equipment to NewYork's cultural playgrounds : WBAI Free Music Store, JudsonChurch, La Mama, Automation House, the Village Vanguard,Fillmore East, Blue Dom, Kansas City Steakhouse, etc.

After those outings, everyone would gather in our loft tolook at the instant playback-something that most people atthat time had never experienced before . Even the word"video" was a brand-new addition to the vocabulary. By 1971,there was so much traffic in our loft that, when a friend told ushe had found a large space in an abandoned kitchen in the oldBroadway Central Hotel, we were ready. The space was in-tended to serve the artists, not the audience . We thereforenamed it the Kitchen-LATL (Live Audience Test Laboratory) .

ENVIRONMENTSIn the early days of video, everything was an installation or an"environment," as we used to call it . In the first generation of'ri-in reel-to-reel video there wa- no provision for editing . The

Steina Vasulka (artist), Route #6, Box 100, Santa Fe, NM 97501, U.S.A.Solicited by Judy Malloy.Received 25 April 1994 .

©1995 ISAST

Steina Vasulka

solution was to cut and glue, aswas done with audiotape . Our en-vironments, therefore, consistedof either "live" camera or "live"switching of tapes . Woody and Ipreferred to use multiplescreens-typically, a stack of moni-tors and several players . One ofour first installations involved thehorizontal drifting of images fromone monitor to the next . After westarted the Kitchen, we had plentyof opportunities to do environ-ments and live video performances . Later, when electronic editing became technically-fea-sible, everyone became infatuated with editing, andinstallation work disappeared for a while-to be reinventedlater by the art world .

In the 1970s, I did a series of environments entitled Ma-chine Vision, the first variation of which was called Allvision

ABSTRACT

The author, a video art pio-neer, discusses some of herworks and the contexts in whichthey have been created . Her dis-cussion ranges from the earlydays of video art in New York inthe late 1960s to her most re-cent works .

Fig . 1 . Machine Vision, series of video installations, 1976 . (Photo :Kevin Noble) In the first variation of this series, two video cam-eras on a motorized turntable were combined with two mirroredhalf-spheres and two monitors, emphasizing a cameraview thatmoves beyond the restrictions of the human eye-all-seeing, all-encompassing vision.

LEONARDO, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp . 15-18,1995

1 rJ

Fig. 2 . Geomania, two-channel sound and video environment, 1986 . This work, presented on a pyramid of monitors, combines site-re-corded imagery and sound in a layering of natural landscapes and electronically generated color and texture .

(Fig . 1) . For Allvision, I put a bar acrossa turntable and mounted two video cam-eras back to back at the center andpointing at two small mirrored half-spheres placed at each end of the bar .Each camera viewed 180° of the spaceand displayed the results on four pairsof monitors placed in the corners of theroom . As the table slowly turned, thecameras captured the entire room, in-cluding viewers, monitors and the turn-ing machinery itself. In a later version, Iput a large sphere in, the middle of theturntable with the cameras at each endpointing in . Another Machine Visionvariation made use of a motorized mov-ing mirror placed in front of a camera.Depending on the horizontal or verticalpositioning of the mirror, the videomonitor would display a continuousback-and-forth pan or up-and-down tiltof the room . A third variation imple-mented a continuous rotation of the im-age through a turning prism, while stillanother involved a zoom lens in con-stant motion, zooming in and out .These automatic motions simulated allpossible camera movements withoutmaking the camera and its operator thecenter of the universe . Time and motionbecame the universe, with endless re-petitive cycles and orbits .

I was a latecomer to this infatuationwith machines, but I vividly remember,after moving to New York, going to Ca-nal Street and looking at gears and mo-tors as kinds of miracles that resembledlife itself-mechanistic replications ofthe biological mystery. I love gizmos,such as the ones I find in surplus yardsthat can be refitted to serve my pur-

16

Vasulka, My Love Affair with Art

poses . If I had a lot of money, I wouldspend it on optical gadgets, mechanicaltoys and state-of-the-art electronics . Iwould make gigantic environments,such as monitors embedded in the floorfrom wall to wall all showing imagerymoving in either the same or a contra-puntal direction . Or I would build afour-sided corridor in which viewerscould look down a long lane of imagesthat keep moving toward and past them .In reality, though, I am very flexibleabout the size of the display, since, tome, the size of an installation is not de-termined by the number of monitors,but rather by the complexity of the com-position . I therefore often improvisehow to configure an installation basedon what is available at an exhibition site .For example, for my favorite installationof Geomania (1986) (Fig . 2 and ColorPlate A No . 1),1 stack the monitors intoa pyramid .

I always intend these environments tobe experienced in a quiet, dark place . Amuseum is potentially a good exhibitionvenue, but museum people always seeminterested in placing video installationsin a maximally visible location . They tellme triumphantly, "We are going to giveyou the lobby." It is always assumed thatvideo ought to be loud and public, but Ireally want it to be quiet and private-athousand monitors and on(_~ viewer, andnot the other way around . I want theviewers to be so absorbed by the workthat they experience another level ofmind. I expect them to share the kind ofstrong feeling I have for the material,and to my amazement, they sometimesdo . An old man who had watched Tokyo

Four (1991) (Fig . 3) over and over onceexplained to me that this installationwas all about death . At that moment Iknew that he had really seen it-eventhough it is not all about death .

Borealis (1993) (Fig . 4) uses two videoprojectors that project through a split-beam mirror onto four translucentscreens ("translucent" meaning that theimage appears with equal intensity onboth sides ofthe screen) . Upon enteringthe room, the viewer can watch the workfrom far away and see all four screens atonce, or walk directly up to and aroundone screen-a much more intense expe-rience . The images are mostly of rivers,oceans, steam and sprays.

SUBJECTSThe aspect of the process of creation Ilike most is the initial recording . Sleet orsnow or howling rain, I love that part,especially if I am alone out in nature . InNew Mexico, where I live, my images arerivers, mountains and arroyos, butwhenI found myself in the metropolis of To-kyo, my material became the people .The Japanese have a social protocolthat, for them, is a daily routine, but to aWesterner looks like fabulous theater-the way they bow, the way they make cer-tain signals . For example, when theJapanese want to cut through a crowd ina hurry, they put their hands forward ina chopping gesture and a magical corri-dor appears in the ocean of humanity.They have hand signals for "yes" and"maybe" (although "maybe" usuallymeans the unutterable "no") . Theyseem to wear an invisible armor, a "no

man's land" around their bodies . Eleva-tor girls in a perpetual state of perfor-mance, train conductors, taxi drivers intheir white gloves and Shinto priestsritualistically pruning their arenas areall elements of TokyoFour (see Fig . 3) .Between taping and editing, there is

usually an intermediary step duringwhich I alter and mix the images,change color or run things upside downor backwards . This is where the particu-lar uniqueness ofworking with the elec-tronic image comes into play. It is some-what akin to photographic darkroomtechniques, but it really reminds me ofplaying an instrument. I change style,timbre, dynamics and key in an improvi-sational and spontaneous way.

MUSICAL TECHNIQUESIn my multichannel video compositions,I often make a ground image of a cer-tain duration, which I then duplicate astape #2, tape #3, etc . I then drop differ-ent but complementary images into thecopies, and a phenomenon similar tomusical composition starts occurring .Starting with a melody or theme, I addharmonic lines and discover that themelody is far less interesting than thecounterpoint . Sometimes there is anemergent melodic structure that inter-weaves through the instruments or (inmy case) the video screens .

Late-twentieth-century art is fast-toofast for me . But I realize that I am out ofsync with the mainstream, which wantsthings fast. Multichannel compositionsliberate me from this concern withspeed, since they rely on different timeprinciples and are more like music .

TEACHINGI do not like teaching, just as I did notlike going to school . It is an absurd the-ater, the teacher supposedly all-knowingand the students posing as eager mindswaiting for illumination . So when I doteach, I go through the theory and thetechniques-video is rather complextechnically-and explain about frequen-cies, voltages and the timing structure ofthe signal. I go into history, show a lot oftapes-mine and those of colleagues-and discuss them with the students . ThenI ask them if they believe in UFOs (uni-dentified flying objects), at which pointthe whole class gets very uneasy. Half ofthem say they do, half say they do not.The class sessions that the students

seem to appreciate most are the ones inwhich I present "the world according to

Fig. 3 . Tokyo Four, multiscreen video, 1991 . This work is organized around categories ofimagery-Shinto priests grooming their Zen garden, train conductors, elevator girls, taxidrivers-in a visual montage reminicront of a musical composition.

Vasulka, My Love Affair with Art

17

Fig. 4. Images from Borealis, two-channel video installation, 1993 . In this work, two videoprojectors, through splitbeam mirrors, project onto four translucent screens in an other-wise darkened room. The images appear on both sides of vertically positioned 4-ftscreens. Viewers are immersed in the rhythm of the imagery, surrounded by it as they walkin and around it .

Steina." We discuss the way the galleriessew up the art scene and make the artistskiss ass . I always tell them that they donot have to kiss ass . And they seemgreatly relieved, almost as though theydid not know this . I remember once over-hearing a student say, "But we have to dothis kind of conceptual/intellectual workbecause this is that kind of a school ." Iturned around and said, "NO YOUDQN'T." And the whole class laughedbecause they realized that they really donot . I tell them that it is every artist's dutyto be disobedient . We discuss what itmeans to be a mainstream person andhave a comfortable life and how decidingto be an artist basically means decidingto live a materially uneasy but more re-warding life . They discuss this for awhile-not that they have not alreadythought about it a lot, but they get lonely

18

Vasulka, My Love Affair with Art

and confused . So I reassure them thatthere is no grander life than the creative,artistic life . It is the unknown, the explo-ration, the fact of being your own personon your own time .

After I ask my students about UFOs(and some of them say they do believeand others say they do not), I tell themwe are not going to talk about UFOsanyway but about how we must stick toour beliefs . I tell them that, if they be-lieve in UFOs, they should raise theirhands whether or not the other half ofthe class is going to sneer . The discus-sion turns to intimidation and lyingabout one's beliefs just to get along. It isemotionally stressful to admit to havingan independent mind . One does nothave to be an artist to experience thisdilemma, but I believe it is the artist'sduty to stay on the fringe .

CREATIVITYANDCOMMUNICATIONThe creative process, for me, is a tre-mendous pleasure, even when it is pain-ful, such as when I feel inadequate tothe task . People perceive this pleasure inmy work and often object, "But you arejust playing!" This comment gives metremendous pleasure!The motivation to make art seems to

come from a deep desire to communi-cate ; for some artists, it comes from adesire to communicate on a massivescale-something that does not particu-larly interest me . I see no qualitative dif-ference in more people versus one per-son if I am communicating . Our wholeexistence seems to be about communi-cation . It cuts through cultures, lan-guages and continents . It also cutsthrough time . We spend so much timewith people we have never met-often,with people who are long dead . But theprimary motivation for all art is the de-sire to communicate with oneself. This isa spiritual idea . It has been the sad lot ofmany artists to communicate only to fu-ture audiences, but, through lucky coin-cidences, artists and their audienceshave sometimes found each other in thesame place at the same time . Paris in the1920s was like that . New York in the late1960s was like that for us . It was a luxury.

BibliographyBoyle, Deirdre. Video Classics : A Guide to Video Artand Documentary Tapes (Phoenix, AZ : Oryx Press,1986) .

Cathcart, Linda, ed . Vasulka. Steina : Machine Vision/Woody : Descriptions (Buffalo, NY:Albright-Knox Gal-lery, 1978) .

Clancy, Patrick, ed. Video as Attitude (Albuquerque,NM : Univ. Art Museum, 1983) .

Dietrich, Frank. "The Computer : A Tool forThought-Experiments," Leonardo 20, No . 4 (1987) .

Furlong, Lucinda. "Notes toward a History of Im-age ProcessedVideo," ArtJournal (Fall 1985) .

Gill, Johanna. Video: State of the Art (New York:RockefellerFoundation, 1976) .

Huffman, Kathy Rae, ed. Video : A Retrospective (LongBeach, CA: Long Beach Museum of Art, 1984) .

Pritikin, Renny. Video Installed (San Francisco : NewLangton Arts, 1986) .

Schneider, Ira; and Korot, Beryl, eds., Video Art : AnAnthology (New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1976) .