criticalartware



	/ (.sMH) Sherry Miller Hocking of the Experimental Television Center (http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org) and Project Director of the Video History Project (http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/) / ======================================================================== / v.002.1x532.sMH / ======================================================================== / "The Experimental Television Center was founded in 1971, an outgrowth of a media access program established by Ralph Hocking at Binghamton University in 1969." - Sherry Miller Hocking Sherry Miller Hocking is the Assistant Director of the Experimental Television Center. The Center acheives its' primary mission "to support the creation of work using new electronic media technologies, by providing space and time to artists for personal, self-directed creative investigations" through its' residency program. From the Center's first artist in residence, Nam June Paik, to the most recent artists, ETC has operated for over 30 years, committed to supporting and fostering work in an exceptional environment dedicated to experimentation and the development of artist built tools and systems. Sherry Miller Hocking has worked with the Center from the second year of its' operation. As Assistant Director of the Center, she has worked on and organized conferences, screenings, exhibitions and events, from those that defined the initial possibilities, constraints and dimensions of early Video Art to more recent reflective efforts such as the Video History: Making Connections conference, which she organized with independent preservation consultant Mona Jimenez. In addition, she acts as the Project Director of the Center's Video History Project, an online resource for the documentation, study and preservation of early Video Art. This database driven application/platform began in 1994 and invites contributions to the protection of endangered or marginalized histories and the development of a "dynamic and inclusive" model for contemporary media art historicization. (jonCates) / =======================Sherry_Miller_Hocking============================== / Sherry Miller Hocking Experimental Television Center interviewed by criticalartware 2002.10.19 criticalartware: How did the Experimental Television Center begin? Sherry Miller Hocking: It actually begin in about 1968 Ralph Hocking was attached to what is now know as Binghampton University, It is part of the state university system. He met Nam June Paik and also met a couple of people who were associated with the New York State Council of the Arts, and one of the things that the Council recognized that they had a responsibility to address those issues of media art, or what would eventually become know as media art. Ralph, in conversations with Nam June, started talking about a residency program for artists and Nam June's interests at that point were in tool design and what ultimately became known as the Paik Abe Colorizer, along with some other systems and machines that he designed and built in collaboration Shuya Abe, who was really the engineer who built the machinery. Ralph's personal interests were in not really engineering but in the physicality of machinery and the beauty of tools, and by tools I mean anything from a pistol to a TV set. It was a very broad range of understanding of that issue. So in conversation with Nam June and in meeting some of the people at the State Arts Council, Ralph felt that it would be a good idea to start some kind of program that invited artists to actually get there hands on these at that point completely new and revolutionary video tools. Ralph began a program then in '69, on the campus of the university that allowed students and community members access to portable video equipment, But in 1970 Ralph with encouragement from Nam June and some of the people at the Concil made an application to the Concil and received support to establish a center off-campus as a separate succinct entity. Again maintaining the core that he had established with the program at the university. First of all access to the portable video tools and systems and also comparable access to equipment that would play the tapes back because at the beginning the equipment that recorded the tapes was not able to play the tapes back so you needed basically two separate systems to even see what you just recorded. We invited people in to work, usually people would come for a week at a time but sometimes we had people stay longer, most of the people stayed at the Center and came from all over the place. We continued to work with Nam June in terms of designing and building tools and systems for people to use, but also engaged David Jones, who to this day continues to be associated with the Center. He first of all come in to repair and maintain the equipment, but David is not someone who wants to stay in a small kind of niche, so he was immediately was drawn to the idea of creating tools and tool sets. So we did that kind of work starting really, I think at first taking existing devices such as the switcher and a keyer, which today I mean it sounds ridiculously simple, but those were fairly radical tools at that point. So David began by looking at the existing SEG that you could buy and the existing keyer that you could buy, took them apart understood how they worked and then started to kind of jam on that idea from an engineering point of view in creating his own circuitry that he would put into existing boxes and from there it progressed as the years went buy into designing and building his own systems and tools. Artists would come in to work at the Center and say 'oh gee, I really want to do this, can you do it.' and some of the equipment that was eventually designed and built by the people working at the Center came out of that kind of collaborative working relationship with people working on the system. criticalartware: How were the initial tools developed? Sherry Miller Hocking: It was really a lot of late night conversations, a lot of collaborative working together, people would come in and say 'I would like to do this,' and then we'd sit around and try to figure out how to pull that off. Sometimes you can do it with existing equipment, sometimes he'd need to go over to the bench, and sometimes he could actually put something together in a couple of hours that would do what it was that needed to be done. You know, all of that hand wired, all of that handmade and most of David's designs, at least as far as the Center was concerned, were that type of handmade tool. But there was a lot of give in take in working with the artist. I mean that was really what it was about for us: trying to understand what it was that artists coming into this new field wanted to do with those images. We were coming at it completely from the point of view of video as an art form, and today because the old tools are kind of conjoined with the newer digital tools it opens up this whole new and, I think, pretty interesting realm of possibilities to break through that kind of restriction of the digital and maintain that kind of flavor of handmade analog continuously varying signal parameters that make for a pretty interesting kind of tool set to work with. We were open to the idea that people need to experiment. I think one of the real issues that set us apart was our interest in what became know as image processing tools and devices. There were as the years went, by the mid to late 70's, actually quite a number of media centers not just in New York state but pretty much all over the country. Some separate and independent like the Center and some associated with universities or museums or the PBS affiliate model, but there were not very many that were focused on the kind of tool base and investigations that we were interested in pursuing and making available to people. And that still continues to be an interest of ours. As I said one of the things we are looking at now is this hybrid of the new digital tools and the older analog devices, and one of the things that we're seeing, which is really interesting, is that there is a lot young makers that are very interested in the older tools and systems and the older analog devices, and they're very smart and they get it. There was a long period of time, kind of middle range in the field, when that wasn't the case. There was a lot of chasing after the fanciest broadcast technology. That's what everyone wanted. They wanted the high end editing. They wanted, you know, three tube cameras, blah blah blah, and that's really not what we were interested in at all and still aren't, and this younger generation of people coming into it now, they get that. They understand that and they also see the value of kind of punching holes in the digital world. That the digital world is wonderful and it's very powerful, but I think there is something there that's lacking that used in collaboration with those analog tools this leads to a whole different image quality. And also I think imagination is part of the vision. It allows people to really achieve a vision that in the digital world is not achievable. I think that those notion of hand made is also something that comes across in an analog tool, that when people adjust a knob, no matter how hard you try to be even in terms of turning it, you don't succeed, and part of the interest to me in terms of all of these images is that you can see that; you can see the hand of the artist making the work. It's like texture in a painting, there's a hand there that touched that, even though with electronic tools you're at a remove obviously, but the artifact is still there, and that's I think what's interesting to me. A system that allows you to kind of play in both of those worlds is, to me, more interesting then one that restricts you either to either one or the other. I mean, I think that that's part of the concept of art of a system, that we put together. As open-ended as we could possibly make it. A broadcast situation is engineered and created with that idea of being most efficient going from point A to point B. Ralph describes this system as being least efficient in going from point A to point B, but by that what he means is that it gives you the most choices. It is not the quickest way to get from camera A to camera B, it takes you all over the lot, but in that going all over the lot there are, you know, thousands and millions of image possibilities that you might get side-tracked in and never get to point B, but that is the whole concept of the design of this system. If you want to be efficient, then maybe what you should do is think about working with a TV lab. If you want to see as many possible image sets as you can possibly see then maybe this is the place that you should come. criticalartware: Who or what were your influences? Sherry Miller Hocking: I think that you... its interesting to take a look at the various aspects of contemporary art that have made a huge difference and were a big influence on the early, kind of founding days of video, and publications like Radical Software. There were conversations about those kinds of issues from the topics of cybernetics to art history there was a whole range of philosophical and aesthetic ideas that were being really explored and I think that was intentional. I mean, I think that people were really working hard on those issues; issues of process, issues of randomness, chance, you know, John Cage and all of those kinds of ideas. The idea of artists working with engineers and the concepts of prefabrication and how far back can an artist be in terms of dictating what the object is going to look like before its really not about the artist anymore, but its about the steel mill or whatever. I think that all of those things were a part of it. There was a large resistance in the early work on the part of the general public, partly because it was tool based work. I mean there was a criticism level that it was just made by a machine. How could it possibly be art? It's not about art, it's about TV. And then it became conflated with the notions of broadcast television and difficult for people to separate it on that level also. So I think it also posed a lot of problems for audiences aside from the issues of philosophy and aesthetics, which a general audience may not have been so conversant with'there were also other issues I think that made it difficult, at least initially for the art to be accepted or understood. It was interesting and engaging for some people but very off putting. criticalartware: How did ETC become involved with exhibitions and events such as 'Information works and Activities'? Sherry Miller Hocking: There were also people who were interested in working in the art field and art world in museums. It was obvious right from the beginning that showing tapes in a museum was really not so interesting. It didn't sort of work very well'it doesn't even today work very well. Ralph was always convinced that the way the people should look at the work, if they were going to look at it on tape, then they should take the tape home, it should be in your own space. Then other people argued that viewing should be a community situation also that there should be an interactive participation on the part of the audience, and taking the tape home by yourself doesn't address those issues. And some of the work that was exhibited at that point were basically the machine. It really wasn't any more sophisticated then that. The colorizer and SEG and the analyzer equipment that was required with the system would be set up in a gallery situation with live black and white cameras that were then plugged in and you could be on TV and colorized. And again it is a little bit difficult to from the vantage point of 2002 to understand the power of that kind of thing, but in 1970, 71, 72 a lot of people hadn't seen themselves on TV. This was like a new thing, and its a little bit hard to kind of imagine or recapture that feeling because everyone is on television all the time at this point, whether you want to be or not, in some respects. So it was this kind of innocent, kind of naive quality to some of these exhibitions that I think you would be hard pressed to recreate that today. In 1972, we were invited by David Ross, who was then a curator of video at the Everson Museum that was located in Syracuse, to put a show on, and it was kind of put to us like that. It was as broad as that. You could have the space for a month. Obviously we needed to supply all of the equipment, but we were given pretty much free reign to do what we wanted, and we put together a show that was basically just called 'Works from the Experimental TV Center' that involved a number of installations created by us. Ralph had a couple of pieces in there, a couple of other people that worked at the Center at that point also did. Nam June also had some work in there. Shigeko Kubota had some work in there. We also did some live performance pieces. One in particular involved a band, guys played music and again we set up, what at that point was called the synthesizer, and kind of interacted in a live fashion with the musicians. There was a tape screening program that ran continuously. Actually, there were four different stations set up. This was all 1/2 inch reel to reel at that time, and a lot of that work, I am not going to hazard to guess in terms of percentages, but a fair amount of it, were excerpts from community based work, the Red Cross, the Civic Center. A lot of the schools around all contributed little pieces to that screening situation, and along with that we also had artists that would come into work. Rudy Stern, again Nam June and Shigeko had work, Walter Wright had some work in there. There were also artists that were beginning to explore the medium and we included that as part of the single channel tape screening. And alongside these, other types of installation works. A lot of the installation works were concerned with the functioning of the tool and kind of playing around with the philosophical notions of what that really meant, but again I think that part of the success from an audiences point of view was this quality of surprise; they saw themselves on television, it was really as simple as that, to some extent. The work itself was much more complex, but what the audience took away from it was maybe not so complex. At least not right then. We, in 1976, were invited back to the Everson to do a show called 'Information Works and Activities,' and that show was done in collaboration with Peer Bode who worked at the Center for a number of years who is now teaching at Alfred University and makes his own work and is an important participant in the field. That followed to some extent a similar kind of model; there were live performances, in this case there were some interactive media dance performances rather then the music video performances that occurred, but similar kinds of things tried to articulate the introspection of the different mediums. That was something that was a particularly rich area of exploration at the beginning because there was no such thing as a media artist coming to work at the TV Center, because there weren't any media artists. A lot of them were coming from different mediums, related perhaps'a lot of film makers, a lot of people involved in audio and music. I think that this is a whole interesting area also, because right from the beginning there were a lot of very similar... the tool set was similar, the notions were similar, there was a lot of, I think very rich... I think it's a very interesting area to explore, and one that also has not been paid much attention to in the history of the medium. This is a really good example of what I mean by the kind of intersection between audio and sound work and video. criticalartware: Describe your involvement with Ars Electronica 1992, 'Eigenwelt der Apparate - Welt Pioneers of Electronica Art'? Sherry Miller Hocking: Oh yeah that was fun, that was really fun. It was really the first time, unfortunately Ralph and I didn't actually get to see the show, which was the sad part. But it was really the first time that those tools had been in the same place, which was really one of the interesting things about it. Functioning. Obviously they are stored, they exist physically in the same space. But to see them operating and to actually be able to, kind of, bring them, some of them, back to life was pretty amazing. It put it into a place that I think we kind of really, it needed to have be put into rather than it being easily dismissible as this machine based art, and that I think was one of the important things about that show. But it was still a hoot to see the machines all together, it was great. Also from an engineering point of view, David and a fellow named Richard Brewster worked a lot on the interfaces for those machines. To try to figure out. That aspect of it was pretty interesting to. Like, how do you take a kind of antique machine that is first of all hand wired and handbuilt, some of them the cases were literally cardboard boxes, I mean that's true, with knobs kind of mounted through the cardboard boxes, really fragile systems, and to figure out interfaces where a general public could come in and actually use those tools is a pretty interesting problem. And that was another thing that I think was successful about that show, was largely we solved it, and that's pretty exciting. And then the catalog was I think another really important thing that came out of that show and still I believe to this day, one of the most important documents of image processing that exists, and unfortunately I think that that's part of the problem with image processing, is that we all were so busy working and creating structures for people to create work, that we weren't very smart about issues of documentation. Issues of exhibitions to some extent. That was one of the difficulties of organizing one of the Ars Electronica show was trying to come up with old schematics. Can we truly find the schematics that, you know Don McArthur constructed for the SAID in 1979. We did, but they're written on paper, literally written on paper napkins and things like that, and its not just the Center's issue. Like this. Some of the equipment that Steina and Woody have, some of the George Brown stuff, Dan Sandin's work, I mean, all of it is in various sates of documentation. Sandin and those guys, partly I think because of the notion that they had right from the beginning with 'copy it right' and all of this, the idea of people actually duplicating that system, they needed to address the issue of documentation right from the beginning. But I think that certainly I can speak for David that it really didn't seem all that important. What was important was making the next machine, making the next version, and even when some of the machines were documented what you would find is that (we discovered this also at the Ars Electronica show) the actual device when you looked at had been changed; it didn't follow the schematics because David or someone else had found a problem and gone in and fixed it, or figured well, if I do this then the machine will do fifteen more new things, so its worth it, so lets just do that. criticalartware: What are the future directions for the Experimental Television Center? Sherry Miller Hocking: There are a number of areas I would like to see us be able to address. Some people have been experimenting here with live web work, which I think would be an interesting area for us to kind of offer to people, partly because a number of people that are working here now, work in a live interactive fashion. Some of them record from here, take raw material and then reincorporate that into performance work. The whole issues of software, the issues of access to web technologies and putting stuff on the web for artists are real issues that need to be some how addressed, and the combination for instance of web based, maybe live work in conjunction again with the tool base that we have here could lead to some kind of interesting things. It certainly again isn't being done but that dynamic of the artist participating in that conversation is something that I think is consistent through the whole history the Center and its tool set. It started out that way and it continues to evolve in that fashion. criticalartware: How did the Video History Project begin? Sherry Miller Hocking: We started really to kind of define it in 1994. I mean its kind of that old. trying to figure out ways that the history could be more inclusive. I am always happy to see art books being published about media, but I don't think that the histories are inclusive, which is fine. I mean people have agendas, they have interests, they have knowledge and expertise, and that's where the books are coming from. And I think part of my dissatisfaction goes back to what I feel was our lack of understanding of the importance of this kind of documentation early on, and that's part of what I kind of regret about it. But I think that not just with image processing but with all of video, there are a lot of people who've been working and did work that were really important people in the early days, who are not in the books, or are in one of the books, or have a whole lot of catalogues put out, but they still didn't make the text books. And what I find in the university situation and now in even K through 12 situation is that people don't know the history, and its only in some senses that it seems foolish to me to worry about a history that is really only about 35 years old, if you just talk about media. I mean obviously if we talk about the art historical antecedents it's a bigger idea, but if you just stick to media and video, its not that long. But there there's been a real failure on the part of the working community to put forward those parallel histories. Part of it is just what happens when, within the art world, people get singled out and chosen. They become stars in the field and that then becomes the history. Which is one of the histories, no doubt about it, but there are also other things that happen that I believe are as important. It's all important and part of a true and accurate picture. Another reason that we were trying to define the history project was I had been invited to participate in the summer institute at the Visual Studies Workshop, and I would teach a five day course in the history of video, and in doing that, and struggling myself with that, I realized the problem accessing resources. If you didn't make it into one of the very few books on the subject, its going to be hard for me to show you or to tell you about things that didn't make those books, unless I personally have the stuff, if I can personally pull it out of my own archive, fine. There aren't very many people that have access to the type of materials that I happen to have access to, and that I think is a real problem. Radical Software is a kind of famous example, it's extremely difficult to get a hold of those issues. They're wonderful, they're fabulous to look at, and they give you this amazing snapshot. It's almost like a geological core sample of what the heck was going on in 1970 and 1971. There are other publications that I think are also important. There is a whole range of publications that where published by Media Study Buffalo which was a very important media Center that functioned in Buffalo that Woody and Steina were associated with when they were in Buffalo teaching at the university. Just incredible publications that they put out, catalogues texts, it's almost impossible to find that material. The web is this fantastic way of distributing and disseminating information. As a medium for contribution and dissemination it was made for this project, and the project was made for that form. So basically it started out as a way to put resources in a place that people could access them. So that people like me that were in positions that were trying to teach workshops or inform interested public about what happened had some place to go, to see that this really did happen, look it's here. Without having to travel to a study Center in New York city. I mean there are places that do have the materials, I am not saying that. But they're not very accessible to people outside those major metropolitan areas. I think it partly works, we didn't have a lot of money to put into it, so it worked because we were again kind of functioning as a tool building team, only this time it was on the level of software and web site development. So we're constantly collecting information for it, I think that its consistent with what we've done at the Center the whole time. We're not out to make money. It's always going to be a free and open site, and part of the idea also was this idea of contribution, which is if an artist is interested in the site and wants his work up there, we are very happy to put it up. Most recently Taka Iimura send a number of his early texts works to be put up. So people are really, they're wonderful, they're very cooperative and just completely supportive of that idea of it being free and available, and its about letting people learn about what happened, and then drawing their own conclusions about where they can take that in contemporary practice. As it was in 1970, it's the interchange that's important. It's the exchange that's required, and for us to arrive at a true understanding of what happened and to move forward I think. I believe that the more resources that we have available, the richer the understanding is. Sherry Miller Hocking interviewed by criticalartware coreDevelopers: jon.satrom ++ jonCates @ the Experimental Television Center Owego NY .US 2002.10.19 video edit coreDeveloper: bensyverson Experimental Television Center system support: Hank Rudolph made possible by the Experimental Television Center http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/ http://www.criticalartware.net this criticalartware interview is a shared cultural resource released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike version 2.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ /