analogue traces
The sun descends over
Berlin's Planterwald, May 2018. If it weren't for the haze, the
Fernsehturm would be visible between the rectangular structure, part
of the Treptowers complex and the electricity pylon. An 1970s artwork
revisited using equipment roughly of that time and a little later;
Hitachi CCTV FP71 camera, Sanyo VTC5000 Betacord VCR, using the VCR's 7
day timer and a mains timer switch for the camera. Video accelerated
x64 with Windows Movie Maker and Blender.
Sometime
around 1970 I became obsessed with the idea that video has been
invented to satisfy an ancient longing: to allow the human eye to
gaze directly at the sun without damage to the retina.
Mary Lucier, Light and Death¹
Mary Lucier, Light and Death¹
In
1975 American artist, Mary Lucier pointed a video camera at the
rising sun. In a piece titled Dawn
Burn,
a video camera captured dawn over the New York skyline; the sun's
intensity leaving indelible traces on the fragile surface of the
video tube as it crossed the frame.
For
Lucier these marks were scars, 'trauma
so deep it cannot be erased but, instead, accumulate on the image
surface as a form of memory'
This
process and Lucier's suggestion that her camera was able to absorb
and retain what it had viewed, albeit as a form of wounding questions
the fate of another video camera, a CCTV camera proposed by Bill
Viola in Video Black – The Mortality of the Image²,
whose service of twenty years silently surveilling the same scene
without ever being coupled to a recorder, comes to an end. Viola's
camera is left with nothing to show for it's experience.
'Without
a memory to give it a life, events flicker across its image surface
with only a split second to linger as after images, disappearing
forever without a trace. '
In The
Autobiography of Video Ina
Blom asserts 'changes
can only be perceived if you are able to remember and compare. And
memory, Viola tells us, is precisely what this camera does not have.
You cannot expect it to tell history or to transfer accumulated
knowledge. Its time is the present only, and the events that make up
this present hardly seem to register at all, leaving only the
briefest of traces.' ³
The
'after images' that Viola refers to, the 'traces' described by Blom
are the video tube sensor's lag, a sort of electronic persistence of
vision that would cause bright objects to appear to momentarily
remain visible once removed from view or to stream ghosts
as they move a screen. Described here as analogous to ultra short
term memory; conspicuous enough to be visible yet too fleeting to
have any mnemonic purpose, the phenomena is related to one of the
factors that made the video tube's responding counterpart, the
Cathode Ray Tube that employed much the same technology but for
display rather than capture, suitable to be adapted for use in the
first electronic Random-access Memory system.4
Video's
potential for immediate feedback, that proved alluring to early
counterparts of Viola and Lucier, allowed for an entire computer
program to be displayed on screen in a series of dots and dashes to
then be read by a sensor that would then write the displayed quantity
back onto the screen. Manually, the operator could access any part of
the 32 bit memory code, intervening in the loop to adjust the data.
The
video tube's ability to produce live feedback could potentially be
adapted into memory systems. What it lacks is storage. Momentary
delay or lag displayed on screen was no use for storage, the
formation of a body or archive; a recording.
Although
a means of electronically writing, saving or storing the imagery
captured by the video tube had been imagined as far back as the 1920s
the electronic moving image existed without dedicated storage until
the late 50s. Until then it relied on a film camera to reshoot it's
images. Unlike video, the motion film recording substrate was
developed simultaneously to the development of the apparatus. Unlike
video, every film second is provided for by multiple sensors,
'footage' that judders past the gate to become film frames. A
scratched or over exposed film frame is, gone within the blink of an
eye. Not so for the video camera that only ever has one sensor, one
eye.
And
yet, Lucier proves the video camera uncoupled to a recording medium,
the eye without a brain, can in fact have recourse to a variant of
storage; a write once system where memory is etched with a blinding
light process gradually causing irreversible damage. Burn.
The term used for this effect would later be used to describe
optically writing data for storage to Compact Disc and DVD.
As
with Keraunography, the mythical process where lines and images are
drawn onto a variety of media including human skin by energy and
light descending from the sky or Optography, the phenomena of the
retina retaining its last seen image beyond death; video burn
provides
primitive, use once image storage that simultaneously inflicts injury
or destruction of the device that has gathered it.
Combining
Lucier and Violas cameras for experiment: a static Vidicon camera
pointing towards the setting sun. Over a period of days and weeks, as
the earth moves about the sun, the fireball's glare will streak
across the image in gradual increments, creating diagonal tracks
across the screen that resembles those made by video heads onto tape
during the helical scan recording process. Unlike the magnetized
tracks set into the rewritable palimpsest of video tape those drawn upon
sensitive photoconductive layer of the Vidicon's target sensor cannot
be erased.
Over
the passage a year, a writing over of the entire target sensor could
occur. Over the twenty years proposed by Viola, it would be entirely
burnt and blinded, yet as it was retired, it would take with it some
material evidence of its service, some indexical proof of what it had
seen. Video, the medium born without memory would blind itself to
create one. Video Black – Viola's camera has remembered something
after all.
1.
Mary Lucier, Light and Death
printed in Illuminating
Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, Doug
Hall, Sally Jo Fifer, Aperture, 1990.
2.
Bill Viola, 1990. excerpt printed in Theories
and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings,
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz,University of California Press, 1996.
3. Ina Blom, The
Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology,
Sternberg Press, 2016.
4.
The Small Scale Experimental Machine or Manchester Baby, 1948.
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6013/The-Manchester-Baby-the-world-s-first-stored-program-computer-ran-its-first-program
