Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY
September 9 – December 18, 2016
Signal to Code provides a special emphasis on the influential history of video art in the Central New York region. Sampling forty years of video art held in the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media in the Cornell Library, the exhibition features works created in the pioneering facilities of the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton and Owego, New York.
Founded by Ralph Hocking in 1971, ETC offered artist residencies to more than 1,600 international artists for work with the Center’s innovative electronic tools. Most American video artists received some form of support from ETC, whether through residencies or grants, thus positioning the Central New York region as pivotal to the history of video art.
The exhibition also includes artists screened in the country’s first video festival, the Ithaca Video Festival (1975–83), which was founded and curated by artist Philip Mallory Jones.
Beginning in the late 1960s, artists and technologists began to custom-create hardware and software for real-time manipulation of video signals through original designs or as hacks to devices common to television production. The artists and tool designers working together at ETC extended this work across analog and digital domains in an expanded media environment.
ETC was renowned for the experimental video processing tools developed by prominent artists and designers such as Ralph Hocking, Nam June Paik, Shuya Abe, David Jones, and Daniel Sandin. Dazzling play with electronic color and form captured the imagination of the original group of video artists, while blends of synthetic sound and radical experimentation in narrative style increasingly enveloped the imagery of more recent artists.
Eleven works will screen simultaneously:
Ralph Hocking, Transparent Body #3, 1974. Single-channel video projection (color, silent); 14:26 min.
David Blair, Wax or The Discovery of Television Among the Bees, 1991. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 1:25 min.
Andrew Deutsch, Magnetic North, 1996-2007. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 7:37 min.
Barbara Hammer and Paula Levine, Two Bad Daughters, 1988. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 12:30 min.
Gary Hill, Earth Pulse, 1975. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 5:47 min.
Sara Hornbacher, Writing Degree Z, 1985. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 5:21 min.
Philip Mallory Jones, First World Order, 1992–94. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 27 mins.
Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe, La Blanchisseuse, 1993. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (B&W, sound); 10:50 min.
NNeng-M (Brian Moran, Nancy Meli Walker, Benton C Bainbridge, and Molly Kittle), Tears, 1999. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 4:58 min.
Lynne Sachs, Window Work, 2000. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 9:04 min.
Ann-Sargent Wooster, Dialectics of Romance, 1985. Single-channel video on CRT monitor (color, sound); 30:54 min.
