In industrial society, the decorative crafts have been converted into mass media. Only the pressure of new creations against art as it has been defined keep art from merging with the media and allows works to survive for an interval as art. To maintain the pressure of de-definition has been the task of the avant-garde.--Harold Rosenberg, "Inquest into Modern|ism" (1978)

In an earlier memoir about my writing for/with videotape, I spoke of the standard small television screen as resembling the page of a book, in contrast to the larger, more enveloping visual field of the moviehouse and suggested that the imagery most appropriate for such a small screen would be intimate and devoid of excessive detail. For my earliest video creations, collected as Three Prose Pieces, I favored simple screen-filling images similar to the essential page-filling images in the visual fictions I was also writing around that time (some of which were collected in More Short Fictions [1980]). In Epiphanies (1981) and Partitions (1986), I put on the screen only sequences of static arrays of words, fully realizing the resemblance to book pages. Two negative assumptions favored from the beginning were that the television box must be good at presenting images other than the solo talking heads that predominate in public transmissions and structures other than the collages favored by most "video artists." There was no need to duplicate what others were doing, no matter how opportunistic such aesthetic butt-kissing might be.

The next development began with a series of almost annual residencies at the Experimental TV Center in Owego, New York. Here, working with Hank Rudolph and Peer Bode, I had access first to slighly more sophisticated character-generators, or electronic letter-making machines. Instead of only one machine, I now had access to two, with different typefaces, each able (unlike before) to do smaller letters as well as full capitals ; and these character-generators also had memories that allowed me to put a series of successive images, or pages, that could then be played back while the recording tape was running. Attached to this system was a tape drive that can store on a single "data-cartridge" cassette as much as three hundred separate pages of text, any or all of which can be random-accessed. In addition, the ETC studio offered processing equipment that facilitated such kinetic moves as dividing the screen between two sets of images or adding color backgrounds that could be electronically changed as we recorded the images onto video tape. Thanks to rescaning, or the process of reshooting an image off a television screen, we could do yet more radical image-modification. I also used the so-called text programs of an Amiga 500 computer to "generate" letters that make words that move. As is my custom in guest residencies, I tried to exploit artistic possibilities within technological limitations, rather than entering a studio with detailed schemes designed to be realized at any cost.

With these technologies, I made a series of short pieces whose only content is language, some only a few seconds long, others perhaps a minute, and thought of these as Kinetic Writings (1988), to quote the title of a twenty-two-minute tape collecting the best of them. But I also realized that the bulk of them could be divided into two categories--"Video Poems," which realize a conciseness of image and effect; and "Video Fictions," which imply movement from one place to another, which is to say narrative, even if abstract. However, since ETC's machines offer only synthesis, not editing, I must go elsewhere to produce a finished tape. That pair of hour-long tapes, when done, would represent, as far as I can tell, the first of their literary kinds.

Thanks to the data-cartridge technology, along with the character-generator's capacity to make letters "crawl" in an evenly paced horizontal line across the screen, I could cast on tape the "strings" I had written several years before. These lines of continuous letters contain overlapping words, each of which includes at least two or usually three letters from its predecessor (depending upon the rule made for each text). Most were in English, one was in German. Thus, Stringtwo, which has a two-letter overlap, opens with the following:

Stringtwomenteroticystitisolatenderotogeniceapplesbiannultimaterminuse. . .

Once these extended strings of letters were entered into the data-cartridge, they could be continuously recorded in several ways: with just a single stream of letters running across the screen, at one of three available speeds, at times with colors changing in either the letters or the background; with an enlargement of the middle letters running as a counterpoint either above or below; with on-screen windows that contain changing fragments of the continuous imagery. Some of the shorter strings were incorporated into a thirty-minute tape titled Videostrings (1989). The entire German text became Stringsieben (1989, 12:00), while Stringtwo (1990) alone runs well over thirty-five minutes. For the first, I added the music of Gordon Jillson, who had previously composed the soundtrack for Partitions; Stringsieben has harp music played by Nina Kellman. For the last I hope to add a kind of continuous pseudo-speech composed by Joseph V. DiMeo.

I also used the character-generator and data-cartridge to put on screen the text of my second most difficult audio composition. The text of Turfs Arenas Fields Pitches (1983) opens with those four words arrayed in the four corners of a single page and contains sixty more poems similarly structured. While in residence at Davis & Elkins College, I recruited four people to speak the words of each page in unison, as a kind of verbal chord, whose parts, I thought, should be individually comprehensible, much as the notes of a musical chord can be individually identified. Attractive though that perceptual purpose was in theory, it was more problematic in practice, especially on first hearing, and what was difficult with four-word poems became even less feasible with eight-word poems composed to a similar spatial principle (Grounds Gridiron Scrubs Vocabularies Tracks Proscenia Lists Theaters). So it seemed appropriate to put the words of all these poems on screen not in their original geometric forms, but as horizontal lines, for durations roughly corresponding to their appearance on tape. (The videotape concludes with silent arrays of sixteen-word poems, likewise similar in structure, because they have not yet been aurally recorded. Since this videotape has three sections, I decided to title it with an opening word from each section: Turfs/Grounds/Lawns (1989, 23:00). As the soundtrack was processed at the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm, where I have several times been artist-in-residence, it was transferred in stereo to the 3/4" master videotape (and copied onto the hifi tracks of VHS tape); its sound, apart from its picture, is thus best played back not through the single small speaker of a standard television monitor but a stereo system customarily used for records and compact discs. Because the audio track of such videotapes is as important as the pictures, I classify them, unlike the others, as Audiovideotapes. (I later used a more complicted video lettering to make visible the text of my audio Onomatopoeia [1988].)

Previously exploring the principle of composing videotapes to my audio compositions, I started with Seductions (1981) and Relationships (1983), two extended electronically enhanced readings of texts that resemble each other with erotic content. For imagery I turned to the Amiga computer, which has an extraordinary capability for continuously generating richly colored kinetic imagery. Since my texts were already comprehensible, it seemed unnecessary to show what was said (as was done with Turfs); instead, we found in the Amiga an endless flow of lush abstract kinetic shapesthat had their own sensuous quality. Indeed, in many respects, the audiovideotapes Seductions (1988) and Relationships (1988) resemble the light show that I enjoyed at the best rock concerts two decades ago.

I realized that similar video syntheses might be effective with other audio compositions of mine. Invocations (1981, 1984), of and about the language of prayer, differs from Seductions and Relationships in having distinct sections, rather than continuous sound, and so it seemed appropriate to make for each section a video synthesis as long as its sound. Thus, each section has its own visual "setting," to use a word that is customarily used to identify sound made to enhance language. Again, it seemed appropriate to use not representational pictures, remembering the commandment against graven images, but continuous kinetic abstractions. I extended this last principle to The Gospels (1982), a two-hour fugue of the initial four books of the New Testament; but rather than letting the audiovideotape go with only one video synthesis, we literally put a new one on top of an old one, making the tape denser and, as the emphasis between the new and the old shifted, more various. As four ministers are simultaneously reciting complimentary biblical texts, shapes flash across the screen. Some of them are circular, others rectangular, yet others strips, their colors changing in stochastic ways, enhancing the acoustic experience without distracting from it (much like the light show at a rock concert).

Once I had these syntheses, I discovered what was not obvious at the beginning--that they were seen best not on stanard small screens but on two-piece projection televisions that resemble film in having images that are looked at (not through, without fear of cathode-ray-tube-damage), but differ from film in having a blurred surface and rougher edges. Indeed, there is every reason to regard projection television as a reproduction medium quite different from the book-like smallscreen television on one hand and film on the other.

For another audiocomposition, Praying to the Lord (1981), I made several Amiga systheses that are similar in style but different in detail, hoping someday to broadcast them on several monitors, which is another medium for publishing background video, so that the images accompany not only the single sound track but one another.

In 1988, I finished an hour-long audiotape composition of and about the sound of baseball, Americas' Game, and wondered how to video it, so to speak. I didn't want live-action footage or other kinds of familiar illustrations. Preferring an image with its own power, I chose a single baseball, well-illuminated, that remains on screen, motionless, for the entire duration, sixty minutes, as a kind of Buddha that is worshipped, to be sure, as devoutly as other images of Buddha.

Only in this last piece do I deviate from my original assumption that my video art would be based on language or literature, for that assumption was the principle, as well as the signature, of my video art. I had noted before that few, if any, of my literary colleagues produced their own videotapes, as distinct from appearing as talking heads in videotapes made by others; and even though I have been making language-based videotapes for a qaurter century now, none of them of talking heads (though some of talking lips), my interest remains unique. There is more work to be done, by others as well as me, in discovering not only video possibilities for language but video contents different from the common run.