Selected Works from the Computer Art Festivals (1973-75)
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and the CUNY Graduate Center’s Art and Science Connect are pleased to co-present an online selection of video works, programs, and materials from the event’s history, alongside a pair of panels inspired by the legacy of the Computer Art Festivals (1973-1975) . In the first panel on Thursday. March 24th, participants from the initial festivals including Dimitri Devyatkin, Charles Dodge, Louise Etra, and Alison Knowles with Joshua Selman will discuss the historical context of the festivals, the nature of computer art at the time, and the event’s resonances today, moderated by curator Michelle Kuo. In the second panel on Thursday, April 28th, contemporary digital art practitioners and institutional voices including EAI’s Rebecca Cleman, Auriea Harvey, The Kitchen’s Lumi Tan, Kalani Nichole, and Addie Wagenknacht will consider the role of institutions in producing and shaping art made with computers, in a discussion moderated by curator Tina Rivers Ryan.
The original festivals featured a multidisciplinary span of artists engaging with digital technology such as computer graphics, synthesized music, performances, poetry, and a robust film and video screening series. Available through April 29th, EAI presents a selection of 19 titles from the Computer Art Festivals’ screening programs from its first three years, including works by Doris Chase, Dimitri Devyatkin, Ed Emshwiller, Bill and Louise Etra, Pat Lehman, Nam June Paik, Lillian Schwartz, Stan VanDerBeek, and Jud Yalkut, alongside programs and materials from the events.
Please note that many of these videos feature flashing lights and intense visual patterns.
Thanks to Helena Shaskevich for her significant role in organizing these events and this material. Thank you to artists Dimitri Devyatkin, Pat Lehman, and Louise (Etra) Ledeen, the Henry Ford Museum, and the Moving Image Special Collections at the University of Washington Library for generously providing videos and permissions.
From top-left, clockwise: Ed Emshwiller, Scape-Mates, 1972; Bill and Louise Etra, Lady of the Lake, 1973; Doris Chase, Circles II, 1972; Jud Yalkut, 26'1.1499" For A String Player, 1973.
First organized by Dimitri Devyatkin in 1973, the Computer Art Festivals were an instrumental forum for the convergence of art and computing technology at a formative moment in the histories of computer art. Within the short span of their three years—taking place at The Kitchen in 1973 and '74 before relocating to the CUNY Graduate Center in 1975—the festivals brought together over 100 different artists, showcasing prescient experiments with computers from a wide array of disciplines, including music, film, video, and graphic sculpture. Coordinators at the festivals included Devyatkin, composer Charles Dodge, artist and scientist George Chaikin (1944-2007), Bill and Louise Etra, and molecular biologist Lou Katz.
Explore programs from the three original festivals below, and read more on EAI’s Kinetic History webpage, which also features reviews and other ephemera from the events’ history.
1973 Computer Art Festival official program: browse here.
1974 Computer Art Festival official program: browse here.
1975 Computer Art Festival official program: browse here.
Three Early Works by Doris Chase (1969-72)
Doris Chase, Circles
1969-70, 6:28 min, color, sound
Music by Morton Subotnick.
Doris Chase, Circles II
1972, 7:43 min, color, sound
Featuring members of the Mary Stanton Dance Ensemble. Music by George Kleinsinger.
Doris Chase, Squares
1972, 7:41 min, color, sound
Courtesy of the Moving Image Special Collections at the University of Washington Library.
Doris Totten Chase (1923-2008) was a painter, sculptor, film, and video maker, initially based in the state of Washington before relocating to New York City in 1972. Chase had taken up painting in 1950 as a form of therapeutic relief after her husband, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, was paralyzed by polio. Chase evolved her hobby into a vocation, first as a painting and design instructor at a technical school and subsequently as a budding gallery artist. By 1962, Chase was exhibited internationally and spotlighted in a solo show in New York, a relative rarity in the then-male-dominated art world. Chase’s curiosity in expanded forms lead her to explore additional mediums, including sculpture, performance, abstract film and video, and computer-generated imagery.
Circles I (1969-70) was an early example of the artist’s forays into new media, created on a large mainframe computer at Boeing’s Seattle headquarters with assistance from William Fetter, a graphic designer and engineer at the company. The work was scored by electronic music composer Morton Subotnick. A second work, Squares, was also produced at the Boeing facilities. Chase’s Circles II (1972) grew from a performance by the Mary Stanton Dance Company, in which dancers interacted with the artist’s kinetic sculptures (a series of large plastic hoops). Chase heavily edited documentation of the event with the help of film colorists and intermedia artists Robert Brown and Frank Olvey, who had previously worked closely on Stan VanDerBeek’s Poemfield series.
Shortly after the completion of Circles II, Chase filed for a divorce and moved to the Hotel Chelsea, where she became acquainted with experimental filmmakers and artists Shirley Clarke, Harry Smith, and Jonas Mekas. Chase was further encouraged by Nam June Paik, shifting her attention to abstract video works and installations in the subsequent decade.
Three Early Works by Dimitri Devyatkin (1972-73)
Dimitri Devyatkin and Walter Wright, Vasant Rai
1972, 10:22 min, color, sound
Dimitri Devyatkin and Walter Wright, Sachdev
1972, 8:55 min, color, sound
Dimitri Devyatkin, The Sordid Affair
1973, 21:47 min, color, sound
Walter Wright on synthesizer.
Courtesy Dimitri Devyatkin. For more of his videos, see Devyatkin’s Vimeo and YouTube pages.
Initially trained as a classical violinist, Dimitri Devyatkin was introduced to abstract video in 1971 while living in Santa Barbara. After experimenting with feedback resulting in a conceptual video made with John Rogers titled Video Tunnel, Devyatkin became acquainted with artist Nam June Paik who suggested he visit the newly-opened media center The Kitchen in New York. Devyatkin soon became the organization’s video director, a position he held between 1971 and 1973, coordinating the center’s video screenings almost daily. In this capacity, Devyatkin organized the first two Computer Art Festivals alongside colleagues George Chaiken (1944-2007), who organized the computer graphics component, and Charles Dodge, who oversaw the musical events.
These three early videos demonstrate Devyatkin’s collaborations with Walter Wright, a video animator who had operated the Scanimate system for the Denver-based Computer Image Corporation, and served as a key collaborator on Ed Emshwiller’s Scapemates (1972). Vasant Rai and Sachdev document the Indian musicians Vasant Rai (1942-1985), a virtuosic surodist and resident of the Chelsea Hotel, and G.S. Sachdev (1935-2018), a noted bansuri player. The Sordid Affair live-mixed Richard Nixon’s 1973 speech on the heels of the Watergate scandal, accentuating the absurdity of the president’s dishonesty with warbled abstraction.
Ed Emshwiller’s Scape-Mates (1972)
Ed Emshwiller, Scape-Mates
1972, 28:16 min, color, sound
For more information, see EAI’s online catalog.
Ed Emshwiller is a major figure in the history of video art. As both an artist and a teacher, his pioneering efforts to develop an alternative technological language in video were enormously influential. He was an architect of the medium's electronic vocabulary and one of its most accomplished practitioners.
In one of his first experiments in video, Emshwiller creates an electronic landscape of both abstract and figurative elements, where colorized dancers are chroma-keyed into a mutable, computer-animated environment. Working with the Scanimate, an early analog video synthesizer, Emshwiller choreographs an architectural, illusory video space, in which frames proliferate within frames, disembodied heads and hands move within a collage of animated forms, and the dancers and their environment are subjected to constant transformations through image processing. With its witty interplay of the "real" and the "unreal" in an electronically rendered videospace, and the skillful manipulation and articulation of a sculptural illusion of three-dimensionality, Scape-mates introduced a new vocabulary of video image-making.
Three Works by Bill and Louise Etra (1973-75)
Bill Etra, Abstractions on a Bed Sheet
1973, 5:40 min, b&w, sound
Bill and Louise Etra, Lady of the Lake
1974, 0:50 min, color, sound
Bill and Louise Etra, Ms. Muffet
1975, 2:26 min, color, sound
Courtesy Louise Ledeen and Project Etra. For more videos, see Project Etra’s YouTube page.
This series of short, experimental tapes by Bill and Louise Etra are a flourishing display of the technological capacities of the Rutt/Etra synthesizer while exhibiting the Etra's evolving interest in exploring a feminist noir technicity. Co-invented by Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, the Rutt/Etra synthesizer was an analog raster manipulation device which allowed for real-time animation and image processing, similar to the Scanimate system used by many early computer artist. Made in the short timespan of two years, all three tapes were screened at the Computer Art Festivals with which the Etra's were intimately involved as organizers, even hosting festival panel and workshops in their own apartment.
Abstractions on a Bed Sheet was the first piece created with the Rutt/Etra synthesizer interfaced to a digital computer (a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP11-10). The short tape features a series of floating white sheets reverberating and proliferating across the screen set to a pulsing, electronic beat. The spectral images continue the Etra's fascination with a technological gothic, as the quickening pace of the repeated images coalesces into a vibrating choreographed performance.
Made at the Vasulka Visual Laboratory in Buffalo, NY in 1974 using the synthesizer, Bill and Louise Etra's Lady of the Lake features a conceptually playful noire commentary on the image versus apparatus as it manifests in the visual depth of the screen. Divided horizontally into two distinct visual realms, the "lady" appears as if she is floating just beneath a watery surface that is in fact the video raster. In a flourishing display of the technological capacity of the Rutt/Etra, her image is violently pulled and stretched across the screen, but never able to break through the horizontal surface of the “lake.” Ultimately, the image of her face collapses with the raster before sinking down into the depths of the screen.
Created using the Rutt/Etra and a DEC PDP11-10 digital computer, Ms. Muffet is a playful, feminist take on the "Little Miss Muffet" nursery rhyme. As Louise Etra writes, "I wanted to flip the story of Little Miss Muffet, from her being the victim of the spider to being the spider itself." In a conceptual and aesthetic echo of Lady of the Lake, a woman's image can be seen emerging from beneath the surface of the screen. Rather than trapped within it as she is in Lady of the Lake, Ms. Muffet has spun the screen and video raster into her web, where she traps others.
Three Works by Pat Lehman (1972-75)
Pat Lehman, Drug Abuse
1972, 1:00 min, color, sound
Pat Lehman, Video Vitae
1975, 7:50 min, color, sound
Pat Lehman, Fractals I + II
Circa 1970s, 7:15 min, color, sound
Courtesy the artist.
Pat Lehman is a video and computer artist working in Colorado. She was the first Art Director for the Computer Image Corporation in Denver, Colorado where she worked on some of their first animated projects for television with the Scanimate Computer. In 1972 Lehman set up the Department of Film and Video at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, where she would continue to experiment with the newly available technology of the Portapak, before returning to Colorado. Lehman was a media activist throughout her career and in 1977 helped organize the local group of the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers (NFLCP) in Denver.
Originally made as a 60 second public service announcement for local TV stations in Denver, Colorado, Pat Lehman's Drug Abuse warns viewers about the effects of drug use in the form of a a psychedelic odyssey. Its multicolored animations, made with the Computer Image Corporation's Scanimate video synthesizer, explore the phenomenological effects of drugs in a series of kaleidoscopic renderings; the mind and body are shown glowing in technicolor before distending and melting in and out of the surfaces of the screen. While the piece is one of Lehman's earliest experiments with Scanimate, it is also, alongside Video Vitae, one of her most frequently exhibited pieces. The tape was screened as an "experimental special effects film" at numerous festivals including the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, before being exhibited at the Computer Art Festival in New York in 1975.
Nam June Paik’s Suite 212 (1975/1977, with Douglas Davis, Jud Yalkut, and Shigeko Kubota)
Nam June Paik, in collaboration with Douglas Davis, Jud Yalkut, and Shigeko Kubota, Suite 212
1975, re-edited in 1977, 30:23 min, color, sound
For more information, see EAI’s online catalog.
Suite 212 is Paik's "personal New York sketchbook," an electronic collage that presents multiple perspectives of New York's media landscape as a fragmented tour of the city. Opening with the 1972 work The Selling of New York, a series of short segments designed for WNET's late-night television schedule, Paik critiques the selling of New York by multinational corporations, and the city's role as the master of the media and information industries. Russell Connor is the ubiquitous television announcer whose droning statistical information on New York is ridiculed by a series of "average" New Yorkers; a burglar steals the TV set on which we see his talking head. Intercut throughout this comic scenario are appropriated Japanese TV commercials of American products. At the core of Suite 212 is a series of short collaborative pieces that form an accelerated, vibrant romp through New York neighborhoods. Street interviews with Douglas Davis' neighbors, Jud Yalkut's rendering of a Chinatown noodle shop and a colorized walk along the bridge to Ward's Island, and Paik and Shigeko Kubota's hallucinatory tour of the Lower East Side with Allen Ginsberg are among the segments in this dizzying time capsule of New York in the 1970s.
Three Works by Lillian Schwartz (1970-72)
Lillian Schwartz, Pixillations
1970, 4 min, color, sound
Lillian Schwartz, UFOs
1971, 3:03 min, color, sound
Lillian Schwartz, Mutations
1972, 6:46 min, color, sound
Courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum.
A pioneer of computer-animated art, Lillian Schwartz is best known today for her computational films, many of which were screened at the Computer Art Festivals. She was first introduced to computing technologies in 1968 when she became a "resident visitor" at Bell Labs. During her tenure at Bell Labs, Schwartz continued to experiment with combining film, computer animation, and experimental music in collaborations with numerous artists and technologists including Ken Knowlton, Max Mathews, Richard Moore, and Jean-Claude Risset. Her work has been exhibited at and is owned by numerous institutions including: The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), The Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Centre Beauborg (Paris), and the Stedlijk Museum of Art (Amsterdam).
One of Schwartz's earliest films made while she was a "resident visitor" at Bell Labs, Pixillation (1970) is a philosophical exploration of computational vision and a brilliant example of Schwartz's technological ingenuity. The short piece is a hybrid film in which Schwartz utilizes Kenneth Knowlton’s programming language, EXPLOR (Explicit Patterns, Local Operations, and Randomness) to combine eighty- five black and white coded frames with microphotographs of crystal growth and hand- painted film animations of color effusions. What emerges from Schwartz's technological manipulations is a brief, yet visually sublime exploration of the pixel as the boundary between visibility and invisibility on the surfaces of the screen.
Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield No. 2 (1966)
Stan VanDerBeek, Poemfield No. 2
1966, 5:40 min, color, sound
For more information, see EAI’s online catalog.
Stan VanDerBeek (1927-1984) was a pioneer in the development of experimental film and live-action animation techniques, and achieved widespread recognition in the American avant-garde cinema. An advocate of the application of a utopian fusion of art and technology, he began making films in 1955. In the 1960s, he produced theatrical, multimedia pieces and computer animation, often working in collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories.
To create his “Poemfields” (1965-71) series, VanDerBeek worked closely with computer scientist Ken Knowlton and the staff at Bell Labs. Each “Poemfield” was adapted from poems by VanDerBeek, programmed on an IBM 7094 computer in black and white using a custom language known as BEFLIX, and colored after the fact by artists Robert Brown and Frank Olvey. Poemfield No. 2 features a soundtrack by jazz percussionist Paul Motian, known for his collaborations with Bill Evans.
Jud Yalkut’s 26'1.1499" For A String Player (1973)
Jud Yalkut, 26'1.1499" For A String Player
1973, 42 min, 39:50 min
For more information, see EAI’s online catalog.
Jud Yalkut (1938-2013) was a pioneering intermedia artist and filmmaker. His remarkable body of moving image work, which spanned fifty years, ranged from early performance renderings and poetic filmic experiments to a series of groundbreaking hybrid video-film collaborations with Nam June Paik.
This tape is Jud Yalkut's video realization of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik's concert performance of John Cage's composition 26'1.1499" For String Player. In this performance, which is manipulated and synthesized by Yalkut, Paik and Moorman play Cage's score on a collection of "instruments" that include a pistol, a dish of mushrooms, balloons, a practice aerial bomb, and a telephone call to President Nixon.
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