CERA BUMPY ROAD GIF PROFESSIONAL
CERA BUMPY ROAD GIF TV

The description on the back of the VHS box offers a somewhat snappier explanation: Twiddling the right knob or turning the right dial on a physical panel sends a signal through a number of filters that can alter the shape, color, and motion of the feedback pattern. The Sandin Image Processor, the implement of choice on most of the included shorts, brought abstract expressionism into the virtual plane. So, uh, what is it? Sykes, Sandin, DeFanti, and their cohort may not have been the very first video artists, and they were far from the first experimental filmmakers, but they did pioneer a new form borrowing liberally from both of those traditions. The trio contributed the lion’s share of the work that ultimately made up “Electric Light Voyage”/“Ascent 1,” and in packaging their esoterica for public exhibition, they opened a direct portal from their technological be-ins and the museum galleries they later occupied to after-dark living rooms across America. She would become their most brilliant student and valued collaborator, credited here with “Video Synthesis” on multiple segments. A young woman named Barbara Sykes learned of their Electronic Visualization Events-brain-expanding live performances of video and audio synthesizing in real time-and started to attend during her time at the university. DeFanti created GRASS, the programming language that gave us Star Wars’ Death Star sequence, and Sandin invented the Sandin Image Processor, a device that “drew” visual patterns the way a Moog “plays” sound. The ELV had been founded by two graduates-turned-researchers, Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti, who would each go on to fabulous success in the field.

CERA BUMPY ROAD GIF PROFESSIONAL

Astralvision acted as a sort of professional extension of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory-the National Lampoon to their Harvard Lampoon, if you please-an on-campus program that incubated the earliest exchanges between art and computer engineering. The end credits clarify this as a joint effort from a loose collective of video artists in the general orbit of University of Illinois at Chicago during the ‘70s. seems to have been established for the sole purpose of assembling this collection of shorts the Astralvision trademark lapsed after it failed to renew in the ‘80s. The short-lived Astralvision Communications Inc. The conflicting titles make it all the more difficult to ascertain information about this curio, little-seen and widely forgotten as it is. This wondrous, strange nostalgia object effectively splits the difference between those two worlds, a treat for both avant-garde aficionados and people looking for something to stare at. “Electric Light Voyage” sounds like an N64 game, while “Ascent 1” nods to the project’s roots in science and experimental art. The gap between the titles chosen by the distributor and the production house-one flashy and fun, the other chilly and practical-speaks to the dual identities of this unusual, singular work. The video nevertheless begins with the original introductory card that dubs the 60-minute compilation “Ascent 1,” after flashing the retro-sleek logo of Astralvision Communications, Inc.

released a tape by that title in 1979, re-christened as such by the label in a likely effort to piggyback on some of the then-ubiquitous Electric Light Orchestra’s popularity.

Independent video distributor Media Home Entertainment Inc. It’s here, among the creepy camcorder detritus and lost video-dating profiles, that “Electric Light Voyage” has been waiting for you.

CERA BUMPY ROAD GIF TV

You pinball from ‘ 80s-era NASA test footage to “36 NEW SHOWS FROM THE HELLISH MID-SEASON TV OF 1979” to the deep catalog of VHS oddities discovered and uploaded by a dedicated corps of obsolescence fetishists. You can’t sleep, you may or may not be on drugs (you don’t have to be, though it’d be a lot cooler, as they say, if you were), and you’re clicking around the weirder back channels of YouTube again. You don’t find it it finds you, most likely in the dead of night. The Wondrous, Sensuous World of Astralvision by Charles Bramesco

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