Most Successful Virtual Band: Gorillaz "Adding Substance to Pop"

Most Successful Virtual Band: The Gorillaz “Adding Substance to Pop”

Genre: Avant-Pop, Experimental Pop, Alternative Rock, Brit Pop, Trip Hop, Hip Hop, Electronica, Indie, Dub, Reggae and Pop.

Awards: Grammy Award, Two MTV Video Music Awards, NME Award, (New Musical Express) Three MTV Europe Music Awards, Nominated for Nine Brit Awards

Studio Albums Gorillaz 2001 Demon Days 2005 Plastic Beach 2010 The Fall 2010 Humanz 2017

Tours Phase One Tour (2001-02) Demon Days Live (2005-06) Escape to Plastic Beach Tour (2010) Demon Days Festival (2017) Humanz Tour (2017)

Permanent Band Members Damon Albarn- Vocals, Keyboard, Guitar, Bass Guitar, Drums, Percussion, Melodica (1998-Present) Jamie Hewlett- Illustration, Visuals, FX (1998-Present)

Live Band Members Mike Smith- Keyboards (1998-Present) Jeff Wootton- Lead Guitar (2010-Present) Seye Adelekan- Bass guitar (2017-Present) Jesse Hackett- Keyboards (2010-Present) Gabriel Wallace- Drums, Percussion (2010-Present) Karl Vanden Bossche- Drums (2005-2007, 2010-Present)

Animated Band Members 2-D Murdoc Niccals Noodle Russel Hobbs

    The british virtual band Gorillaz was created in 1998 by “Blur” Musicians named Damon Albarn, and Graham Coxon. During a Blur interview Albarn and Coxon met Jamie Hewlett of Deadline Magazine. Hewlett began to hang out after the interview in with Damon sharing common interests. One evening they had a conversation at Albarns while he and Hewlett were watching MTV and Hewlett remarked…

 “If you watch MTV for too long, it’s a bit like hell, there's nothing of substance there. So we got this idea for a cartoon band, and something that would comment on that.” [1]

    MTV during 1998 would have shown the Backstreet Boys, Third Eye Blind, Usher, Matchbox Twenty and other popular artists. These contemporary 1998 pop artists provided good jumping off contextual building points for the two to start creating their ideas and begin their Avant-Pop directed approach. Originally after formation the Gorillaz identified as singular “Gorilla” without the “z” and released their first song “Ghost Train”.

 
   
   Which lives on the second side of the single “Rock the House”, and the second side of compilation “G Sides”. The “Ghost Train”collaboration included Albarn, Del The Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and Kid Koala. The same producers that worked on “Time Keeps on Slipping” by Deltron 3030. Although Albarn still claims, “The first ever Gorillaz tunes was the Blur 1997 Single “Own Your Own”. [2]



    Jamie Hewlett was the artist to bring alive the 4 animated members that would eventually populate the Gorillaz media. This was the first virtual band that the world had ever seen. Hewletts previous comic work “Tank Girl” served as a jumping off point for the aesthetic of the animated members of the captivating virtual band. The virtual band consists of, 2-D who’s the lead vocalist that plays keyboards. Murdoc Niccals that plays bass guitar & vocals. Noodle plays guitar and keyboards. Russel Hobbs is the Drummer & percussion sounds. The four characters are completely fictional and are intended to not resemble any real contemporary musicians or themselves. At this point in time it was extremely avant-garde and experimental in the music video world to be using cartoon characters. It’s even more avant-garde in the sense that the cartoon characters were not resembling any real life musicians. What was really evocative was Albarn and Hewletts creation of a fictional universe for which these characters lived. Viewers can find characters in the video pieces jump from, 2-D book art to 3-D engineered characters side by side with non cartoon footage to create a realistic and non realistic surrealist landscapes. Fantastic revolutionary imagery that really grounded their work arises as being different than other MTV pop. You can find the band currently contributing the creative media on their website, and music videos, social media, and DVDs. Their website (www.gorillaz.com) provides instant interaction for visitors and has an open video during the duration of a surfers visit. The only places to click on the site include the tabs, News, Store, Fan Club Sign Up, and social media links. They currently use a disappearing sidebar that holds the band's visual and audio releases.
    For every Gorillaz release since “Blur’s 1997 Single, Own Your Own” (Albarn's proclaimed original Gorillaz song.) Damon Albarn has served as lead composer. Although every piece of their work serves as a collaboration between a variety of musicians responsible for covering such pop genre avenues. Most would classify the Gorillaz genre as Alternative Rock, Trip Hop, Hip Hop, Electronica, Indie-Dub, and Reggae. Arguably they set out to purify the pop genre itself in all aspects.     Albarn's and Hewlett’s success amongst others have continued to impress. However it’s more appropriate to label their content and visual delivery systems in a bundled critique in which they are extremely Avant-Pop with new ideas of visuals and performances that no one in their time has been releasing.
    The first Gorillaz album “Gorillaz” was a 15 track project released in 2001 and sold 7 million copies, and the Guinness book of world records awarded them the,

 “Most Successful Virtual Band.” [3]

   This award comes without question as they have continued to shape their own intermedial practice throughout their discography, visualizations, and merchandising. Not to mention avid attention to contemporary technological times allows them to develop amongst application releases and virtual projection performances all using the building block fictional characters in artistic environments. This avenue continues to propel their success as an avant-pop artist. The 2001 album “Gorillaz” included 4 very popular singles:

Clint Eastwood (first album release, memorable hit, back side containing song Dracula, vocals performed by Del tha Funkee Homosapien, the genre is electronic dub and hip hop, when Clint Eastwood released in early March, it landed at number 4 on the UK charts.)

 

 19-2000 (used for EA Sports FIFA video game 2002 [4], most memorable as “get the cool shoeshine” vocals by Damon Albarn, with a video of the Gorillaz riding around in their Geep, and mimicking MTV cribs).

 

 Tomorrow Comes Today (the first EP, including Tomorrow Dub, Tomorrow Comes Today Video, and Film Music.) Tomorrow Comes Today was co-produced with Hip Hop producer Dan the Automator, featuring Phi Life Cypher (UK Rap Group) and Del the Funky Homosapien (US Rapper).

 

 Rock The House (a hit amongst United Kingdom charts, vocals by Del tha Funkee Homosapien, during the time being sued by Doppelgangerz for stealing the idea for the “Gorillaz” the video had visuals associated with emotions the band was having, and portrayed some of the characters as satanists in kong studios)

 
 
   The same year as the September 11th attacks, D12 (Hip Hop band commonly in collaboration with rapper Eminem) was stranded in England without Eminem and Albarn invited D12 to the studio to start collaborating on a track on September 13th [5]. This project Albarn felt extremely appropriate as he was experimenting with middle-eastern music at the current point in time. [5] This would be an appropriate project to release to promote working together. This approach would be rather experimental in regards to western pop culture's current view towards the middle east as perpetuated through the media. This release titled "911" debuted in December of 2001.

    
 
   Gorillaz swung into 2002 performing February 22nd at the Brit Awards in London. This performance included 3-D animations on 4 large screens and included Phi Life Cypher rapping during the event. That year they were nominated for four Brit Awards, Best British Group, Best British Album, and Best British Newcomer. However they didn't win any. Dan the automator (Dan Nakamura) added in an Interview about the event...

 "You can't determine in advance how well a thing like this is going to do, It was done for fun, so it's always a surprise when it takes on a life of its own." [6]

     More importantly this notes the artistic vision of the Gorillaz, and processes that Gorillaz and their collaborators kept in common throughout production. Their next visual project built off of the Gorillaz 2001 album. They released the DVD. “Phase One: Celebrity Take Down”. This project included 4 visual pieces, “5/4”, “Charts of Darkness Documentary”, “Gorilla Bitez (Which included multiple skits with the band's virtual characters)” and “MEL 9000 Tour of the website” [7]. They even designed the DVD menu like the band's website starting to depict Kong Studios an important part of the virtual characters environment and personal story development involving Murdoc and Russel, 2-D, and Noodle. The media DVD release propelled the ideas of a film project that was soon abandoned by Albarn and Hewlett after multiple studio meetings with Hollywood executives amounting to Albarn saying,

 “Fuck it we'll sit on the idea until we can do it ourselves and maybe raise the money ourselves.” [8]

     Generally artists that venture down this lane of approach find more reward and control in production. Albarn and Hewlett are addicted to control and sometimes barely agree with each other let alone would be successful taking orders of direction from a studio that doesn't share the same building block vision. It also reinforces the logic of working with what you got. Which is a common theme of production for the group.
     In October of 2004 the Gorillaz released “Rock It” a website video to get fans ready for the album release of Demon Days in 2005.

  
 
   Demon Days hit Japan May 11th, May 23rd United Kingdom and May 24th the United States. The album debuted landing at number 1 and top of the UK Album Chart. Two of the more recognizable tracks:

   “Dirty Harry” was charted No.6 in the UK in its first week as a single release. Referencing “George Bush’s Mission Accomplished” speech, with an image for the cover resembling the film Full Metal Jacket’s.

 

    “Dare” was a number 1 United Kingdom hit and is sung completely by Damon Albarn, more memorable the lyrics “its coming up, its coming up, its coming up, its dare.” In this video 2-D walks around Shaun Ryder of Happy Mondays live real head.

 

     Demon days sold 1 million copies in the UK in 2005. Since it has gone 5 Times platinum (platinum = selling 500,000 copies) in the UK, Double Platinum in the United States, Triple Platinum in Australia, selling a total of 6 million copies worldwide. [9] The 2005 MTV Video Music Awards gave the Gorillaz two awards for “Feel Good Inc”, Breakthrough video and best Visual Effects. They continued to perform “Feel Good Inc” in concert using music video parts in their performance.
     In 2005 Gorillaz also coordinated the Demon Days release with “Gorillaz Figurines” released by designer toy maker “Kidrobot”. The sets varied in editions and had sets of anywhere from limiting 1,000-60,000 limited issues in circulation. Quite genius approach to bringing sculptured on screen characters into fans hands. They released figures simultaneously with videos like “Dare” where character Noodle was sold in limited edition, amongst others. During the 2006 Brit Awards in London they performed “Dirty Harry”, and were nominated for Best British Group and Best British Album. They took the virtual characters a step further and created a fan frenzy when they did holographic performances at the 2005 MTV Europe Music Awards and the 2006 Grammy Awards.


 
   Their April 2006 announcement of Demon Days american tour, sold out in the begining hours. They then announced a plan for a holographic world tour in 2007. Where the cartoons would actually appear on stage using a technology called Musion Eyeliner. Musion Eyeliner would captivate audiences bringing colored lifesize and larger than life holograms moving across stage using the live stage illusion referred to as “Pepper’s ghost. The illusion is not truly a hologram because it places reflective material at an angle in front of the audience that is illuminated by a LED screen below so characters appear to 3D volume. 2006 was a visual high point for the group when Hewlett and Albarn started collaborating with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein from Weinstein company and Miramax films. September 2006 Albarn announced...

 “the band has been a fantastic journey which isn't over because we're making a film. We’ve got Terry Gilliam Involved. But as far as being in a big band and putting pop music out there it's finished. We won't be doing that anymore.” [10]

Little did they know about the projects to come… October 27 2007 the official Gorillaz fansite announced documentary film “Bananaz” would be released. A Film directed by Ceri Levy would document the previous band years. It was released on Babelgum Website April 20th 2009, and on DVD June 2009. Albarn & Hewlett began work on Carousel a visual project that actually birthed the band's third album Plastic Beach, shortly after commenting by Albarn that Gorillaz were done making music. Meanwhile Gorillaz simultaneously etching out the ongoing avant-pop adventure throughout his and Hewletts artistic practice. They didn't know they had a project to start until they were already working in their artistic practices of visuals and DVDs. More importantly they weren't ever done when they thought they were done. Reinforcing experimentation through process at its root. It was also important to their history in understanding that by staying on course they were able to extract and start to work with new ideas and stimulus for creation of new projects.
    Albarn takes a leap when talking to the public saying Plastic Beach, “is the biggest and most pop record I've ever made in many ways, but with all my experience i’ll try to and at least present something that has got depth…” [11]
    They planned on having Plastic Beach collaborations with Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Gruff Rhys, Mark E. Smith, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Kano, Bashy, De La Soul, Little Dragon, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, sinfonia ViVA, the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. Here’s some notable popular tracks from the 16 track project.

 On Melancholy Hill (was a synthpop production that had Damon Albarn's charismatic lyrics that helps listeners become pulled out of a gloomy day, and focus on the brightening up the listening session with catchy lyrics “Up on melancholy hill, sits a manatee, just looking out for the day, when you're close to me!)

 

 Stylo (was a electro funk song that collaborated with Mos Def and Bobby Womack “convinced by his granddaughter”[12] to be on a Gorillaz track. You can also hear Damon Albarn through the back up vocals. The visuals use most real life footage of Bruce Willis driving a red Chevy El Camino, while Murdoc, 2-D, and Noodle find time to cause a fast pace car chase.

 

    January 18th they announced that they would be headlining the final night of Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival. The same year Damon Albarn made statements in an interview to defend the integrity and direction of the avant-pop work they have been making. During the same time he was under the impression that the cast of Glee wanted to cover the group's recent songs. To which Albarn said, “The Fox tv show is a poor substitute for the real thing.”[13] At this point the pop media industry can't expect anything less of a response from Albarn given they were soon to be releasing their idea to “Reject the false Icons” emphasizing thinking for yourself and more importantly to have ideas about power of self development and an anti popular culture ideology.
     December 8 2010, “Plastic Beach” was announced to be released for download for free to website fan club members on Christmas Day. The same day they released the album “The Fall” which was recorded on the American leg of the "Escape to Plastic Beach" tour. The Fall ended up being in collaboration with a release of the application iElectribe by Korg. A software development company developing for the iPad, and Apple Platforms. The application had Gorillaz designed interface, including 128 sound samples that were created by the band. Including 64 ready to use loops made by Gorillaz sound engineer Stephen Sedgwick and Korg designers. This is a big leap for any music group in the 20th century to jump into application collaboration and development. Reinforcing ideas that anyone can be an artist and to let fans become composers as well. Shortly after the iElectribe release the Gorillaz announced:

 Do Ya Thing (was a song that partnered with Converse in February 2012, on a project called Three Artists One Song project and included James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem and Andre 3000 of Outkast. The single included a visual by Hewlett and animated versions of 2-D in 3D using green suits to map the directions of the character.





   In April Albarn told The Guardian [14] that Hewlett and Albarn had a “fall out” and future projects were unlikely due to tension building during Plastic Beach and The Fall. Word spread quickly through the fanbase. By the time it does however Albarn and Hewlett had already had their arguments worked out by the end of the same month. It’d be hard to believe Albarn and Hewlett would let a fall out occur at this point, but it was actually weird timing being after “The Fall” Album. This does however nail home the fundamental idea in collaboration, being sometimes you just have to take a punch for someone else's idea or not be afraid to let another collaborators idea weigh heavier than your own. Nevertheless to jumpstart the fanbase and kick things off they started scheming a follow up to Plastic Beach. They planned releasing new content in 2016 with so called upbeat humorous and positive melodies. [15] All the tracks contained nothing less than 125 bpm. One hundred and twenty five beats per minute is comparable to nodding your head repeatedly for .75 seconds up and down.

 “I'm starting recording in September for a new Gorillaz record, I've just been really, really busy so I haven't had a chance. I'd love to just get back into that routine of being at home and coming to the studio five days a week”[16], Albarn states.

    Reinforcing the concept of working in a present place in time conducive to completing projects and building off of pieces to make paths for new ideas. Not to mention the previous Hewlett, Albarn April argument has been referred to as making their collaborative friendship and relationship a lot stronger. In April 2016 Hewlett showed life of a new project on social media platform Instagram showing work on album featuring content from Liam Bailey, Albarn Himself, Twilite Tone, Vic Mensa and Jean Michael Jarre. They also jump started their media worlds and fan base by releasing interactive media stories about what the fictional band members have been up to sense the last project. They featured Noodle, in “The Book of Noodle” where she ended up in Japan tracking down a demon crime boss. Russel featured in “The Book of Russel” which had him on the shore of plastic beach in North Korea, and starved to point he shriveled back to normal size. Murdoc, in “The Book of Murdoc” was captured by the label EMI at sea and told to make another album. 2-D in “The Book of 2-D was swallowed by a whale named Massive Dick and washed up on an empty part of Cabo San Lucas surviving by eating the whale's blubber. They then gave Noodle her own instagram in October of 2016 augmenting her character personality in further clips. This marks a huge milestone for the virtual band as they continue to pave their own road through captivating their fan base and creating new relationships with viewers using compelling character stories on social media.
   This year (2017) has already been a big year for the Gorillaz. A new horizon is born as they are creating a unique festival called “Demon Dayz Festival” to start the 10th of June 2017 at Dreamland Margate, in Margate, England. Now becoming the first “virtual band” to have their own festival. The festival will feature virtual characters Noodle, 2-D, Murdoc, and Russel and other animations new and old, using new lights and installations and more Musion Eyeliner technology.
   The new 2017 project “Humanz” tracklist was initially leaked as one would expect given today's digital age. The actual “Humanz” album was said to drop via instagram on march 23rd saying the scheduled release date was the 28th of April 2017. Showing features of, De La Soul, Popcaan, Vince Staples, Pusha T, Rag n Bone Man, Anthony Hamilton, Kilo Kash, and Kali Uchis... Leading up to the release date singles started appearing on the band's youtube page.

"Saturnz Barz" (a hip hop, trip hop dancehall song with a music video came out in 360 view and normal view. This was a huge release and powerful hit featuring jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan and Abarn. The 360 video was named across the internet by Billboard and NME (New Music Entertainment) most successful debut of Virtual Reality music videos thus far. [17] Which is nothing short of surprising given the band's project history. It defeated the previous VR music video record that achieved 1.3 million plays total. Saturnz Barz actually got 3 million views in the first 48 hours.

 

“Andromeda” (was a visual and audio release on youtube that had an animated planet in galaxy featuring american rapper D.R.A.M. & Albarn is something one would consider post-disco, and alternative dance mixed with synthpop as it is a song one would find accompanied in an 80s club.

 

 “Ascension” was along the same type of visual, where the camera moves along a street on a left to right continuous pan through a dark city scape featuring american rapper Vince Staples. Marking the first of a Gorillaz, and a Vince Staples collaboration. This song would fall into the genre of alternative hip hop and alternative dance. Staples vocals on this piece fit the tempo very well and is extremely evocative.

 

 “We Got the Power” featured Jehnny Beth of english rock band "Savages" and Noel Gallagher of "Oasis". This visual was a stationary shot of the animated traffic jam on a multiple leveled highway. This amongst other pieces serving as a visual metaphor to go with the lyrical message. This track is a synthpop genre and actually has back up vocals by D.R.A.M for a second album collaboration.

 

 “Let Me Out” a trip hop and alternative hip hop track featured Vince Staples and Pusha T american rappers. The visual was the 4 animated band mates over a checkered visualizer that would move blocks around the video. To spread the message that the content doesn't have to be changing too much to be entertaining, that sometimes people just want something familiar, like social critiques on the inauguration of Donald Trump.

 

    Who knows what's next for Albarn, Hewlett, and Coxon, only time will tell as they meander through their upcoming performances and collaborations. One things for sure there's no argument that the Gorillaz are one of the most influential avant-pop experimental collaborative and revolutionary virtual band making compositions beyond music, in applications, merch and festivals. They constantly deliver beautifully melodic yet beneficial social criticisms for listeners, to disrupt the content that normally populates the pop industry and more so western culture through their lyrical content, instrument content and artistic process.
    Throughout their history they operated on foundational conceptual building blocks. Such blocks continued to propel projects based on their day one goals in 1997 since the have been "adding substance to the pop world". There’s plenty of hints and obvious pieces of content that lean us toward understanding Albarn, Hewlett and their collaborators aim. They're continuing to set the bar higher for themselves and every album release so fans and other artists are able to experience music in a visual and audio world that had yet to be explored since the Gorillaz came into the pop scene.
   The past two decades of pop have Albarn and Hewlett and their collaborators to thank for really beautiful pieces of music and virtual/live performances that will help carve out societies concentrations in a new mass communicated light and set forth new methods to approach and talk and communicate on current environmental & social problems, Gorillaz truly serve as revolutionary twentieth century Avant-Garde artists.

Presentation: http://prezi.com/bmto8hg_wpnr/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

 Sources

[9] “Artist Profile - Gorillaz” https://web.archive.org/web/20081115114738/http://www.emimusicpub.com/worldwide/artist_profile/gorillaz_profile.html . EMI. 2006.

 [13] Associated Press (10/12/2010) “Gorillaz: We Won’t Let ‘Glee’ Cover Our Songs”  Billboard.com. http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/954190/gorillaz-we-wont-let-glee-cover-our-songs

[15] Book, Ryan. “Damon Albarn Writing A Musical While Flirting with Blur and Gorillaz Comebacks”  http://www.musictimes.com/articles/7797/20140721/damon-albarn-writing-musical-flirting-blur-gorillaz-comebacks.htm The Music Times. The Music Times. July 2014

[17] Britton, Luke (March 30, 2017) “Gorillaz Break Record with ‘Saturn Barz’ VR video” NME, http://www.nme.com/news/music/gorillaz-break-record-saturnz-barz-vr-video-2030640

[5] Brown, Cass; Gorillaz (2 November 2006). Rise of the Ogre https://scififantasylitchick.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/book-review-rise-of-the-ogre-by-cass-browne-gorillaz/ United States: Penguin. p. 43. ISBN 1-59448-931-9

[3] Cooper, James (19 November 2007). “Gorillaz: D-Sides” http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/6r25/

[16] “Damon Albarn: New Gorillaz Album Coming, Recording Starts in September http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/6634331/gorillaz-new-album-2015-damon-albarn . Billboard, Retrieved 31 July 2015

[4] David Roberts (2006). British Hit Singles & AlbumsRoberts, David. Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. Guinness World Records Ltd. 18th edition (May 2005). ISBN 1-904994-00-8 London: Guinness World Records Limited

[1] Gaiman, Neil (July 2005). “Keeping It (Un)real”. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2005/07/gorillaz-2/

[6] Grant, Kieran (23 February 2002). “Gorillaz come out of the mist” http://jam.canoe.com/Music/Artists/G/Gorillaz/2002/02/23/745445.html

[12]  Greene, Andy (9 April 2009). “Gorillaz Attempt to Draft Bobby Womack For Upcoming Album” http://everything.explained.today/Plastic_Beach/

[8] Joseph, Michael (2 November 2006). "Gorillaz in the Midst". The Big Issue in Scotland (604):

[7] Mitchum, Rob (5 February 2003). “Phase One: Celebrity Take Down DVD” Pitchfork. http://pitchfork.com/article/record_review/18165-phase-one-celebrity-take-down-dvd/

[11] Morley, Paul (27 November 2009). “Paul Morley’s Showing Off… Damon Albarn”(MP3). The Guardian. 29 November 2009. http://audio.theguardian.tv/audio/kip/music/series/paul-morley-showing-off/1259329339795/8827/AlbarnMorleyFINAL.mp3

[10] Williamson, Nigel (November 2006). "West London Calling". Uncut: 88.

The Paik/Abe Synthesizer, by George Fifield

There are a few moments in history where a major advance in the arts is also an advance in engineering and directly responsible for a major acceleration of popular culture. The invention of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer is one of those perfect moments.

The Paik/Abe Synthesizer is the first machine designed to distort existing video. It was built in Boston at WGBH-TV in 1969 by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe.

At the time Paik was an artist in residence at the public television station. He had come the previous year as part of a contingent of artists invited to create a revolutionary broadcast television show called "The Medium Is The Medium." It grew out of an exhibition at the Howard Wise gallery in New York. The idea was to have these new video artists take over a television broadcast studio to make video art. The producers Pat Marx and Ann Gresser successfully approached the Ford Foundation for funding. But at the time broadcast television was an insular institution, to say the least, and finding a television station that would allow these artists in was difficult. Marx and Gresser had seen an article in Newsweek about a TV show on Boston public television called "What's Happening, Mr. Silver" produced by Fred Barzyk. This was a weekly program hosted by Tufts University professor David Silver. The episode mentioned in Newsweek was called "Madness and Intuition."

During the production of it, Barzyk recalled, "I used every film chain, every video tape machine, I had groups of thousands of slides being projected. I had a guy on a motorcycle circling two old people from an old people's home. I had two guys sleeping in bed. I gave [director] Dave Atwood instructions that whenever anybody got bored they just yelled out and we would change to what ever else was there without rhyme or reason, assuming that everything would make sense by the time it all came out. Twenty-two minutes into the show I got up and left. As director I just walked out. One lady called up [the station] afterwards and said, 'Don't ever do that again, you've given me brain cancer.'"

With this kind of creative exploration about the structure of Television already in place, WGBH was recognized from the outside as a place where artists might be allowed some freedom to play. Barzyk, producer Olivia Tappen and Dave Atwood were invited to New York and arrived with 100 lbs of 2" inch tape of their work to show the Wise Gallery artists. Everyone got along and the artists came to Boston.

In March 1969, "The Medium Is The Medium" aired nationally featuring six artists, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini. Each of them made a short video using WGBH equipment. Paik's contribution, "Electronic Opera #1" pioneered the idea of interactive television in his by exhorting viewers to "close one eye" or "close one eye half way" and finally, "Turn off your television set".

"Nam June Paik showed up in [rubber] boots and with about twenty old TV sets." Barzyk remembers, "I asked him why he was wearing the boots and he said, 'Oh, I get electrocuted otherwise.' He asked if I could get a nude woman to dance over a picture of Richard Nixon. I went as far as I could on public television. I had a dancer who was willing to do it in pasties and a g-string. But that shook up the station too, because this was definitely not what they expected. However with the Ford Foundation supporting this show and getting national recognition they had to pay attention. Reluctantly, but they had to pay attention."

Later Paik introduced Barzyk to Howard Klein at the Rockefeller Foundation, who had seen the importance of this new medium some time before. Klein had already worked with a number of artists and institutions, like Paik and KQED in San Francisco, funding video experimentation. When he added WGBH and later WNET in New York to the process, he was able to design an entire program, the Rockefeller Artists-In-Television Project, to cover the various grants. And Paik became a WGBH Rockefeller Artist-In-Television.

Barzyk recalls working with Paik in that summer of 1969, "Nam June's vision was immense. His language was somewhat limited and his communication with engineers (and his ideas had a lot to do with engineering) were threatening to a lot of people. Nam June had an engineer friend in Tokyo, Mr. Abe, and he came to me with an idea that he would create a machine for himself that would be away from the requirements of the [WGBH] engineers. I remember he and I had lunch with Michael Rice [president of WGBH] and we laid out this huge piece of paper which tried to describe the synthesizer and what it was like and what it was going to do. I don't think Michael really understood, but he knew that Nam June would be gone for three months and we got the money needed to send him to Tokyo and to develop and devise this thing and bring Mr. Abe to help set it up here in the United States." Paik returned from Japan in the spring of 1970 and made the synthesizer over the summer.

What Paik wanted to accomplish was to make video as malleable as paint. He realized that all the broadcast studio equipment in the world was still not enough to accomplish his vision of "video wallpaper. Nam June Paik saw television as the canvas for the next generation of electronic artists. The synthesizer itself was designed to do exactly what all the WGBH engineers prided themselves on avoiding. It contaminated the video signal.

By wiring up seven old black and white surveillance cameras to a colorizer and scan modulator, Paik and Abe were able to distort the color and misshape the image on the television screen. In the early sixties, Paik had displayed old television sets with huge horseshoe magnets sitting on top. This wild distortion of the magnet on one TV was exactly the effect Paik wanted on everyone's TV. With the synthesizer, he was finally able to achieve it.

Paik himself described the Synthesizer; "Is sloppy machine, like me." The original Synthesizer is a jumble of old video equipment that probably looked scavenged back in 1970. Starting with seven old black and white surveillance cameras, the Synthesizer is a colorizer and scan modulator combined. Each of the seven video signals is passed through its own non-linear amplifier and then through a matrix into a RGB to NTSC color encoder. This meant that one camera acted as the red input, one green, one blue, one as red and green, one as red and blue, etc. Aiming the cameras at roughly the same object gave overlapping color images. David Atwood, who was Paik's roommate in Boston that summer, said simply, "The engineers hated the thing."

The Synthesizer debut in a four hour broadcast television show called "Video Commune - The Beatles from Beginning to End" on WGBH, channel 44 on August 1, 1970. Paik took advantage of a licensing agreement that WGBH had which gave them rights to air all Beatles songs. So he created four hours of a wildly colorful broadcast performance to a soundtrack of Beatles music. Susan Dowling, later director of the New Television Workshop, described Video Commune as "All the images on the show - surreal landscapes (crushed tin foil), eerie abstractions (shaving cream), bursts of color (wrapping paper) - were transmogrified by the Synthesizer at the very moment of broadcast: "live" television at its most unexpected." Interspersed with the Synthesizer video and Beatles music were clips from a tape of Japanese television, in Japanese, with no subtitles.Viewers in Boston had never seen anything like it.

After Video Commune aired the engineers came out and said, "You guys blew up the color filter on the Channel 44 transmitter and if we ever do this again, we have to have more control."

Later Paik left Boston and built many more Synthesizers, including ones for the Experimental Television Workshop in upstate New York and for WNET in New York City.Atwood described his job as the mediator between the WGBH engineers and the Synthesizer. He tells the story about the Green Frog. In the Synthesizer room was a large container in the shape of a green frog. It contained numerous video cables of different lengths that he had collected around the station. After Paik left, when artists like Ron Hays created a new show on the Synthesizer and it was scheduled to air the engineers would always say something like, "We can't air that, its 60 degrees out of phase." Atwood knew that by adding cable to the output of the Synthesizer, he could change the phase by 2 degrees a foot. So he would go into the Synthesizer room and pull thirty feet of cable out of the frog and add it to the output. Then he would return and say, "Look at the phase now, how is it?" The engineer would then have to air the work.


Today the original Synthesizer is the Kunsthalle in Bremen, Germany, in a large frame built by Paik himself, which is covered by a jumble of vintage televisions which show the various videos made with the synthesizer and their date of production. Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Bremen Kunsthalle explains that he insisted that the dates be there, so the MTV generation of kids who came into the room realized that these modern looking videos were made before they were born, not last week.

By exhibiting a simple machine this way, Herzogenrath showed that he understood the importance of the Paik /Abe Synthesizer to world culture in a way that few in Boston or the rest of the United States did. It represents the vision of an artist who sees a medium of communication and understands that to make art with it you must first subvert it.
Until NamJune Paik the medium of worldwide broadcast television was the engineers temple. Artists were not invited. Yet by 1970, this "vast wasteland," as it was called, had transformed our culture, becoming the most powerful form of communication in the world.

Paik revolutionized that. The handful of videos he made with the Synthesizer had an effect far beyond their audience. Suddenly the idea of video art made sense in a way that it hadn't before. Video became a canvas that the artist could literally paint on. The freedom of creative thought that Paik's creation spawned spread like wildfire. The Paik/Abe synthesizer and others like it were used by an entire generation of artists interested in the formal beauty of the abstract video image. Suddenly artists started inventing new electronic tools as fast as they needed them, twisting video signals through a whole new language of feedback and colorization, processing and disruption.

above copied from: http://davidsonsfiles.org/paikabesythesizer.html

Video Black - The Mortality of the Image, Bill Viola

[Excerpt]

[...] Still, the question remains, exactly what is this movement in the moving image? Clearly it is more than the frenetic animation of bodies. Hollis Frampton, the great American avant-garde filmmaker, described it as «the mimesis, incarnation, and bodying forth of the movement of human consciousness itself.» The root of the cinematic process remained the still picture, but images now had behavior, and the entire phenomenon began to resemble less material objects depicted and more the process of the mind that was moving them.
A thought is a function of time, a pattern of growth, and not the «thing» that the lens of the printed word seems to objectify. lt is more like a cloud than a rock, although its effects can be just as long lasting as a block of stone, and its aging subject to the similar processes of destructive erosion and constructive edification. Duration is the medium that makes thought possible, and therefore duration is to consciousness as light is to the eye.
Time itself has become the materia prima of the art of the moving image. The «unsticking» of the image in time has been a gradual process, and ist effects are permeating art and culture in the late twentieth century, moving beyond the domain of conventional cinematic form and serving to dislodge the dominant compositional model of the dramatic narrative (based on Aristotele´s theories of 400 B.C.). This chapter in art history will potentially be as significant as the introduction of three-dimensional space originally was to painting. No doubt the first examples of time-based visual art in the twenties century will be regarded by future observers as being clumsy and childlike, much in the same way that the modern eye tends to see the medieval painter's first attempts at three-dimensional representation.

Source: Doug Hall, Sally Jo Fifer (Hg.), Illuminationg Video. An Essential Guide to Video Art, Aperture Foundation, New York 1990, p. 482.

Above copied from: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/47/

Electronic Zen: The Alternative Video Generation Talking Heads in Videospace, Interview by Jud Yalkut

A Video Meta-Panel with Shirley Clarke, Bill Etra, Nam June Paik, Walter Wright and Jud Yalkut
interview by Jud Yalkut

Originally recorded on February 4, 1973 for broadcast on WBAI-FM.

The following Meta-Panel, so-called because it represents an attempt at an overview of the alternate video scene as of the time of the discussion with a glance into the video future, was one of two hour-long radio discussion panel shows, hosted by Jud Yalkut, for the Pacifica radio station in New York City, WBAI-FM. The shows were part of a weekly series called ARTISTS AND CRITICS, each week dealing with a different art form. During the life of the series, one a month was on the media arts of film or video. The other video panel show, included in this book, was the discussion on the Kitchen, An Electronic Image And Sound Laboratory. This video panel, called now TALKING HEADS IN VIDEOSPACE, was originally recorded for broadcast on February 4, 1973, and its guests were four of the foremost practitioners of video art explorations: Shirley Clarke, proponent of ultimate participation video; Nam June Paik, video pioneer, avant-garde performance artist and co-creator of the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer; Bill Etra, video artist and co-designer of the Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer; and Walter Wright, working with computer generated images since 1965, former computer animator for Dolphin, Computer Image Corporation, and designer of his own video synthesizer system.

JUD: Since we have four practitioners of what is called alternate video here, or video art, terms to be defined, we can start out by discussing what do we mean by alternate video at the present time?
WALTER WRIGHT: I’ll start by telling you what I do. I’ve been exploring the use of something that might be called a video synthesizer, and it has the possibilities of transforming or building an abstract image, or changing a real image into something more abstract. The process means that I can take a real video image in, or generate one with oscillators, and then add to it electronic color. Nam June Paik has in fact built one of these machines, being the grand-daddy of this.
NAM JUNE PAIK: Thank you for mentioning, sir. (Laughter)
SHIRLEY CLARKE: Which he sells for a pittance.
WALTER: And Bill and I are going to rebuild Nam June’s.
PAIK: Thank you very much. I think this should be in good solid hands, who know every institution, and how to do things. Distribution is much more important than production. A guy who can start from the distribution end on, that guy will be really good for it. I like what you, Bill, and you, Walter, are doing because we are a small, small stone in a vast sea, and the problem is how to face that vast sea, you know. And it will benefit everyone, and then the video synthesizer can be a solid media, alright. If they made video into a medium, then we can sell video synthesizers as a medium, because this is much more interesting this way. It can be sold eventually for a few hundred dollars. So it will be much cheaper then a portapak, because it has no mechanical moving parts. So, theoretically, the video synthesizer, from all professional technical points of view, should be, if we make as many as portapaks, which is not too many, we should be able to go 1/3rd price of portapak.
SHIRLEY: I have to interrupt you now to ask, does this make an image? What is it, live process?
BILL: It will do either.
SHIRLEY: But, I mean as against the portapak which records, as sort of a pseudo mini-movie camera?
BILL: Carried to its ultimate extreme (Laughter) which is- oh, I don’t know what it would cost to build one now. We’re in the process now of getting together and building one which would go to the ultimate extreme. Television is recorded in a. matrix of 526 by 600 and something lines, vertically and horizontally, and we would be able to put a different color and intensity dot into any one of these points and move it around at will, so it wouldn’t necessarily have to have a camera to generate an image. We would be able to actually paint it.
SHIRLEY: Like painting.
BILL: That’s one of the possibilities. Now you can also take a live image and process it. You could take a person’s face and roll it up into a little ball.
SHIRLEY: But does it replace a camera and a recording device?
PAIK: I think we can always use camera.
BILL: You would need a recording device to record it.
SHIRLEY: My first suggestion would be, since you’re going to work in that area, that you give us, into our hands, an object that would be like a little ball that would actually be a lens similar in a way to a microphone in an audio system, that you can squeeze closed.
JUD: An image collector.
SHIRLEY: Right. An image collector, and you would squeeze it closed to zoom in, and open your hand to zoom out, and through a wire or whatever, send a signal-to a recording apparatus so we could free ourselves finally from the nonsense of looking at video as if it were film, and thus messing up our heads further, (Laughter) since we already see a great many electronic movies, and we don’t see a great many electronic videospaces.
PAIK: Yeah, yeah. I agree completely. I completely agree.
SHIRLEY: And you really have to change some of our physical devices. There’s no reason any longer to have a camera, right? That was something necessary for movie-making; you had to look through the lens in order to see what you were going to shoot. In film, this was fine, but in video, where the finished product is seen in videospace, i.e. a TV monitor or a video projector.
PAIK: That’s it. There is no finished product, because, like your room at the Hotel Chelsea, Shirley, I think that is the most ideal, supreme creation of video so far,, because there you feel the space, and there is no product and it’s more interesting.
SHIRLEY: To me, there is no product.
PAIK: Because that’s the process of a living room. You have integrated videospace with living space.
SHIRLEY: I think I’m ready now for when we have the two-way cable access, or even first cable, and then two-way access. No, my image is: I’m up in my Tepee, you know, the roof, and all of you are with me, and various other artists in New York, in China, in Paris, and Tennessee, altogether into a live mix. That, to me, is the essence of video.
PAIK: I think that is really a very good use of video., in constant video living.
SHIRLEY: Every event that I have seen that fits into the live action process use of video does the thing that no art in front of it ever did before, that makes you understand video., and not fall into the traps of video is like film. It is, but video is also like theater; it’s also like dance; it’s also like music.
PAIK: Video is video.
BILL: Conceptually, it’s beautiful, Shirley, but structurally nearly impossible. My phone doesn’t work half the time.
SHIRLEY: I don’t think that’s important.
BILL: No, it’s not important to the concept. It’s important to the reality.
SHIRLEY: Our minds go faster than the technological manufacturing keeps up.
JUD: That’s been one of the problems with film for ages, that you can’t splice as fast as you can think.
SHIRLEY: Yes. I got into film in the mid-50s, and we all went in and spent the next 15 years trying to develop a hand-held sound camera. Now, when I left film a few years ago, we had the great accomplishment of an Auricon which was there before any of us came and separated the sound system so you could record sound separately, meaning that the manufacturing people have never kept up with the artist, and never kept up with the fantasy and mind of man. But, I think it’s going to get progressively less so. Time feeds everything. And our job is just what we’re doing right now, which is to talk to people, get them to understand some of the possibilities so they want them. Then they’ll make sure we get them. Because manufacturers in a free enterprise system produce to the demand.
JUD: Eric Siegel’s been pushing very much for the manufacturers to come up with new developments which would meet the needs of the practitioners.
SHIRLEY: We never succeeded.
BILL: Everyone in this room has done it. I’ve seen Shirley’s remodeling of the Sony camera.
WALTER: Manufacture our own.
SHIRLEY: That was one of the better moments.
BILL: The glove camera.. (Laughter) Nam June can’t buy a synthesizer.
SHIRLEY: So he made one.
PAIK: And went into making synthesizers. Walter is redesigning synthesizers. Walter’s worked with computers and he’s redesigning them. I, as an artist, found an electronics engineer who’s building a synthesizer because I couldn’t get a synthesizer, or at least I couldn’t get anything that approached what I wanted. It would have cost me a half million dollars.
JUD: It’s an exact analogy to the old days of light shows. You could never go out and but a machine to produce the effect you wanted to produce. You would end up having to get the components and building from scratch for every single image you wanted to produce.
PAIK: Video is very fast., but it’s supposed to be a cool media.
SHIRLEY: What I find fabulous is that I’m basically a very impatient person. I’m amazed that I have managed to survive two years of constant mechanical hang-ups. I have yet myself to participate in or attend any event where the equipment worked. I remember spending 72 hours to get that ferris wheel set up to enjoy it for ten minutes, and the show was over. It’s endless, endless.
PAIK: That’s what I gave as an answer when somebody, the LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY, interviewed me about what I thought of Art and Technology’s Nine Evenings. I said: It’s marvelous, because it showed how technology is fragile. (Laughter) And this is a great accomplishment so that art does blind words for technology. So I think that’s a great achievement and I’m airing some part of that for my Cage show, because it’s a tribute. And number two is that when the last issue of the 1960s came out of Newsweek, which I read in Tokyo while building that synthesizer, and was fighting with those machines, I read what the editor in-chief of NEWSWEEK said the 1960s did, that two things happened: you had ended on the moon, in which all technology worked perfectly; and number two, you had a great blackout where all technology failed., and he had much more fun in the blackout when everything failed than on the moon landing where everything worked. I think that’s a brilliant observation.
SHIRLEY: It is. I think one of the talents that all of us have developed, I know I certainly have, as performers, is that we fill in when the machine fails.
BILL: A basic survival tactic.
SHIRLEY: Communicating person to person with an audience, which is in a way a marvelous thing, because we can assure ourselves, whereas for awhile electronic music had the problem of bringing the human being back into it, the performance. We’ve got the human being in there always.
PAIK: When you had that very difficult session at NET, I think they should have filmed you, then they could have made a wonderful documentary on Shirley Clarke. The greatest show.
SHIRLEY: The artist versus the engineer, or something against women. Are there any lady engineers around here. (NOTE: The radio station.)
JUD: There are several who work the night shifts quite a bit.
SHIRLEY: Oh, good. Because there were none at NET.
BILL: It never works, the equipment doesn’t work.
SHIRLEY: That’s true, but sometimes it does.
BILL: I went to see a friend of mine, Steve Rutt, who’s the inventor who’s working on the machine we’re building, and for a week I got him interested in video. He was into other fields of electronics, and Steve walked around for a week, looking at his scopes around the plant., shaking his head: “It doesn’t work.” None of it works, and he would play it back on the 1/2” machine and the playback would change from time to time, and “it doesn’t work..” and he would look at the broadcast signal, and say: “That’s not what it’s supposed to look like; that’s lousy.” And the fact is that television is one of these non-perfected media, which get very soft.
JUD: Low definition.
WALTER: Yes, low definition.
SHIRLEY: I don’t mind that, because I personally think the aesthetic of the 8mm camera is way beyond the aesthetic of the 35mm camera, you know that heavy monster that sits and watches is not really as beautiful as something that can be held by a human being in your hands. And that’s certainly important here. It’s just that sometimes when it doesn’t work at all- (Laughter) I went recently to see an experience by a young artist from Baltimore who came to New York, and it was interesting because he did it over a period of seven performances, one each night for 15 minutes. He gradually got all his equipment together by the end of the week. (Laughter) But, meanwhile he learned a lot. I went to all of time. Unfortunately, not everybody had the time to do that.
PAIK: Actually, the VISION AND TELEVISION show at Brandeis, the opening was 7:30, and nothing was working in my part, and I had half a floor. (Laughter) Oh, nothing, and one of Charlotte’s TV bras broke, OK?
SHIRLEY: TV bras?
WALTER: In Boston?
PAIK: In Boston, and at 6 o’clock everything closes, all the TV stores.
SHIRLEY: Did you have to buy brassieres or TV sets though?
PAIK: And then, suddenly, miraculously, 15 minutes after the opening, two sets worked, and then I had a great performance as if two sets were all, you see. Always, man is more interesting than machine. So, if man gets turned on., it’s much easier than machines.
SHIRLEY: Of course since you’ve been to my place, more things work. I’m learning more about wires every day. I spent my first year crawling on the floor, looking for which wire to attach. Now I’ve got a little patch thing, and I hit it, and sometimes it works.
BILL: It’s the artist developing into a technician. Sometimes you have to.
SHIRLEY: Ugh. (Laughter)
BILL: You get entrapped by this wonderful stuff that you see you can do if you have a laser, or a video camera, and I took all this stuff to the Avant Garde Festival this year, and it broke, including the tape. The tape came apart. (Laughter)
SHIRLEY: But mine worked this year. The thing I did with Don Snyder, the Oracle, really worked. It’s true we spent 5 to 6 times as long putting it up as we enjoyed it, but there was an atmosphere that was created that was very, very exciting. What I found, by the way, is the most successful thing to do, is what I call game playing, using video to play games, because the human element is built into game playing, and there is that built-in exchange, and if you can find setups that that becomes part of. The thing of Paik’s that I’ve enjoyed are always where there is the live human element being faced with the audience. Sometimes it’s a reaction to a man standing there nude, and on his intimate parts is a little TV monitor. It’s much better for me than watching tapes, that’s for sure.
PAIK: There is a clear distinction between video art and videotaped art, that we cannot enough emphasize this difference.
SHIRLEY: For me, what I do, maybe I’m wrong, I refer to something called videofilm, which uses electronic computers, and all sorts of things, to enhance the ability to put onto a single strand, or many strands, images that are recorded; but then I see next to it a live process, which is an interaction with things which are prerecorded, and basically they imply some kind of a mix of different elements, of people, of prerecorded tapes and cameras, and to me I guess that’s more video.
JUD: And the videofilm can be released as a film or a videotape. There’s an interchange between the two.
SHIRLEY: Right. Is that, by the way, the same as reversing the procedure, where film can be put onto video, i.e. television, cable, or whatever, and therefore will hold up, or do you think that the tape which has been made for a tape holds up better in its original form? Is that an issue about it? Ply suspicion is that, in the long run, it’s not.
JUD: The interchangeability between the two is rapidly being discovered in terms of syntax.
PAIK: Of course. That is important.
SHIRLEY: When our screen sizes change, that will also make a difference.
PAIK: I think the difference between broadcasting and non-broadcasting is in the main technical.
SHIRLEY: It makes a great difference.
PAIK: How we think of it. If communication should be complete, alright then, communication is practically a feedback loop. You go and come back.
BILL: Absolutely. It’s a feedback loop whether it’s a delay line or a few microseconds.
SHIRLEY: Are there lots of friends of ours outside who are waiting? If everybody comes to the Kitchen this Sunday- Paik, who won’t even be physically there, he’ll be in Boston, right? What’s going on right now, you’re at the Kitchen, seeing us right now, and what Paik suggested was, why don’t we play back the audio through a radio when it’s broadcast, and each of us bring some kind of image feed, so that while this is going over the air, the images could be watched, whatever they might be.
PAIK: Actually, you have time to come over to 240 Mercer Street- the Kitchen, alright- then watch and see this program with us.
SHIRLEY: They can do just what we’re talking about; they can leave their houses, dash over to Mercer Street, and watch what’s happening now. This is video.
BILL: If we’re doing a commercial for the Kitchen, I have to say that we’re supported by the New York State Council On The Arts.
SHIRLEY: No, you’re not doing a commercial.
JUD: In other words, you’re listening to the conception of a piece which will be realized when you’re hearing it and watching it at the Kitchen.
WALTER: And Nam June will be phoning in from Boston.
SHIRLEY: And if we’re really very good at miming, we could mouth our own words.
PAIK: Anyway, 240 Mercer Street, and you can reach through subway to E. 8th Street, or Bleecker Street
SHIRLEY: Ok, everybody has arrived. The audience is here, and we say hello. Now we start.
JUD: What’s the picture of the video movement at the present time?
SHIRLEY: Right now.
BILL: No, I have a different outlook than Shirley on what video art is, or what videotape is. The difference between tape and live performance; now this will probably make it so that we’re all going to be screaming at each other, and nobody will be able to understand what’s go ing on.
SHIRLEY: They’re having a hard enough time already. (Laughter)
PAIK: It’s a good talk show. Better than most talk shows you see.
BILL: You see, I work with electronic image, and I’d rather work, for the most part, without people.
SHIRLEY: You’re lazy.
BILL: No. I’ve done several things with people, and you’ve seen them.
SHIRLEY: I never saw you do anything with people, except help me.
BILL: The Billy Graham tape. I didn’t direct him. I did the thing with the San Francisco Cockettes. You saw that. You liked that.
SHIRLEY: If you ask me whether I like tapes I’ve seen, if you ask if I’ve liked film tapes I’ve seen, sure, I have.
BILL: I did a live show with a strobe at the Kitchen, but that’s besides the point. I would prefer to use a medium without people because as soon as I involve people in the medium, I lose some--of the control, and for a lot of pieces I would prefer to have total control. I would like the interaction with the audience to come, not on a cerebral level where you sit there, watch the tape and think of what I meant, but where they sit back, relax and think of other things, and then have the tape affect them in such a way that they’re carried along, and they can think their own thoughts and add their own imput into it on a highly personal level, on an individual level.
SHIRLEY: You’re misundestanding, though, the role of the video director. You’re confusing him with the videomaker, let’s call him. The videomaker can control, is the one in charge of, the situation, and he sends out broadcasts out over the air, or across the room, to himself, whatever he wants, and when you want to control a situation, fine. But I don’t see the process as being of that short a duration. First of all, I see it as constantly continuing. Already in the United State, the American people go to sleep, go to work, and watch video. If you ask them what they do, most Americans watch TV, and that’s their occupation.
BILL: I guess so. I don’t watch TV.
SHIRLEY: So what I’m suggesting, in the six hour day that the average person puts in, there’s a great deal more time to explore many things in relationship to any input, any process, any kind of back and forth thing. So, I’ll give you my great fantasy, what I call the Pleasure Palace Theater of the Future. And it’s something like Mercer Street, but instead of being a bunch of separate people who have come in and rented space, this is on e big overall space, a kind of labyrinth maze, and that as you go from room to room, you can go through many experiences, from dance, to music, you can eat, you can take a sauna bath., you can play chess to Mozart, you can see live theater. Jud and Paik know this well because several years back (Laughter) we described the same event. I haven’t yet found that 200,000 dollars to even get the first thing, but it’s an architectural space, something that would certainly get anybody out of the house. Otherwise, I, for one, plan to stay right smack in my house and watch TV, until you send me something else over the cable so I can turn on the cable, or else I may stay in my house and play bingo’- via the cable. But, other than that, I don’t think we’re in any disagreement. I think you either don’t understand, or just don’t accept the implications of what I’m describing, something very big that will include watching tapes made electronically or however. I personally would like to feed film inputs to my tapes because they give me certain images I cannot get otherwise.
BILL: It’s just the average artist’s inability to communicate with anybody else. (Laughter) I agree with what you’re saying perfectly. And I didn’t understand it, right? So there’s a communications gap, which I find happens a lot between people who are always striving to communicate.
SHIRLEY: No, I think it’s very important for us to exaggerate what we say. In other words, I will not stand publicly for electronic films versus video as a live process art form, because unless I scream loud and clear for process.
BILL: You would never get it.
SHIRLEY: We won’t get it at all.
BILL: I feel the same way about electronic image. Unless you sit there and shout: “You need this machine which will do this,” people look at you like: “What do you do?” “Well, I do videotapes.” “What sort of people do you tape.” “I don’t tape people at all; I deal with electronic images.” They say: “What does it look like?” and unless I have my portable video playback unit there, or my studio, I can’t even begin to show them. It’s become totally strange. Walter must have the same experience.
JUD: For years, it’s been: “What kind of films do you make?”
SHIRLEY: Thank you. Jud. I was just going to say, I make films about people and I never make films about abstract objects. That was not my thing, that’s all.
WALTER: The FCC says there something wrong with the television; they’re going crazy when they see things like that.
SHIRLEY: I like them fine. But then, I usually admire what I don’t do. As do we all. But I think Jud is a very good example. Jud’s been in and around the video scene since its very conception, way before I even knew it existed, and yet he has remained very faithful, no matter what he uses as input, to the kind of filmmaking that he believes in, that he’s been doing for many, many years. And Paik’s work resembles Paik’s work, whether it’s music, or whether it’s his tapes.
WALTER: Or whether it’s an interview. (Laughter)
SHIRLEY: Why would it be anything else? And I remember seeing Walter’s things the first time, and flipping out because he was playing around with TV with images we would get all the time with a TV screen, even though we all admit that the problem with things keeping themselves together technically is tough, and it isn’t going to be much longer before we see large groups of people, across the city, across the world, all different kinds of art imagery produced, using this medium for distribution.
JUD: That’s for sure.
SHIRLEY: And that’s why you compared it earlier WBAI, because the whole thing with why Gene Youngblood feels so strongly about it, and when I met him at Paik’s house last fall, I suddenly got the impact of the meaning of it, what access to this medium is going to mean, because he described himself sitting in California, a film critic, not being able to see films, which is, of course, insane.
JUD: When we’re talking in terms of opening up channels, it’s like gradually being able to feel more and more different parts that we never knew existed of our nervous system.
SHIRLEY: That’s indeed true.
JUD: And what perhaps has to happen culturally at this point, and what we are talking about now, is just like the first injection of stimulant into this mass nervous system.
SHIRLEY: One of the things, of course, that’s fantastic is this idea: we’re having a conversation now that’s really marvelous. We’re really inputting a great many ideas. Now, unless people sit at home with a cassette and record it for themselves, they won’t be able to play it back and at their own leisure re-examine it. And this is, of course definitely true with images. You go to the movies, and you’ve got to look back each time. Let’s just think for a moment of the videocassette and what that’s going to do. We can have these things just like we have books and records, and that’s going to make a big difference’-too. I’m busy right now trying to write, which is not my thing at all, and I realize that in the few moments we’re spoken here, the next year’s worth of articles have been written.
WALTER: Ah, maybe I ought to start writing.
SHIRLEY: No, I think we should do more ways of talking actually, because it’s a good way of communication.
JUD: As you get more in non-verbal communication, you discover that words have an entirely other importance.
PAIK: And hire a professional editor to edit it, so it will be as good as anything.
BILL: You’d have to get someone who’s literate. Like Shamberg came to guest lecture at one of my classes at NYU, and he asked me to write down something, and I asked him how to spell every word because I never learned spelling.
SHIRLEY: You talk alright, like I do.
BILL: Alright, but not well. And I said to Michael, I’m sorry, you’ll have to write it down yourself. I’m illiterate. And he said, post-literate. (Laughter)
SHIRLEY: Well, that’s a nice compliment.
BILL: There’s an interesting thing that hinges on what we’re talking about. It was a sort of scary talk I had with Paul Kaufman, who’s the Executive Director at the National Center For Experiments In Television at KQED on the West coast- actually there are three of them- and he’s the director of that one. I asked what he thought was going to happen in terms of abstract and strange video art forms in the next few years. And it was, of course, the summer before the election, and he said: “I think Nixon will be re-elected; everybody will feel sort of suppressed and stop a lot of their protesting, and we’re going to be the Soma producers. We’re going to produce pretty patterns and nice television so people can sit at home and not go out and protest, and sit back and get high and watch tape.” Now, I see it differently too, otherwise, I’d be totally seared; but it is a scary thought.
SHIRLEY: But I see something much more exciting going on now.
BILL: Opening sensory, new tactile, new sensory, orgasmic feelings, through image and sound, electronic image and electronic sound, added in with old art forms which you can now put in a cassette and review paintings or old pictures frame by frame, and do intense study. It does imply something of going more into yourself, and getting out of politics, and that’s sort of a frightening though, in some ways.
SHIRLEY: Up until that very last sentence, I was absolutely with you. And then, I will just take this deviation here. If you look at a very interesting phenomenon, which is all the people, many of them violently anti-Chinese, anti-Mao, who returned from their first visits to China and their first reaction to it, you get a very interesting phenomenon because all they report is that there is a group of people now in the world who are happy at the moment doing what they’re doing because they see a positive future based on the best parts of their past. And, here, we all feel kind of floaty lost. This is a very political statement I’m making now, that if we saw our roles as having to learn these new skills we’re talking about, so that the technology makes possible the communication web, to really start to cross, we too can become part of what the Chinese are going through, without or with the kind of revolutions they had to go through to attain what they did. It might be possible in the future, just through communication, through information passed to people, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Nixon in the White House or who it is, because the power of the people stopped that bombing in North Vietnam, no matter what anyone says. There’s no question about that. It didn’t stop the fighting.
WALTER: Maybe we’ll get the communications web then.
SHIRLEY: But when we get it, we better jolly well have used this period perfecting some of the techniques. I, for one, find it difficult to do something that was never asked of me before, though it’s been asked of jazz musicians for years: the fact that a jazz musician can play and improvise within a group. He hears what he plays, and at the same time he hears what other people are playing. What do we do with our eyes and our bodies? Dancers know something about it with their bodies. We don’t know anything about that with our eyes. Now this is a skill we’re going to have to learn, a totally new skill for the human being. There was no other way he ever needed it before.
PAIK: That’s very true.
SHIRLEY: And it’s a very important thing to look at this period as practice time, or getting together time. It’s true; our heads are in front of the reality of things, but our skills aren’t.
PAIK: For instance, from that moment of time that man-monkey stood up and we had man, until the time we could draw, first, say the painting of 5000 B.C. good painting in a way- it was a million years we took just to learn how to use it. OK, we even use cave painting still a lot of times, and from 5000 B.C. to now is a very short time still.
SHIRLEY: Because you have to look at it not just as passive input, Bill.
PAIK: I think it is very important that we got a new hand, telecommunications.
SHIRLEY: Right, a new tool is going to make man.
PAIK: This new tool takes a very long time, and now the smart way of many, many experiments should be done because we cannot say that this is video, and this is video art, now, you know. We cannot say that.
SHIRLEY: No one’s ever defined for us what painting is either.
PAIK: Art is a very elusive concept.
SHIRLEY: I think that’s something we all have to do, busying ourselves perfecting our talents to create electronic images, a skill that we’re all going to need.
PAIK: That’s very important.
SHIRLEY: I am busy learning things having to do with movement, fine. That’s what we need. We need all our different inputs.
JUD: It’s rather like studying the zen of electronics.
WALTER: Yes, zen electronics.
BILL: Jud knows me and I think he may be poking fun at me. Jud and I teach a course together and jud knows that the only book I require in the course in how to use a half-inch portapak is the book ZEN IN THE THE ART OF ARCHERY (NOTE: by Eugen Herrigel.). People then look at the equipment in a different way. Instead of saying, in the standard Western approach: “This is a machine that I’m going to battle it out with,” they should look at it and say” “This is something that I’m going to have to incorporate into myself in order to be able to use it.
SHIRLEY: I agree with you, but I’m very curious about what Paik wants to say now, because I wonder about how he felt about being able to be p art of something like the Experimental Television Lab.
PAIK: My position from the beginning was, though I’ll do all that I can do, that I thought the best thing I can do is not to exercise any of my personal influence., so that it can be as open as possible, and then, I thought of doing as Lao Tzu said., the doing of not-doing.
SHIRLEY: By giving people access to what you have developed.
PAIK: Yeah, yeah. Of course, it was a very hard decision first, like in 1970, the various things I had already developed for ten years, and then to make a machine, and to liberate it or not to liberate it. I thought many, many nights. And one day, I knew it, that I should go off, and that day I said I will practically not use it. I made one whole year of movies with Jud Yalkut, so that I don’t play video synthesizer. It should be an open thing. Therefore, video art should be as open as possible, and also therefore all environment and all non-videotapable art. For instance, in a panel discussion with George Stoney, Gene Youngblood and Russell Connor in Minneapolis during the first video art competition, I said: “You are supposed to be video art competition, but what you are doing is single channel videotape art competition.” (To WALTER) I’m sorry, you won, and it was a very good tape. It was a good thing they discovered Walter. It was all a good thing, but the name was at fault, and I didn’t submit anything. And the thing is that video art and videotaped art are different, and we are also thinking of environment, and that is also different. I always think about the profound meaning of Paul Ryan’s thing which very few people know. Paul Ryan has this time-delay line and self-analysis. I think that’s very important.

YES AND NO is an experience in one’s own balancing of positive and negative feedback. Set up two videotape machines with a single tape. The first machine records you and the second plays the recording back on a five-second delay. According to how you feel, start with saying YES or NO into the camera. If you start with YES, when that comes back on the monitor five seconds later, you can either switch to saying NO to your YES- and so on and so on. All manner of ambivalence can be explored in this way .... (Piece at Brandeis show) ... “VT is not TV. Videotape is TV flipped into itself. Television, as the root of the word implies, has to do with transmitting information over a distance. Videotape has to do with infolding information. Instant replay offers a living feedback that creates a topology of awareness other than the tic-tac-toe grid.
- PAUL RYAN.
SHIRLEY: My daughter, Wendy, is involved in something that’s fascinating.
PAIK: Psychological.
SHIRLEY: Yes, of self-analysis with video which could end up being something like a Proustian novel, and that’s a whole other possible thing.
PAIK: What I’m quite interested in what we are doing now with Jud is freezing time. Why are we, why suddenly, take a portrait of a great man? It used to be a job for a painter, and the painter’s job was how to make it better. Then they invented photography, and that became the job of a professional photographer, and when it became very cheap, it became everybody’s job, you know. So Paul Ryan’s portapak is the same thing, all beginning with “P”.
SHIRLEY: How about a film I once made called PORTRAIT OF JASON, which, by the way, I thought was a videotape. I thought when I finished it I thought, when I finished it, I could hire myself out as the modern day portrait painter. You know, for $1000, I’ll come to your home and do your film on you.
BILL: One of my first revelations In video, when I started working with electronic image, I would keep the camera on myself as I was playing with the thing, because I wanted a live image to input into this mess. After awhile I realized that I had the bad habit of picking my nose.
SHIRLEY: Self-improvement.
BILL: You discover it. But after awhile, you’re watching all this tape I decided it didn’t matter anymore.
PAIK: Actually, George Stoney said the same thing. That’s really interesting.
SHIRLEY: What I’ve done is, I set up my first equipment so that the monitors and the camera were right there together. From then on, no one ever looked through a lens or a viewfinder in my house. We looked in the monitor. But then Viva said: “Aren’t you going to make people self-conscious?” The answer was: “Of course. They go through a period of self-consciousness, of enjoyment, of vanity, and then they go beyond it.” And it’s fabulous. I have finally gotten where I will let people take still pictures of me, which I never could do before, because I was really insecure about my image.
JUD: It’s like the Gurdjieffian idea of self-remembering, and video feedback is making us more able to do that instantaneously, to train ourselves to do it.
SHIRLEY: Simultaneously.
JUD: Yes, simultaneously, because we can train ourselves to do as things are happening, to be aware of what we’re doing at the moment that we’re doing it, and be right on top of it.
PAIK: Yes, like Paul Ryan.
SHIRLEY: It will change how people who go out with videotape deal with themselves, let’s say, everybody wants to show everyone else in the world something of themselves. We’ve given them the means to do it themselves. No longer do we have the interpreter; we’re that for ourselves now. There’s this dating game at Antioch College they’re into- the kids- it’s perfect; it’s a very good video symbol. You come and for x number of dollars, you make a ten minute tape of yourself, and then you want a date with somebody, you can come in and look through all those tapes and see what the different people look like, and you choose somebody to go out with. It’s a very good idea.
PAIK: It’s much better than a computer.
BILL: We must have that at the Kitchen.
WALTER: That’s the kind of thing the TV LAB should be doing, and broadcasting it, too.
SHIRLEY: We could do it at the Kitchen, and pay for the tape because a person would pay, say, ten dollars to be put into.
WALTER: The video data bank.
SHIRLEY: Video Date Data. (Laughter) Dada. D-A-D-A.
BILL: This is where you could get your $200,000 for your Pleasure Dome.
SHIRLEY: Oh, you mean I could gradually take $2 off of everybody as they came in, out of the $10
BILL: And it goes to a good cause, the Pleasure Dome.
SHIRLEY: Bingo in my house is cheaper. I run a bing game on the cable. Why not? They do it in Chicago.
WALTER: Which cable?
SHIRLEY: They have apartment buildings which have been wired up for cable in Chicago, and there are young kids sitting there making quite a mint of money running bingo games for the apartment houses. Fine, why not?
WALTER: That’s right. The cablestations in Canada play bingo too.
SHIRLEY: I want the money to come to us so we can continue doing our thing.
PAIK: Actually, the latent, sleeping demand or use for video is so much.
SHIRLEY: It blows your mind.
PAIK: For instance, the reason I am not I is because when I started working at Binghampton [note: Binghamton is correct spelling] Community TV Center- Binghampton is a sleepy small town.
BILL: Was- (Laughter)
PAIK: In upstate New York. Actually, there were university and then town people. There were three Binghamptons: one was university, which is quite far; another is IBM people; and another part is old Binghampton which is centered on Johnson’s Shoe factory. There are three completely different types of people on income. And when you see a house, you know where they belong. Anyway there was hardly an introduction, just sleepy town. Then Ralph Hocking set up the TV Center, with seven portapaks, and nobody cam to rent it out. His job was to rent it out free, and nobody comes. First week, one guy; second week, two guys, and then, in two months, people just kept coming, all kinds of people, firemen, policemen, and of course, young people, and the poets, and clergymen. For instance, they still had hula- hoop competitions going on. And now, they really have a waiting list for ten portapaks a month.
JUD: That happened with public access in New York City, too.
PAIK: And then we made a video synthesizer and, of course, nobody used it. For months, nobody, and I had a very bad conscience to make that, to spend so much money, with nobody using. Then, slowly, slowly, two week waiting period, even the video synthesizer.
SHIRLEY: Well, you know, that was the history of the portapak. Remember, three a month, now 33,000 a month.
JUD: And how many people per portapaks.
SHIRLEY: Yes, one portapak goes to many people. It’s not a little home toy quite yet. The implications are extraordinary.
PAIK: That Binghampton case.
SHIRLEY: Just think, that community that’s sitting there, all sleepy and separate, where one person didn’t get to know another, and I don’t know if they have cable-or not, but if they did those tapes would go out over cable, and what a different change. P I AIK Because it happened in Binghampton. I lived in Freiburg, a small German town, a university town. The only sexy thing in town was the undergarment advertisement.
SHIRLEY: That was the big turn-on.
PAIK: That was the most sexy thing, you know. Martin Heidigger lived there, and Edmund Husserl. It’s like the birthplace of existentialism, Frieburg, near Switzerland. And Binghampton was on that level, you see.
BILL: They will never talk to you again, Nam June.
SHIRLEY: Why? Well, it’s changed the sex habits of the world. Put your own portapak up and make your own porno.
BILL: That’s right. They have them in Tokyo.
SHIRLEY: I see it as a live action thing, frankly.
BILL: I have trouble lighting the set. (Laughter) I know it’s a skill you have to perfect; that’s what I say.
PAIK: Very interesting. You just talked about how we have to learn to use our senses. So, there are three classical visions: Plato said that the word “conception” is the most important thing; St. Augustine said that sound is the most profound; and Sinoza said that vision is the most profound. Now, TV commercial has everything. (Laughter) But still, another interesting thing: when Doug Davis videotaped his honeymoon with Jane, in some motel in Vermont, and then on the bed. They showed it silently, and I told them: “Turn on the sound” and they didn’t turn on the sound.
SHIRLEY: That’s interesting. It made it personal when the sound went on
PAIK: So sound is profound, no?
SHIRLEY: There’s no doubt that all the inputs make it. Anytime you have a medium with something missing, like on radio now, people can’t see our funny faces, so they’re missing part of the fun.
JUD: But they can run around doing something else.
SHIRLEY: Yeah, right.
PAIK: That audience is so important.
SHIRLEY: By the way, one of the things that’s struck me so much about video; in theater, you have to go to the place, and in film, in order to see it. But with video, the place is something we have to start to question. Where do you see it? It can be both ways.
PAIK: It can be anywhere.
SHIRLEY: It’s quite a different thing when something comes into your home.
PAIK: The most interesting thing about NET’s two channel production, which I saw, the most interesting part was when Bob and Ray intercepted and met in the middle. That was fantastic.
SHIRLEY: That was the whole trip. And when they took the rope to pull, and they got it wrong in the tug-of-war, so that instead of being out of one monitor into the other, they got it a little mixed up so they were both in the same monitor on the edge, and suddenly you understood that’s what integration is.
PAIK: And also, both disappeared- in the middle. That is a genius idea. That’s what the video medium is- silence.
SHIRLEY: I once discovered something very funny. I was doing what I call Sculpture Tapes, where you take three cameras and you put the monitors one on top of the other, say, like a body is, head, torso, feet. And the people watched while they were being taped, and what was interesting was that, in the playback, the bottom monitor, which was the feet, bad nothing much happening, and that’s where your eyes went all the time. Not up to the busy tops, and all the moving around, but to these dumb feet which just stood there, or just sat. That’s what I’ve learned actually very much from oriental art.
Once, when Paik came to my house and we were playing with my stuff, he took a live camera and set it up so that it had one of those absolutely perfect kind of Japanese etching qualities., just the edge of something, the edge of a monitor showed, a little frame, and suddenly your eye can’t go into all my fancy images. It kept going back to this quiet.
JUD: The quiet center.
SHIRLEY: The power of observing quietly while action goes on around is another thing that only video input can do, because you need the live feed to the present moment.
PAIK: My thing is that the future, because I am now studying radio quite much, the degree of freedom we will have in the future.
SHIRLEY: Yes, we have to do something about that.
PAIK: Freedom need not be first amendment. Medium free. When you go to movie, you are prisoner of time.
SHIRLEY: Absolutely.
PAIK: Alright. There’s no other thing there.
WALTER: A physical prisoner.
PAIK: On television, you have half freedom, because you turn on the lights a certain amount, and you can do a certain amount of your things, read some books.
SHIRLEY: And also, the commercials were a good tought.
PAIK: Right, so you can leave the room. Or you don’t watch it. You come only for the commercials. And number three, radio gives you more freedom, because you can all information while you type a letter, and doing things, and even watching TV. Therefore, if in the future we can have one silent TV station, where you can get all the information through visuals, while we can choose our own audio source, from records, radio.
JUD: That could be aided, of course, by having a larger visual screen.
SHIRLEY: The day of the mosaic screen, where you have many inputs on a wall.
PAIK: When you stop broadcast, there’s more important information.
SHIRLEY: But the reverse of what you’re talking about, too, where the sound is played for you on the video, and you can make your own image.
PAIK: Of course.
SHIRLEY: And all the variations that come from understanding that.
PAIK: I have the feeling that all talk shows, including TONIGHT show and Dick Cavett, will eventually go back to radio, because there is no reason to see Johnny Carson every night.
SHIRLEY: What I find though is this; I like to get a look at how somebody behaves.
PAIK: Sometimes-
SHIRLEY: There’s something interesting about personal behavior. Let’s take an aging movie star; that’s very interesting to watch. There are all sorts of strange possibilities. But there are ways of doing it that don’t demand so much, for instance, when there’s a talk show on, I find myself more listening to it
PAIK: And you do other things.
SHIRLEY: I now live alone, and find something very interesting. In the old days, I used to turn on my record player when I came into the house. Now, I turn on my TV set, because in many ways I can deal with it merely as sound input, and busy myself. Not too often do I turn to look, and the soap operas are fine with just sound. They really don’t need much image, and game shows too. But, where I see the major difference in what we’re talking about, is having access. At the same as we have access to all of this to the fact that if you are living in Korea, and you are living in San Francisco, and you are living in Brooklyn.; and I’m in New York, and you’re in Minnesota.
WALTER: Why me in Minnesota?
SHIRLEY: I don’t know; you won the prize there. Then we can, also at will, use what used to be called the videophone. We can also plug into each other.
WALTER: That’s the thing to be able to get back to.
SHIRLEY: That we get back and forth.
WALTER: Sometimes we’ve got to talk back to the television set.
SHIRLEY: You can send video images. You can say: “Shirley, shut up for a while; I’m sending you for the next half hour beautiful images; enjoy them.”
BILL: Why are we restricting ourselves to one screen? I used to sit at home and have two air programs on simultaneously, or I would flip dials. I’m a very big one for sitting there and zooming around. The information needed really to digest two or three prime time shows isn’t very much. You can flip the dial and have them all laid out.
SHIRLEY: That’s true of television. It isn’t, I don’t think, quite so true of the kind of concentration that some of us expect with other things. In other words, I think then that the skill we were talking about developing, is that we have to learn to integrate images so that multiimages can be played, and that they can connect in a way that makes it possible to watch.
BILL: Like Nam June’s last show at the Kitchen.
WALTER: Or Shigeko Kubota’s RIVERS.
SHIRLEY: Shigeko’s RIVERS was a very good example.
BILL: This is all, I think, important. As Nam June said in his show: “You can allow your eye to do the editing.”
SHIRLEY: Well, it does what life does
BILL: To some extent. You can have a four-wall screen, or a six-wall screen. You can have the floor and ceiling. You can be inside a cube where there’s something different everywhere.
PAIK: Like quadrasonics, we’ll have quadravideo.
BILL: I think this is the next step.
SHIRLEY: The average living room, twenty years from now, has screens of many sizes on the wall, the way they have paintings. And they can still hang paintings on the opposite wall.
SHIRLEY: Do we still have more time.
JUD: I’m going to over-record, so we can edit.
WALTER: This is edited. This is what should be left on.
BILL: This is process radio. (NOTE: The program was broadcast exactly as it was.)
SHIRLEY: Still a real filmmaker.
PAIK: One thing- let me say one thing.
SHIRLEY: Last word.
PAIK: No, not last word, but one word. Everybody says one last word. Like in court. (Laughter) Finally, Harvard University, with many hundreds of years of history, and many thousands of scholars, you know, finally got one guy, and of course Harvard man has to research books to get degree, so he got research.
SHIRLEY: Grant.
PAIK: Of course. They always get better than we do. (Laughter) He did all research about what was written about the telephone and, for the last hundred years, or 110 years, that the telephone was existing, only two essays had been written about the telephone.
SHIRLEY: Oh, that’s not nice.
PAIK: One is McLuhan; another is another guy. In a hundred years! When-television.
SHIRLEY: Unbelievable.
PAIK: Yes, telephone changed our lives, and only two guys wrote about it.
SHIRLEY: You know what’s very interesting. There’s this old Don Ameche movie about how he discovered the telephone; Don Ameche was the actor who played Bell, right, so there he is discovering the telephone, and finally when he and his partner have gotten it together, and they’re going to have a big show to get money so that they produce telephones- what they do is- it’s an absolutely perfect example of what our lives have been like- One of them is in Springfield on one end of the phone, and in Boston, all these rich people are watching, right, and guess what he sends out, the first telephone message: “Hello, hello, you there? and you get there, and then a group of barbershop singers do a little number, there’s a cornet solo (Laughter) and then it’s all interrupted because the landlady, who they own rent to, interrupts than., saying: “You have to get out. Sorry, you can’t do this.” She kicks them out, and everybody looks and says: “Well, it’s a nice toy, but really what is it? Who in the world would ever want to use it.” And that’s exactly the state we’re in now. It’s a good analogy.
JUD: There must be a tape of that somewhere.
WALTER: We’ll hire a Harvard man to research it.
SHIRLEY: I find my survival now, which is in a way very nice, by thinking of all this, as in the beginning of any new art form, as something one plays with. You must look at it more as a toy. Don’t take it too seriously. Enjoy it. Because it’s in that enjoyment that the significance of the thing is finally revealed. We don’t really know yet all the possibilities.
BILL: And we won’t, for several million years.
SHIRLEY: Ta-daaa.

Above copied from: http://experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=30&page=1