MÉMOIRES_VIVES

FROM NAM JUNE PAIK TO SLIDERS_LAB

MÉMOIRES_VIVES

CONTENTS_

PREFACE

Mémoires vives –Living Memories

JEAN-MARIE DALLET

I

INTRODUCTIONS

The Art of Nam June Paik –Diversity,Convergence & Global Network

JINSUK SUH

‘Videory’: Nam June Paik, Video and the End of History

LARISA DRYANSKY

Nam June Paik,Exhibition of Music – ElectronicTelevision 11-20 March 1963, Galerie Parnass,Wuppertal – Elberfeld

PATRICK NARDIN

The Singularitiesof Video Art:DistinguishingCharacteristics and Remediations

GRÉGOIRE QUENAULT

Notes Towards aHistory of Image-processed Video – Steina and Woody Vasulka

LUCINDA FURLONG

Reflections on the Brotherhood

HALLDÓR BJÖRN

RUNÓLFSSON

The Processing of The VasulkasArchive by theSLIDERS_lab: between Conserva-tion and Activation

INTERVIEW WITH

FRÉDÉRIC CURIEN

AND DON FORESTA BY

JEAN-MARIE DALLET

Unfold: theStrategic Impor-tance of Reinter-pretation for Media Art Mediation& Conservation

GABY WIJERS

Progressive Move-ments & Slides: Some Tracks for a History ofSLIDERS_Lab

THIERRY DUFRÊNE

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74

86

96

102

138

148

172

210

216

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16

22

28

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II

DEVICES_LANGUAGES

A Stroll through Electro-Magnetic Worlds

JOOST REKVELD

A Syntax of Binary Images

WOODY VASULKA

Generative Alu Forms No. 1:A Musician’sApproach to theVasulkas’ Legacy

ANNE SÈDES &

MARC BILLON

III

MULTIPLE_SCREENS

IV

MEMORY_ARCHIVE

RétinA: Matter of Images …

MARIA BARTHÉLÉMY

& RENÉ SULTRA

RétinA Questionsthe Meaning of ‘Seeing’. Five Adjectives to Qualify such a Questioning

SACHA LOEVE

08

MÉMOIRES VIVES –

LIVING MEMORIES

Curatorship:

Jean-Marie Dallet

Production: Liedts-Meesen

Foundation, Ghent, Belgium

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Video art, which first appeared in the1960s, was a contemporary of televisionwhose commercial aspect, aesthetic pur-pose and method of dissemination, how-ever, it did not share. The idea of thepioneers of video art – Nam June Paik,Steina and Woody Vasulka, Volf Vostell,and, in France, Jean-Christophe Averty –was to break down the languages of artand the classical modes of representationthrough the use of the new televisualmedium. Thus Paik, in 1963, at the exhi-bition ‘Music/Electronic Television’ atthe Galerie Parnass of Rölf Jährling inWuppertal, showed an installation con-sisting of thirteen television sets dis-rupted by frequency generators and whosescreens displayed striped and striatedimages. The production of abstract imagesindependent of the mass medium of tele-vision thus became the hallmark of thisearly phase of video art, during whichartists would endeavour to explore thepossibilities offered by the ‘immaterial’nature of the electronic signal.

Anyone familiar with contemporary artalready knows what I have just describedin a few lines. However, what I wanted to highlight here was the importance of,at the beginning of this adventure calledvideo art, a few key terms: power, massmedia, television, dissemination, signal,technique. These would, in fact, occupythe focus of a large part of the artists’activities and open up new horizons inwhich some saw the birth of a whole newepistémè.

This idea of a world in transformationwhich, from the 1960s on, would shiftinto another era of knowledge is particu-larly interesting here, because it inter-sects with reflections heard in the early1990s when the computer first became‘personal’, that is, accessible to all.With the advent of ‘automatic calcula-tors’ in the home, in anticipation of the changes to come, people referred tothe era as a new Renaissance, subject to an upheaval such as humankind had notexperienced since the invention of print-ing in the 15th century.

We therefore would like to show in thisexhibition that these two moments, thatof the 1960s and that of the 1990s, arelinked by secret paths. On this journey

of discovery, we will follow threetracks: first, that of the devices, theiruse and their creation by the artists aswell as the language that animates them;second, the track of memory and, con-sequently, of the archive; and third, thetrack of the multiplicity of screens asthe construction of new mental universes.

THE DEVICES, THE LANGUAGES

———————Video art initially sought to shapeexisting devices – television, thecathode ray tube, the tape recorder, thePortapak camera (after 1967) – either by integrating them into installations,or by dismantling their mechanisms so as to propose reinterpretations via theinvention of new devices created by theartists with the assistance of engineers.

At the birth of this art, Nam June Paikmade the founding gesture of interro-gating the materiality of the television-object and turning it into an instrumentthat played with the physicality of theelectronic image: the modulation of theimage so that is reduced to a simplehorizontal or vertical line; an imagethat varies in real time depending on thepitch of the sound; a pedal that, whenactivated, causes the image to flash.

From the end of the 1960s the physi-cality of the electronic image – a formof time-energy – was also questioned bythe Vasulkas. In this regard, they talkedof building and rebuilding space in time.With the video image freed from the frameof the cinematographic image, it couldthen unfold in space according to variousphysical phenomena: the echo (feedback,the Larsen effect), impulse (the strobo-scopic effect), scanning, shift, torsion,switching, keying.

Following the model of music which sawthe development of synthesizers for themanipulation of sounds, video artistscreated many devices. These allowed themto control the image accurately, torepeat effects, to explore modificationphenomena more deeply, and to address,too, the question of the relief of theelectronic image that appears on thesurface of the 2D screens. The trans-formations of the signal were based on

Jean-Marie DalletMémoires vives – Living Memories

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many devices: the colourizer, the keyer,the multiple keyer, the Putney synthe-sizer, the H.D. Variable Clock, the dualcolorizer, the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor,the digital memory processor, oscillatordrift, flip-flop switcher …

From 1978 on, the transition to digitaltechnology brought to the fore the ques-tion of languages. The analogue technologythat operates by reproducing the signalso it can be recorded in another medium – for example magnetic tapes in the case of audiovisual cassettes – was graduallyreplaced by a language based on ‘0’ and‘1’. Woody Vasulka’s Syntax of BinaryImages was the first known attempt totest this new language as he sought tounderstand its effects on the reading and construction of images.

This ‘pseudo-didactic’ work relating tothe languages of art was reactivated someforty years later by the collective ofartists SLIDERS_lab who, in collaborationwith Woody Vasulka, started by taking theoriginal work as an open field of activityable to generate new reflexive processesusing today’s devices: the computer, the3D printer, the Kinect sensor, and so on.

This dive into art history chimes wellwith a time when increasing numbers ofartists – wild scholars one and all – arestarting to reread and sometimes redoearlier experiments and incorporate theminto their work. This is the case of JoostRekveld who, with his installation #67(2018), ‘replays’ Reminscence, a videomade in 1974 by Steina and Woody Vasulka,going to the trouble of remanufacturing a modern Rutt/Etra Scan Processor for the occasion, and still using analoguetechnology.

MEMORY AND ARCHIVE

———————One way to address this issue is to turn to the pair anamnesis – that is,recollection – and hypomnesis – that is,all the internal and external techniquesused to support memory. The first termemphasizes the idea that the recording of information is useless if there is nosystem in place to reproduce, to draw out,and refresh memories, that is to say, our personal archive. In this model,

widely disseminated since Aristotle, thememories of empirical origin constitute a dead memory, which humans can volun-tarily recall by the action of the livingmemory, which is the faculty of anamnesis.Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha (2002) can beseen as, among other things, a staging of this idea of reminiscence, even if itwere at level zero. In this well-knowninstallation, a stone Buddha contemplateshis image, which is transmitted in realtime on a TV set whose screen is a mirrorthat reflects, opposes, but also opens adimension in depth, so that the cathodicimage appears to be a trace of what thesculpture is thinking, absorbed in itsown thoughts.

The second term of the pair, hypo-mnesis, links memory to technique, makingit dependent on the recording tools avail-able to us at a given time. It raises thequestion of the technicality of the trace– a book is not a videotape which is nota hard drive – and hence of access tothose traces.

In the case of digital technology, for example, what would be the use ofbillions of documents stored on compu-ters and other servers on the planet if there were no interface to reproducethem on our screens? The advent ofdigital technology requires a reflectionof new ‘intellectual technologies’, newknowledge systems that rely on the wide-spread storage of traces and computer-ized access to them.

In our era there is no shortage ofarchives. In the 21st century, a ‘archiv-ology’ is required, to use Derrida’s term – in other words, a science of thearchive, where ‘archiving is a performa-tive act, an active, productive inter-pretation’.1 Starting from texts, images,videos, sounds, from these potentialnarrative spaces, it is necessary toinvent an archival organology, newmnemonic instruments that allow us torethink ‘the relations between physio-logical organs, technical bodies andsocial organizations’.2

This is the whole meaning of a worklike VIM (Vasulka interactive Multimedia),which has been in development since 2014by SLIDERS_lab and which proposes a newtype of open interactive instrument to

1 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive, Paris,Galilée, 1995.2 Bernard Stiegler, De la misère symbolique 2.La catastrophe du sens-ible, Paris, Galilée,2004, pp. 29, 99.3 The title of WoodyVasulka’s work also paystribute to Frances A.Yates’s The Art of Memory,Chicago Il., Universityof Chicago Press, 1966.

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navigate through the memory of the artistsSteina and Woody Vasulka. In the sameway, BIG CRUNCH_Marienbad by the artistsMaria Bathélémy and René Sultra is aflexible and reconfigurable informationmedium, a woven fabric across which passthe optical fibres inserted into thematerial of Last Year at Marienbad, afilm folded in on itself, directed byAlain Resnais in 1961. This 11-m-long,1.5-m-wide screen gives shape to the ideadeveloped in Woody Vasulka’s film Art ofMemory (1984), which offers architecturesof modular images set in natural land-scapes into which are inscribed images ofthe major conflicts of the 20th century.

The title of Vasulka’s film Art ofMemory refers precisely to the memorypalaces which, until the Middle Ages,played an essential role in the mechanismof recollection, by facilitating journeysalong the left traces, via the construc-tion of principles of classification inmonuments intended to recover ‘souvenirpictures’. The Anarchive collection(1999–2018) directed by Anne-Marie Duguetis an extension of this tradition. Theauthors of each issue, all recognizedartists on the international scene, offernavigations through their work, alwaysfollowing singular paths through inter-faces that organize and shape theirthinking in virtual space.

MULTIPLE SCREENS

———————The matrix layout of monitors is one of the responses of artists to the omni-potence of the film frame. The combina-tion of monitors, and sometimes evenlarge numbers of them, thus allows acombinatory game with the modalities of the appearance of images in multipleframes. The effect thus created re-inforces the hypnotic and compulsive pro-cesses of the appearance and disappear-ance of images, and drags the bodies ofthe spectators into innovative immersiveexperiences, but also the bodies of theartists in disturbing choreographieswhere they hybridize into complex inter-active man–machine devices.

The multiplication of video framesalso corresponds to what artists’ experi-

ence in their workshops. In their dailylifes, they look at an image on severalscreens. They were the first to realize,at the beginning of the 1970s, that theimage is no longer alone, but that it isimmediately included in a network thatobviously summons memory, but also all theimages produced on Earth. This thought of the fragment and the interrelationshipbetween images, if it refers back to theinterest of this period in logic andlanguage, propels us in the same way intoa delinearized space that revolutionizesthe modes of reading and writing.

If the first video artists thought oftheir art as electronic cinema, narra-tive appeared quite differently from that encountered in classical cinema. No longer unfolding in linear fashion,reading such works was made associativeand the order of the elements appearedirrelevant to the process of understand-ing their messages. It was a revolutionin the modes of transmission of knowledgethe shock of which we are still feelinghalf a century later.

The sampling of sounds and images, thework on repetition via electro-digitalaudiovisual loops, their staging ininstallations, embody the idea of build-ing and rebuilding space in time. Spacedoes not only unfold in the image as wehave seen above, but it also expressesitself in the real world, on screenmatrix devices that force the mind toassociate the images between them.

The video installations presented in‘Mémoires vives’ left a mark on theirtime but, in some cases, have rarely beenexhibited since. Here is an opportunitythen for spectators to be able to roamamong or pass in front of the screens ofMoon is the Oldest TV (Paik, 1976–2000),All Vision (Steina, 1976), The West(Steina, 1983), Borealis (Steina, 1993),Schubert (Paik, 1989), and Pyrospheres(Steina, 2005); or raise their head andadmire the Video Chandelier No. 1 (Paik,1989) suspended under the glass dome ofthe exhibition site.

In this exhibition, I support the hypo-thesis that the proliferation of screensboth in private and public space, thelarge number of cables necessary toconnect them as well as the multiple

Jean-Marie DalletMémoires vives – Living Memories

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conceptual links that we form in ourheads to articulate and relate images one to the other have paved the way forthe advent of the hypertextual thoughtthat is now so characteristic of oursociety. Non-linearity is the norm, as is the infinity of possible paths betweendocuments. The database and the algorithmthat binds elements together are the new symbolic forms of representation, as was classical perspective for theRenaissance. Three works express threemoments of this increasing delineariza-tion of information: first, Schubert(1989), one of the many robots assembledby Paik using old televisions and radios.In this work, images and sounds are still visibly connected to each other,and their spatial configuration takes the form of a person wearing a large red hat on his head, which is in fact a gramophone horn. Steina’s MachineVision (1978) presents a second moment in this history of the delinearization of information by proposing a devicedesigned to shatter the perspectivalspace inherited from the Renaissance. Six suspended screens, spread out atregular intervals, display images fromsix cameras installed on tripods. Theylook in different directions in space and are ‘augmented’ by articulateddevices made with motors, mirrors andlenses. The space of the room as shown on the suspended screens is floating,unstable, always in motion, elusive andfractured. The third moment in this toobrief overview moves our meditation on to the virtual world, a delinearizedspace par excellence where all therelationships linking things between them evolve in real time according to the requests of users. TMWKTM (2009–15),a generative work of SLIDERS_lab, pro-poses the spatial conception of a ‘film’that is no longer really one since, fromnow on, it is a film cut into pieces that the audience witnesses. The brokennarrative link between the scenes hasresulted in their random scattering bythe computer program, converting theoriginal story into an amorphous mass of micro-narratives without temporal andcausal connection.

For the first edition of the Biennale‘Update’, a concept I created in 2006 at the request of the Liedts-MeesenFoundation, the basement, ground floorand first floor of the exhibition spacewere considered from a geological view-point. ‘Each level’, I wrote at the time,‘is a stratum that promises the specta-tors a journey from the depths of theearth towards heaven.’

I have not repeated such metaphors for this new edition of ‘Update’, theseventh, and the works are this timearranged quite freely over the exhibi-tion space, even if some of the largerensembles articulate the problemsinvolved: on the ground floor visitorswill thus encounter installations withmany multiple screens while on the firstfloor they will find several sections:one focusing on an examination of digitallanguage; a second bringing together the Time/Energy Objects series of photo-graphs made in 1975 using the Rutt/EtraScan Processor; a third uniting thedevices; and, finally, a fourth dedi-cated to archives.

The basement of the exhibition site is also used, in order to accommodateworks involving the use of a particulardevice. This is the case of Pyrospheres(Steina, 2002) or TMWKTM (SLIDERS_lab),which call for visitors to wander aboutand a spatial game in the small darkcells of the basement. It is also forthis reason that I chose this deeplyevocative place to install WoodyVasulka’s Art of Memory (1984), whosetitle3 explicitly refers to mnemonics, a technique of organized remembrancefollowing memory architectures that often adopted the shape of the laby-rinth, the cavern, or the cave.

‘Mémoires vives’, the title of thisexhibition, directly refers to thiscapacity of human memory to draw outmemories, to update them by removing them from the places where they werepreviously stored. The video works of the past thus function as memories set in motion by their present-day counter-parts: indeed, the whole exhibitionoffers a look at the past to betterunderstand the present times.

SLIDERS_lab [F. Curien, J.-M.Dallet, H. Jolly],Digital Vocabulary,experimental digitalvideo, 2014. (Tributeto Woody Vasulka, A Syntax of BinaryImages, 1978).

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SLIDERS_lab [F. Curien, J.-M.Dallet, H. Jolly],Digital VocabularySculpture, 3d forms on a light box, 2016.(Tribute to WoodyVasulka, A Syntax ofBinary Images, 1978).

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WOODY VASULKATIME/ENERGY OBJECTS1975

The Time/Energy Objectsseries presents thirteenpictures made using theRutt/Etra Scan Processor.This image synthesizerbreaks the rules of linearperspective used in videocameras, themselvesbased on the age-oldprinciples of the cameraobscura. With the Rutt/Etra, the image freesitself from reality and canbe generated simply bythe modulation of timeand energy. In otherwords, the object photo-graphed does not comefrom the real world and is not a luminous imprintleft on a photosensitivesurface; on the contrary,it comes from the modu-lation of the energypotentials which encodelight, coupled to fluctua-tions of time periods.

As Woody Vasulka notedin 1975: ‘It now becomespossible to move preciselyand directly between aconceptual model and a constructed image. This opens a new self-generating cycle of design

within consciousness and the eventual con-struction of new realitieswithout the necessity ofexternal referents as ameans of control.’

The Time/EnergyObjects series is a more‘artistic’ version ofanother work realizedthat same year – 1975 –using the Rutt/Etra ScanProcessor: Time/EnergyStructure of the ElectronicImage. This series ofimages is highly didacticand proposes, in the formof four tables, an experi-ment on the visualizationof three types of energycharacterized by sinu-soidal, triangular, andsquare waves whosevariations in time andspace Vasulka observes.

Vasulka’s obsessionwith understanding thephenomena behind theconstruction of imageswould also be evident inSyntax of Binary Images(1978), at which time awhole generation of video makers will beshifting from an analogueto a digital language.

——————120 × 90 cmSeries of 13 pictures——————

COLOPHON_

This book was published on the initiative of the Liedts-Meesen Foundation on theoccasion of the exhibitionupdate_7: Mémoires vives12/01 – 10/03/2019

www.zebrastraat.be

EXHIBITION—————————ARTISTIC DIRECTION Jean-Marie Dallet

COORDINATION &COMMUNICATIONAnnelies Geenen

SCENOGRAPHY Jean-Marie Dallet, François Deleury

COORDINATION OF TECHNOLOGY Yannic Ally & Frédéric Curien

TECHNICAL DIRECTIONYannic Ally & LawrenceLiedts (Assist)

COORDINATION OF CONSTRUCTIONSFrançois Deleury

CONSTRUCTION OF DECORATIONSSebastian Enciu

CONSTRUCTION OF FURNISHINGSAtelier W110

PRODUCTION Liedts-Meesen Foundation

CATALOGUE—————————COORDINATION &DOCUMENTATIONJean-Marie Dallet

TEXTSMaria BarthélémyMarc BillonJean-Marie DalletLarisa DryanskyThierry DufrêneLucinda FurlongSacha Loeve Patrick NardinGrégoire QuenaultJoost RekveldHalldór Björn RunólfssonAnne SèdesJinsuk SuhRené SultraWoody VasulkaGaby Wijers

TRANSLATION Jan Moens

COPY-EDITING First Edition

BOOK DESIGN & TYPESETTINGThomas Soetewww.thomassoete.com

PHOTO CREDITSTimothy Baum: p. 111 Jean-Marie Dallet: p. 125(below)Marcus J. Leith: p. 187(below) C.K. Mariot Photography:pp. 228-229 (above)Phoebé Meyer: pp. 94-95,192, 193, 194-195, 224, 225Luc Meichler: p. 107montweART (photographerManfred Montwé): pp. 20-21, 31, 39 (above andbelow), 42, 43, Kevin Noble: 160 (aboveand below)

Nam June Paik Estate (courtesy of Nam JunePaik Art Center): pp. 27,116, 117, 118-119, 182, 183,204, 205, 206-207J.M. Pharisien: p. 93SLIDERS_lab: p. 13 (photo-grapher: Jean-Marie Dallet),109, 110 (photographer:Jean-Marie Dallet), 113, 168(photographer: Jean- MarieDallet)

© Lannoo Publishers, Tielt, Belgium, 2019www.lannoo.com

ISBN 9789401458535D/2019/45/48 NUR 646/644

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