Confluence of Ideas of Electronics and Arts
Many principles used in the construction of early video synthesizers reflected a healthy and dynamic interplay between electronic requirements and traditional interpretations of artistic forms. For example, Rutt & Etra and Sandin carried forward as an essential principle ideas of Robert Moog that standardized signal ranges so that any module's output could be connected to "voltage control" any other module's input. The consequence of this in a machine like the Rutt-Etra was that position, brightness, and color were completely interchangeable and could be used to modulate each other during the processing that led to the final image. Videotapes by Louise and Bill Etra and Steina and Woody Vasulka dramatized this new class of effects. This led to various interpretations of the multi-modal synthesesia of these aspects of the image in dialogues that extended the McLuhanesque language of film criticism of the time.
In the UK Richard Monkhouse working for EMS developed a hybrid video synthesiser – Spectre – later renamed 'Spectron' which used the EMS patchboard system to allow completely flexible connections between module inputs and outputs. The video signals were digital, but they were controlled by analog voltages. There was a digital patchboard for image composition and an analog patchboard for motion control.
Read more about this topic: Video Synthesizer
Famous quotes containing the words ideas, electronics and/or arts:
“They [creative children] ask more questions than most children. They’re usually spontaneous and enthusiastic. Their ideas are unique and occasionally strike other kids as weird. They’re independent. Not that they don’t care at all what other kids think, but they’re able to do their thing despite the fact that their peers may think it’s strange. And they have lots and lots of ideas.”
—Silvia Rimm (20th century)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)