|
“The condition of music is that it is the live production of organised
sounds that extend in time and affect our inner selves without the necessity
of mediation through verbal or conceptual structures.
The condition of video is that it is the live production of organised
images that extend in time and affect our inner selves without the necessity
of mediation through verbal or conceptual structures. As one plays a
musical instrument the result is an immediate feedback through the ear
of what the body and mind has created. As one plays a video instrument
the result is an immediate feedback through the eye of what the body
and mind has created. Video is the visual equivalent of music.
My own concern with video has been the search for and discovery of a
coloured visual expression of equivalent potency to that of music. Music
needs no external references other than itself. It just is. There is
now no reason why a visual event should need external references. Let
it be. Video as a medium is unparalleled by any other in its ability
to allow immediate visual and aural experience extend in time and be
recorded. It extends our possibilities for expression.”
I wrote the above in 1975 – I’d phrase it a little differently
now but it makes the central point.
All my videos
from the Seventies involve a complex real-time performance between one
or more electronic visual artist(s) and one or more musician(s) and
electronic performer(s) – always including my key collaborator,
Simon Desorgher. Each had visual and aural feedback of one another’s
output in real time and the visual element thus became an equivalent
to the production of live music. The recordings saved were the best
“take” achieved during the typically three-day set-up and
recording schedule.
This placed
the resulting video in a completely different “space” artistically
to that occupied by other people working with video in the UK at that
time, perhaps having more in common with a few practitioners in the
USA who were similarly trying to explore the achievable visual boundaries
of this new medium. In 1978 I founded a travelling performance group
called VAMP (for Video and Music Performers), but despite sell-out shows
at the ICA, Birmingham Arts Lab etc it could not continue due to lack
of funding.
Good reading:
Colour-Music,
the Art of Light, A.B. Klein, Crosby Lockwood, 1930
http://www.iotacenter.org
|
