What are your backgrounds?

[jimfetterley]

By day, I’m the Museum and Theater Technical Director of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. By night, I’m a longtime media collage artist learning analog video synthesis from all you folks- I really love and appreciate the talent and generosity of this community!

I first dipped my toes into analog video synthesis a couple years ago building a 3Trins by Gijs Gieskes
and a CHA/V Jonas Bers. This led to watching and reading as much as I could until I finally caved in and put in a pre-order for a Chromagnon last April, thinking I’d have my hands on one by June ! The extended waiting led to buying some modules that were available one by one, until I had cobbled together a proxy neanderthal by necessity.

One thing that has kept my spirits up despite the infinite loop of THOSE dreadful feelings all year long was learning to build and play with this small but mighty av synth with modules from LZX, BrownShoesOnly & Reverselandfill with a s/o to Chris Johnson
for the Cadet builds!

This clip is my attempt to visualize that undulating equilibrium of the joy of learning from this incredible community and the horror and grief of the pandemic this past year.

Gotta keep those sinking feelings afloat as I can attest to the therapeutic positive FX these video drugs have had on me personally- it really goes beyond any words that I can tap away at here on this site! Thanks again and plz enjoy the vibes of this loop!

Eye Dropz- Relaxersize your eyes.
https://vimeo.com/531519495

(excuse my cross-post to facething, just wanted to share with and thank as many of you as possible <3)

[bebop]

i picked up a visual cortex after going back to school & getting too big of a student loan

it wasnt very much fun to play at the time because i had to use the rest of my 6U just to attenuate and boost to get a single audio osc on screen. i took it out & decided to build a video rack some day

that was about four years ago, and a couple of months ago , i decided to use part of my stimulus for that video rack, and ive been trying to get an electronic video studio put together & learn how to play the tv better

ive just been a janitor since i finished my BA, but im hoping to go to grad school & study counseling , & hopefully a little about art/music therapy

[IoDionysus]

I used to work and eventually run a relatively high end A/V studio in my high school when I was growing up and I would spend a lot of time playing with outdated nonlinear editing bays and making cool visuals from movie clips. We also used to have a top-notch switching bay where I could make could patterns and “patches” so to speak. I stopped doing a lot of that stuff after graduation, but when I heard about LZX a few years ago, I became immediately interested in learning more and the rest is history lmao

[Gavin]

I’m an academic art historian at a university and used to work at a national museum as a curator. I don’t write about or curate video art at all, and it’s just a nice escape where I try to avoid thinking too much about theory or context and just have fun with. I guess I’m a Sunday video painter. I have a visionary system with DIY modules and not much Orion, and will probably stick with that for a while, as I learned tounchdesigner for anything more aesthetically ‘digital’. I got a visual cortex years ago to make visuals for my band and then went down the wormhole like lots of us!

[Boneoh]

I’m a retired IT guy after 40+ years. I’ve been everything from junior programmer to CTO. I’ve programmed a lot of stuff in my day, from supercomputers to minis, microcontrollers, etc. A lot of hands on hardware and networking as well.

I started doing computer graphics in 1980. You basically wrote a pixel at a time using a direct memory connection from the computer to a frame buffer. The display was 512 x 512 and was state of the art at the time, very expensive. Each pixel was a 16 bit value that selected an entry in a lookup table. Your program would populate the lookup table with RGB values at startup. The lookup table had 8 bits each for R, G, and B. It was slow, we weren’t doing realtime animation of any complexity.

For recording, we had a device that contained an 8mm camera, a monochrome display, and R,G, + B filters. We programmed it to display the image, capture N frames, and then repeat. We had lots of fun when the movie was developed! Later we got a programmable VCR that could capture N frames from the frame buffer. This VCR was about two feet square and a foot tall!

Around 1983 I started programming graphics on IBM mainframes using color terminals. This supported drawing either pixels or straight lines. We had to program polygons and fill them in software. Not fast, but it worked ok.

I’m amazed at the GPUs and other hardware we have today. More power that the supercomputers back then.

I’ve done a lot of amateur and volunteer videography and editing for the past 12 years or so. I’ve been playing a lot with software on my Mac and an NVIDIA Jetson Nano and it’s been really fun! Some of it is custom software I’ve written, others are example programs that I’ve modified to work the way I need it.

I’ve been doing eurorack audio for about 5 years and am just starting the analog video adventure. Patiently waiting for the TBC2 and Chromagnon like many others here. Things are going to get crazy fun really soon! So exciting to see what everyone will be creating with the new instruments!!!

[dryodryo]

Looks like the original poster got suspended for bad behavior … I’m skeptical. She sold me a Topogram, so she can’t be all bad.

I’m a video and 3D graphic artist. Got my start in video synthesis in 1987 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was one of the few students interested in the Sandin Image Processor. At that time, video synthesis and feedback were already considered passe by the art world. So basically I got all of the toys to myself. They had TWO complete IP systems, originally in two different studios. The larger of the two studios also had a Fairlight CVI, several ZGRASS systems, and eventually a color Macintosh II.

On the basis of my elective “thesis” video piece, realized using the IP and CVI, I was accepted to California Institute of the Arts. There, I immediately found that I was one of the most technically-minded students in the School of Film/Video. I actually wanted to understand the medium in which I was working, which was highly unusual. Most students didn’t care or were intimidated by the technical side of things. But I thought their avoidance was akin to a painter not knowing how to mix or layer paint. And it turned out to be a fair analogy, because I found that the students in the School of Art did not learn how to paint. It was all about learning the hermetic insider language of post-structuralist theory, and ingratiating oneself to the existing social order of curators, critics, and collectors.

While at CalArts, I pursued parallel interests in “videographics” and 3D animation. The Videographics Lab was built around the Hearne / Electronics Associates Berkeley Videolab II, and it also featured a Fairlight CVI. My professor, Michael Scroggins, modified an Optical Electronics Incorporated scan processor to accept control voltages, effectively making it a Rutt-Etra. I spent many long hours in that lab. But I knew that after graduation I would lose access to these specialized devices. The future was in 3D graphics, and as a young cyberpunk, I thought it was going to liberate the imaginations of millions.

So I spent my third year of a three-year graduate program learning the 3D stuff. It was laughably primitive compared to today. Everything was orders of magnitude slower and more expensive. My graduate thesis incorporated both videographics and 3D animation.

After graduation, I worked in video production for a few years. After hours I occasionally played around with realtime digital video effects and switcher feedback. Eventually the studio got a four-channel Scitex / Abekas DVEous. That thing was incredible, with a price tag to match: at least $200,000.

In 1998 I did an artist residency at the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York. That was the precursor to today’s Signal Culture. I only had a week there, and barely learned how to work the systems designed and built by Dave Jones.

All through the 2000’s and 2010’s my career focus was on teaching 3D graphics, primarily 3ds Max and Maya. I continued to complete the occasional 3D experimental animation short.

With the advent of LZX and the incredible dedication of Lars & Co., video synthesis is now a viable art form for mere mortals who aren’t students or teachers at expensive art schools. But I’ve always been allergic to scan lines. I get it, many people love the retro look. It’s just not my thing. Only with the announcement of TBC2 and Chromagnon support for HD timings did I return to the video synthesis medium.

[jimfetterley]

yo @dryodryo It’s fellow SAIC student of the late 80s, jim fetterley here. I remember you from the media center days- LOL! I’m a Bob Snyder, John Manning and Ed Rankus student as well, getting gateway drugged by the gear at the time and esp. teh IPs, but couldn’t get beyond bending circuits and making glitches once I left school becasue it was expensive- until lzx opened this new era of affordable quality modules. I formed video collage band, Animal Charm, perfomring live 1995 to present inspired partly upon H-GUN production & craig baldwin sonic outlaws. I’ve run into see Eric Z at Coaxial space and remember SAIC, too. I was the Video Ape in Davey Fosse’s TV Sheriff mash-up video band, while days were spent time working at Cal Arts and finding John Hawk and the video grfx lab rekindling my video synth interests for live vj’ing. Seems like we drank from the same kool aid in chicago leading somewhat parallel video lives. I had a specific memory jarred by your post above. I lived with jon schnepp and others at bali lua lofts- the media center and gear was always topic of discussion-haha. “gotta get teh cameras back to Ross by 8am!!!” It was video production chaos and very exciting-then I moved out here to work with him at king robot. He had a ton of SAIC hi8 videos in his archive and we took a look and there was one where George Kuchar is visiting the school and Jon gives him a tour of the media center where you are in- kinda home movie art performance comedy, as Jon excelled in. It’s fun to remember all this- thanks for sharing. Jon passed a few years back and I really appreciate anything that brings his humor back into my life. Really digging your posts and video shares. peace!

[dryodryo]

Wow Jim, we know many of the same people. I was saddened by Jon Schnepp’s passing, I knew him from SAIC and we were Facebook friends. I still keep in contact with several of the Media Center crew, some of whom became good friends.

Looking back, I learned so much from Bob Snyder.

[eyesnoface]

big fan of that Golden Digest dvd. Welcome to the zzzzzzzzzone

[jimfetterley]

TyTy!
Luvin the warmth of this zzzzzzzzone!!!

[jimfetterley]

Same! before a world of foodies, his obsession with exotic made perfect sense but was sooo obscure! I don’t know if you ever took a class with Peter Kubelka, but he required that you had to prove you could cook before you could attempt to make a film- same kinda vibes. Big fan of his videos too