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The Artist that invented Computer
Animation Aapo Saask on the artist Ture Sjolander On an island aptly named
Magnetic Island off the coast of Australia, a Swedish artist lives in
exile. Just like so many others in today's media-landscape, he was first
praised and then brought to dust. However, he has left a lasting imprint
on the world. As early as the 1960's, he made the first electronic
animation. Had he been an inventor, he would have been celebrated as a
genius today, but because he is a predecessor in the world of art, things
are different. In that world, the great ones often have to die before they
are recognized.
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"the origins of video art"
pages: 116, 117, 118 and 181, 182 and 183.
A HISTORY of VIDEO ART
by Chris
Meigh-Andrews
During the period between 1965 and 1975,
which could be considered as the defining period of video art, there was
significant research activity amongst artists working with video to
develop, modify or invent video imaging instruments or
synthesizers.
The first generation of video
artist/engineers include Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Lars Weck, Eric
Seigel, Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, and Bill and Louise Etra, in
addition to the well-documented collaborative work of Nam June Paik and
Shuya Abe.
The work of these pioneers is important
because, in addition to exploring the potential of video as a means of
creative expression, they developed a range of relatively accessible and
inexpensive image manipulation devices specifically for 'alternative'
video practice.
TURE SJOLANDER AND
MONUMENT
In September 1966 Swedish
artists Ture Sjolander ( 1937-, Sweden) and Bror Wikstrom broadcast Time,
a 30-minute transmission of electronically manipulated paintings on
National Swedish Television. Sjolander and Wikstrom had worked with TV
broadcast engineer Bengt Modin to construct a temporary video image
synthesizer which was used to distort and transform video line-scan
rasters by applying tones from waveform generators. The basic process
involved applying electronic distortions during the process of transfer of
photographic transparencies and film clips. According to Modin they
introduced the electronic transformations using two approaches. The
geometric distortion of the scanning raster of the video signal by
feeding various waveforms to the scanning coil, and video distortion by
the application of various electronic filters to the luminance
signal.
Sjolander had begun working with broadcast
television with the production of his first multimedia experiment The Role
of Photography, commissioned by the National Swedish Television in 1964,
which was broadcast the following year. With the broadcasting of Time, his
second project for Swedish television, Sjolander was well aware of the
significance of his work and importance of the artistic statement he was
making:
Time is the very first video art work
televised at that point in time for the reason to produce an historical
record as well as an evidence of original visual free art, made with the
electronic medium - manipulation of the electronic signal - and
exhibited/installed through the television, televised.
In 1967, Sjolander teamed up with Lars Weck
and, using a similar technological process, produced Monument, a programme
of electronically manipulated monochrome images of famous people and
cultural icons including the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, the Beatles,
Adolf Hitler and Pablo Picasso. (Separate text of this work as
below)
This programme was broadcast to a potential
audience of over 150 million people in France, Italy Sweden, Germany and
Switzerland in 1968, as well later in the USA. Subsequently, Sjolander
produced a Space in the Brain (1969) based on images provided by NASA,
extending his pioneering electronic imaging television work to include the
manipulation and distortion of colour video imagery. A Space in the Brain
was an attempt to deal with notions of space, both the inner worldof the
brain and the new televisual space created by electronic
imaging.
Sjolander, originally a painter and
photographer, had become increasingly dissatisfied with conventional
representation as a language of communication and began
experimenting with the manipulation of photographic images using
graphic and chemical means. For Sjolander, broadcast television
represented truly contemporary communication medium that should be
adopted as soon as possible by artists - a fluid transformation and
constant stream of ideas within the reach of millions.
The televised electronic images Sjolander
and his collaborators produced with Time, Monument and Space in the Brain
were further extended via other means. The television system was exploited
as a generator of imagery for further distribution processes including
silkscreen printing, posters, record covers, books and paintings that were
widely distributed and reproduced, although ironically signed and numbered
as if in limited editions.
It seems likely that these pioneering
broadcast experiments were influential on the subsequent work
of Nam June Paik and others. According to Ture Sjolander, Paik visited
Stockholm in the summer of 1966 and was shown still images from Time while
on a visit to the Elektron Musik Studion (EMS). Additionally, Sjolander is
in possession of a copy of a letter dated 12 March 1974 from Sherman Price
of Rutt Electrophysics in New York, acknowledging the significance of
Monument to the history of 'video animation', and requesting detailed
information about the circuitry employed to obtain the manipulated
imagery. In reply, Bengt Modin, the engineer who had worked with
Sjolander, provided Price with a circuit diagram and an explanation of
their technical approach to the project, claiming he 'no longer knew the
whereabouts of the artists involved'.
THE PAIK-ABE
SYNTHESIZER
The Paik-Abe Synthesizer, built in 1969 is
one of the earliest examples of a self-contained video image-processing
device. As we have seen, Ture Sjolander and his collaborators had brought
together video processing technology in temporary configuration to produce
their early broadcast experiments, Paik's synthesizer was a self-contained
unit built expressly and exclusively for the purpose. The instrument, or
video synthesizer, as it came to be known, enabled the artist to add
colour to a monochrome video image, and to distort the conventional TV
camera image. -.......
Extending a dialogue that they had begun in
Tokyo in 1964, electronic engineer Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik began
building a video synthesizer in 1969 at WGBH-TV in Boston, possibly
spurred on by the work of Sjolander in Sweden.
from Chris
Meigh-Andrews book,
A HISTORY OF VIDEO
ART, Publisher BERG, Oxford-New York. First Edition October
2006
representative video art
works
pages 181, 182 and
183
MONUMENT, TURE SJOLANDER AND
LARS WECK (WITH BENGT MODIN), 1967
( BLACK AND WHITE, SOUND, 10
MINUTES. COMMISSIONED AND BROADCAST BY NATIONAL SWEDISH TV,
1968)
Monument, characterized by Ture
Sjolander as a series of 'electronic paintings' is a free flowing
colage of electronically distorted and transformed icoic media images. Set
to a similarly improvised jazz and sound effects track, images of pop
stars, political and historical celebrities and media personalities,
culled from archive film footage and photographic stills have been
electronically manipulated - stretched, skewed, exploded, rippled and
rotated. The relentless flow of semi-abstracted monochromatic faces and
associated sounds seems to both celebrate and satirize the contemporary
visual culture of the time. In its fluid mix of visual information it
generalizes the television medium, draining it of its specific content and
momentary significance. It creates a kind of 'monument' to the ephemeral -
all this will pass, as it is passing before you now.
Archive film footage and
photographic stills of familiar faces and people, such as Lennon and
McCartney, Chaplin, Hitler, the Mona Lisa - the 'monument' of the world
culture - flicker and flash, stretch and ooze across the television
screen. In some moments the television medium is itself directly
referenced, the familiar screen shape presented and rescanned, images of
video feedback and, at one point, its vertical roll out of adjustment,
anticipate Joan Jonas's seminal tape, although for very different
purposes. The work anticipated a number of later videotapes, particularly
the distorted iconic images of Nam June Paik.
Gene Youngblood described the
psychological power and effect of these transformations i his influential
and visionary book Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970):
Images undergo transformations
at first subtle, like respiration, then increasingly violent until little
remains of the original icon. In this process, the images pass through
thousands of stages of semi-cohesion, making the viewer constantly aware
of his orientation to the picture. The transformations accur slowly and
with great speed, erasing perspectives, crossing psycological barriers. A
figure might stretch like a silly putty or become rippled in liquid
universe. Harsh basrelief effects accentuate physical dimensions with
great subtlety, so that one eye or ear might appear slightly unnatural.
And finally the image disintegrates into a constellation of shimmering
video phosphores.
Sjolander and his collaborators
at Sveriges Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Company) in Stockholm had
worked together on a number of related projects since the mid-1960s,
beginning with The Role of Photography, Sjolander's first experiment with
electronic manipulations of the broadcast image in 1965. This project was
followed with the broadcast of Time (1966), a thirty-minute transmission
of 'electronic paintings' produced using the same temporarily configured
video image synthesizer that was later used to create
Monument.
The system that Sjolander and
his colleagues used involved the transfer of photographic images (film
footage and transparencies) to videotape using a 'flying-spot' telecine
machine. This process produced electronic images which they transformed
and manipulated by applying square and sine signals with a waveform
generator during the transfer stage, often using this process repeatedly
to apply greater levels of transformation.
For Sjolander and his
collaborator Lars Weck, the broadcasting of Monument was the epicentre
of an extended communication experiment in electronic image-making
reaching out to an audience of millions.
Kristian Romare, writing in a
book published as part of an extended series of artworks which included
publishing, posters, record covers and paintings after the broadcasting of
Monument, describes the scope of Sjolander and Weck,s vision and
aspirations for the new image-generating technique they had
pioneered:
see separate article Sjolander,s
CV on the Internet. www.monumentintime.homestead.com/
SCAN
MODULATION/RESCAN
In this process images are
produced using a television camera rescanning an oscilloscope or CRT
screen. The display images are manipulated (squeezed, stretched, rotated,
etc.) using magnetic or electronic modulation. The manipulated images,
rescanned by a second camera are then fed through an image processor. This
type of instrument was also used without an input camera feed, the
resultant images produced by manipulation of the raster. Examples of
this type of instrument include Ture Sjolander,s ' Temporary " Video
Synthesizer (1966-69), the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, and the Rutt/Etra Scan
Processor (1973).
----Original Message Follows---- From: Christopher Meigh Andrews <cmeigh-andrews@uclan.ac.uk> To: turesjolander <turesjolander@hotmail.com> Subject: RE: Monument Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:14:19 +0100 Ture, As you rightly say, there is a sense in which the American artists have written everybody else out of the history of video art. I would like to put some people (such as yourself) back in! I would like to use an image or two from the stills of Monument that I have found on the web, but they are very low resolution. Would you be willing to e-mail an image of greater resolution? (300dpi would be best- jpeg or tiff, if possible) also, i attach a little form so that you grant me the rights to reproduce the image in the book. Is this OK? if so, please fill it in and send it back to me. I would like to do more than simply paraphrase what Gene (Youngblood) has written in Expanded Cinema, which as you say is what M. Rush has done. Any chance that you can tell me a little bit more about your ideas with Monument and how it began? I will of course piece togther what I can from the web site, and from what Aapo Saask has written. I also will talk to Brian Hoey and Peter Donebauer. i also have the Biddick Farm catalogue from the exhibtion at Tyne & Wear, which has a little info. All best wishes to you- and i will certainly send your regards to Brian & Peter!!! Chris Dr. Chris Meigh-Andrews PhD (RCA) MA, HDCP Electronic & Digital Art Unit 38 St. Peters Street Preston PR1 7BS www.uclan.ac.uk/edau Tel: 01772-893204 Fax: 01772-892921 Mobile: 07855954298 http://www.meigh-andrews.com |
"So who exactly broke grounds here? Pixar, for merely creating something longer, or Information International, Inc., for being the first to use CGI animation in a major motion picture? And what about Ture Sjolander, who made the first electronic animation as far back as the early 1960s? Doesn't he deserve any credit at all?"
But no, Pixar takes the prize, because its production was longer, or in reality, because it's from Hollywood and made lots of money. As for real technical breakthroughs? Bleh, who needs that? Just show me the money, right?
And note that none of this had anything to do with Steve Jobs, at all, yet he's been lauded with the accolade of somehow being responsible for it all, in some mysterious way that (unsurprisingly) no one can quite put their finger on.