Raven Row

Chris King: Video Circuits


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Chris King: Video Circuits
Thursday 2 June, 6.30pm
Artist Chris King leads a live demonstration of early media art and video synthesis technologies, working with a selection of different techniques used by the Vasulkas and other video artists during the 1970s and 80s.
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London-based artist Chris King uses electronic video and audio synthesis techniques to perform live visual music. A collector and archivist of early media art periodicals, he also teaches workshops on video techniques and the history of electronic intermedia and visual music practice. His blog, Video Circuits, explores early abstract and synthetic image making practices such as video synthesis, experimental animation, graphic scores and DIY television.
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This event was presented as part of the exhibition 'Steina & Woody Vasulka. Machine Vision' at Raven Row.
Steina & Woody Vasulka. Machine Vision
19 May to 5 June 2016
Steina (born 1940, Reykjavík) and Woody Vasulka (born 1937, Brno) are pioneers of electronic and digital image production. In their ongoing dialogue with machines – from cathode-ray televisions to digital computer systems – they consider the electronic signal as artistic medium.
Meeting in Prague in 1962, the Vasulkas relocated to New York in 1965 where, by the early 1970s, they began working almost entirely with machine-generated imagery. Their early technical studies were produced in what they described as ‘states of unsupervised performance’, with the artists adjusting and altering sound and image waveforms in real time to create illusory images in virtual space. Often collaborating with a close network engineers, musicians and artists, they invented new electronic and digital devices to realise video environments such as Noisefields (1974).
Woody initially worked as a filmmaker, while Steina trained as a classical violinist, and their respective visual styles are seen in their individual practices. In the exhibition, Steina's electro-optical-mechanical installation Machine Vision (1978) implicates the body of the viewer and demonstrates her poetic conception of time, while Woody’s scientific analysis of video technology is evident in his Waveform Studies (1977-2016).
At Raven Row, examples of their analogue videos and experiments with lens-based media and digital processors from the early seventies to the early eighties reveal how the Vasulkas’ methods anticipated the virtual modes of image-making that are dominant today.
The exhibition is curated by Amy Budd, Deputy Director, Raven Row, and Kristín Scheving, Head of Vasulka Chamber. The exhibition is made in partnership with Vasulka Chamber, Centre of Media Art, at the National Gallery of Iceland.
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Image: Steina, Orbital Obsessions, 1975-77; revised 1988. Still from video, 24:13 min. Courtesy the artist and Vasulka Chamber, The National Gallery of Iceland.
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