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27-709: Stephen Beck is an American artist, writer, toy designer and inventor who pioneered video synthesis and interactive video art . Examples of his work have appeared in collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , the Museum of Modern Art , New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art . He holds several patents in phosphene based video display technology and energy management. His writings have appeared in Wired Magazine and

54-591: A co-creator of this device, showed frequently at the Kitchen during the Vasulkas' tenure). Steina's practice centered around environmental, mechanical, and physical relationships between body, video, and camera, beginning with a late-1970s series of moving-camera environments titled All Vision and Machine Vision which were shown, in part, at The Kitchen. The Vasulkas have collaborated with Harald Bode (posthumously). In 2014, The National Gallery of Iceland opened

81-589: A faculty position at the State University of New York's Department of Media Studies, though they would maintain involvement with The Kitchen and its programming. Though Steina and Woody had worked outside their duo before, their practices diverged to a greater extent following this relocation. Woody's practice became more focused on digital image manipulation and the employment of tools like the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer (Bill Etra,

108-517: A handful of performances and showings each month, included a range of live documentary and experimental videos, live video performances, live video processing , media installations, and “experiments in perception.” The Vasulkas' work at this time was colored by the artists' interest in negotiating terms like "space" in the context of video and what Yvonne Spielman calls video's "image object." The Vasulkas' wide exploration of video in this ontological regard led to apparent contrast, such as that between

135-481: A machine like the Rutt-Etra was that position, brightness, and color were completely interchangeable and could be used to modulate each other during the processing that led to the final image. Videotapes by Louise and Bill Etra and Steina and Woody Vasulka dramatized this new class of effects. This led to various interpretations of the multi-modal synesthesia of these aspects of the image in dialogues that extended

162-487: A number of features of the early video synths. The address generator counts in a fixed rectangular pattern from the upper left hand corner of the screen, across each line, to the bottom. This discarded a whole technology of modifying the image by variations in the read and write addressing sequence provided by the hardware address generators as the image passed through the memory. Today, address based distortions are more often accomplished by blitter operations moving data in

189-437: A particular font, or weather maps. Imagery from TV cameras can be altered in color or geometrically scaled, tilted, wrapped around objects, and otherwise manipulated. A particular video synthesizer will offer a subset of possible effects. The history of video synthesis is tied to a "real time performance" ethic. The equipment is usually expected to function on input camera signals the machine has never seen before, delivering

216-487: A processed signal continuously and with a minimum of delay in response to the ever-changing live video inputs. Following in the tradition of performance instruments of the audio synthesis world such as the Theremin , video synthesizers were designed with the expectation they would be played in live concert theatrical situations or set up in a studio ready to process a videotape from a playback VCR in real time while recording

243-690: A recursive ray tracing algorithm, however long it takes. This distinguishes them from video synthesizers, which must deliver a new output frame by the time the last one has been shown, and repeat this performance continuously (typically delivering a new frame regularly every 1/60 or 1/50 of a second). The real time constraint results in a difference in design philosophy between these two classes of systems. Video synthesizers overlap with video special effects equipment used in real time network television broadcast and post-production situations. Many innovations in television broadcast equipment as well as computer graphics displays evolved from synthesizers developed in

270-715: A scholarship at the Prague Conservatory in 1959. Woody Vasulka was born in Brno , now in the Czech Republic and trained as an engineer before studying television and film production at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague . While pursuing his studies in the fifties, Woody Vasulka wrote poetry and produced short films. The pair met in Prague in the early 1960s, where Woody introduced video to Steina. For

297-765: The New York Times and he was artist in residence at KQED – NCET for the National Center for Experiments in Television. This article about a toy designer is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about an artist from the United States is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Video synthesizer Video pattern generators may produce static or moving or evolving imagery. Examples include geometric patterns (in 2D or 3D), subtitle text characters in

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324-444: The documentary -style Participation series involving footage of real-life performances (occurring in the space in front of and around the video camera), and works like Caligrams , in which the Vasulkas use hardware devices such as scan processors, video sequencers, and multikeyers to "play" or perform with video like a musical instrument, and in a different kind of space. In 1974, The Vasulkas moved to Buffalo, New York to pursue

351-616: The video artists' community and these industries often support "electronic art projects" in this area to show appreciation of this history. Many principles used in the construction of early video synthesizers reflected a healthy and dynamic interplay between electronic requirements and traditional interpretations of artistic forms. For example, Steve Rutt , Bill Etra and Daniel Sandin carried forward as an essential principle ideas of Robert Moog that standardized signal ranges so that any module's output could be connected to "voltage control" any other module's input. The consequence of this in

378-530: The American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1968, Woody conducted his first experiments with images made with electronics and put aside the cinematographic form in favor of video . Steina was experimenting with video at the same time as Woody, with equipment that the couple had borrowed from Lloyd. Over time, the Vasulkas became more closely involved with the artistic communities around them and

405-670: The Fillmore DVD released 1999, released again 2012) In 1971, the Vasulkas founded The Kitchen , a multi-use media theater located in the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center in Grand Central Hotel , Greenwich Village , in the interest of cultivating new-media art in an inclusive, comprehensive, and un-administrative context. Under the direction of Dimitri Devyatkin , and with help from Andy Mannik, Sia and Michael Tschudin, Rhys Chatham , and Shridhar Bapat ,

432-582: The McLuhanesque language of film criticism of the time. In the UK, Richard Monkhouse, working for Electronic Music Studios (London) Limited (EMS), developed a hybrid video synthesiser – Spectre – later renamed 'Spectron' which used the EMS patchboard system to allow completely flexible connections between module inputs and outputs. The video signals were digital, but they were controlled by analog voltages. There

459-680: The Vasulka Chamber, a collaboration between the museum and the artist couple. They donated a substantial amount of their digital archive to the museum and it is the Chamber's aim to preserve the legacy and collection of the artists. In 2016 the Vašulka Kitchen Brno (VKB) was established in Brno in The Czech Republic, for research, artistic experiment and informal education in the field of new media art. It consists of

486-422: The address generator, and the video data pipeline, recur as core features of digital video architecture. The address generator supplied read and write addresses to a real time video memory, which can be thought of as evolution into the most flexible form of gating the address bits together to produce the video. While the video frame buffer is now present in every computer's graphics card, it has not carried forward

513-575: The early 1960s. The couple met in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where they began showing video art at the Whitney Museum and founded The Kitchen in 1971. Steina and Woody both became Guggenheim fellows: Steina in 1976, and Woody in 1979. Steina Vasulka was born in Reykjavík , Iceland and trained as a classical musician and violinist and was a member of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra . Steina received

540-527: The emerging fascination with video and new-media, and grew more dedicated to their developing video art practice until they made it their shared full-time occupation. On December 31, 1969 and January 1, 1970 Woody Valsulka video recorded Jimi Hendrix performing with Band of Gypsys at the Fillmore East in NYC. The recordings are included on a DVD included in a CD release of the concerts. (Source: Live at

567-478: The first few years following their relocation to in New York, the Vasulkas were not involved with the local art scene; Steina continued to practice as a violinist and Woody began making independent documentaries and edited industrial films at Harvey Lloyd Productions. In 1967, at the request of architects Woods and Ramirez, Woody collaborated on developing films designed for a multi-screen environment to be shown in

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594-511: The memory, rather than changes in video hardware addressing patterns. AudioVisualizers.com historical archive of Video Synthesizer hardware. Now defunct, copy at archive,org [REDACTED] Media related to Video synthesizers at Wikimedia Commons Steina and Woody Vasulka Steina Vasulka (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir in 1940) and Woody Vasulka (born Bohuslav Vašulka on 20 January 1937 – 20 December 2019 ) are early pioneers of video art , and have been producing work since

621-965: The results on a second VCR. Venues of these performances included "Electronic Visualization Events" in Chicago, The Kitchen in NYC, and museum installations. Video artist/performer Don Slepian designed, built and performed a foot-controlled Visual Instrument at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1983) and the NY Open Center that combined genlocked early micro-computers Apple II Plus with the Chromaton 14 Video Synthesizer. and channels of colorized video feedback. Analog and early real time digital synthesizers existed before modern computer 3D modeling. Typical 3D renderers are not real time, as they concentrate on computing each frame from, for example,

648-658: The space received a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and expanded its programming, which was foregrounded by video and electronic media performance and would come to include new music programming under the direction of Rhys Chatham. The Kitchen would relocate following the collapse of the Mercer Arts Centre, but maintain its mission. The Kitchen was valuable space for a number of music, performance, and media artists in New York who at

675-430: The state of the art from address counters to programmable (microcodable) AMD Am2901 bit slice based address generators. On the data path, they used 74S181 arithmetic and logic units, previously thought of as a component for doing arithmetic instructions in minicomputers, to process real time video signals, creating new signals representing the sum, difference, AND, XOR, and so on, of two input signals. These two elements,

702-428: The time did not feel welcome in commercial galleries or the mainstream art-world. The Vasulkas' programming for The Kitchen provided the space to a number video artists who would become prominent, including Joan Jonas , Nancy Holt , Vito Acconci , Mary Lucier , Dara Birnbaum , Bill Viola , and Gary Hill . The work that the Vasulkas presented at The Kitchen's original Greenwich Village location, which amounted to

729-503: Was a digital patchboard for image composition and an analog patchboard for motion control. Video synthesizers moved from analog to the precision control of digital. The first digital effects as exemplified by Stephen Beck 's Video Weavings used digital oscillators optionally linked to horizontal, vertical, or frame resets to generate timing ramps. These ramps could be gated to create the video image itself and were responsible for its underlying geometric texture. Schier and Vasulka advanced

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