MANFRED MOHR

LE TEMPS N'EST PAS FAIT DE TEMPS

Nourrie par les sens, l'intelligence se détache difficilement de sa conception primaire d'un continu sensible. Comme elle avait rempli d'éther l'espace, elle avait doué le temps d'une manière de consistance; mais extrêmement légère, correspondant à la vague fluidité des perceptions ordinaires de la durée, données par la cénesthésie. Cette trame si exquise, ce fil ténu des Parques, cette pellicule de chagrin, cette substance indécise, plus subtile encore que l'éther, et qui se refusait même à recevoir la précision d'un nom propre, restait cependant une réalité matérielle.



Le cinématographe a détruit cette illusion; il montre que le temps n'est qu'une perspective, née de la succession des phénomènes comme l'espace n'est qu'une perspective de la coexistence des choses. Le temps ne contient rien qu'on puisse appeler temps en soi, pas plus que l'espace ne renferme d'espace en soi. Ils ne se composent, l'un et l'autre, que de rapports, essentiellement variables, entre des apparences qui se produisent successivement ou simultanément. C'est pourquoi il peut y avoir trente-six temps différents et vingt sortes d'espaces, comme il peut y avoir d'innombrables perspectives particulières, selon les positions infiniment diverses des objets et de leur observateur.



Ainsi, après nous avoir indiqué l'irréalité du continu comme du discontinu, le cinématographe nous introduit, et assez brutalement, dans l'irréalité de l'espace-temps.
-Jean Epstein, L'intelligence d'une machine, repris dans Écrits sur le cinéma, vol.1 1974

Pure beauty: http://www.ubu.com/film/epstein_temp.html

PETER DONEBAUER

1974, Colour, 8 minutes,
Music composed and performed by Simon Desorgher

Entering is a classic videotape, representing something of a milestone in British broadcasting and art history. It was the first independent “art” videotape and the first completely abstract work to be commissioned and broadcast nationally on television in the UK - in May 1974 in an Arts magazine programme hosted by Melvyn Bragg. And was selected as part of Tate Britain’s “Century of Artists Film in Britain” exhibition in 2003.

It was recorded by the BBC as an outside broadcast from the Royal College of Art television studio in Kensington, London on 15th April 1974. Pictures and sound were transmitted via a microwave link to the Television Centre at White City via the Crystal Palace transmitter on the other side of London (as no direct line of site was available between the two sites just two miles apart!)

The imagery and sound were performed and recorded by Donebauer and Desorgher “playing” together in real time with both participants having visual and aural feedback of each other’s transforming contributions as they affected the piece in real time and thus in turn their own continuing contributions. The tape represents the best early example of the visual techniques Donebauer had developed through access to the old ATV colour studio donated to the College by Lew Grade. These techniques involved manipulating the studio in ways for which it was never designed, enabling the development of a form of “Electronic Painting” equivalent to the “Electronic Music” that was being first developed around that time. The two went on to work together for several years with Desorgher providing and co-ordinating the sound elements through a mixture of traditional musical instruments and electronics.

The imagery is non-representational, and the tape’s theme is an allegory of the experience of birth in the physical sense and re-birth in the metaphysical sense. The tape’s structure is in three sections separated by moments of darkness. The first section suggests the security of a womb. The second section develops through a series of contractions leading to the expansion of birth itself. The final section suggests the quiescence of rest and sleep.

http://www.donebauer.net/

LARRY CUBA

Larry Cuba is widely recognized as a pioneer in the use of computers in animation art. Producing his first computer animation in 1974, Cuba was at the forefront of the computer-animation artists considered the "second generation" --- those who directly followed the visionaries of the sixties: John Whitney, Sr., Stan Vanderbeek and Lillian Schwartz.

Larry Cuba interviewed by Gene Youngblood, in 1986 (excerpt)
"Someone once asked what I mean by the term "experimental film." What makes them experimental? I said because they’re not previsualized. They're the result of experiments and dialog with the medium. And he said, 'Well, all art is like that, that's what art is." I said all art is like that but all film is not. We're much more used to films being preconceived, both in content and execution. Even many people with whom I share the same intent will listen to a piece of music, come up with images, storyboard them and animate them . So that by the time they get to the production stage the result is almost a foregone conclusion.

That's much less of a dialog than my approach and in that sense it's not as experimental. Also there's the danger that the music is carrying the piece: take away the sound and there's not much left. In my work, the visuals come first. I'm trying to discover what works visually, so I never start with music. That would be starting with a composition that already exists, and composition is the problem. I don't have an image of the final film or even any of the scenes before I start programming. I only have basic structural ideas that come from algebra, or from the nature of the [computer] drawing process, or from the hierarchical structure of the items in the scene and how they will dance---the choreographic movements from a mathematical point of view."

Excerpt of Calculated Movements (1985), 16mm, B/W

In the 1970s the computer graphics for the first Star Wars film (1977) was created by Larry Cuba at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) (at the time known as the Circle Graphics Habitat) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

For the rest of the interview:
http://prehysteries.blogspot.com/2008/07/larry-cuba-interviewed-by-gene.html

STEINA AND WOODY VASULKA

"In their early collaborative work, the Vasulkas examined the electronic nature of video and sound, developing specialized imaging tools and strategies while also using the medium to document the city's expanding underground culture. "We were interested in certain decadent aspects of America, the phenomena of the time—underground rock and roll, homosexual theater, and the rest of the illegitimate culture. In the same way, we were curious about more puritanical concepts of art inspired by [Marshall] McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. It seemed a strange and unified front—against the establishment."

http://www.vasulka.org/
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?VASULKAS