Beginning in the late 1960s, artists and technologists began to custom-create hardware and software for real-time manipulation of video signals through original designs or as hacks to devices common to television production.

Contemporary artists and tool designers continue this work in analog and digital domains in an expanded media environment. This program will bring focus to the social and artistic dimensions of custom tool development, and to the dual impulses to create new instruments and conserve and use older ones. In conversation will be inventor Dave Jones, whose video instruments span forty years, artists-designers Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis of LoVid, Rhizome conservator Dragan Espenschied, and Hank Rudolph of the artist space Signal Culture and the Experimental Television Center.

The panel marks and celebrates the publication of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued, edited by Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking, and Mona Jimenez (Intellect Books, 2014). The book discusses such early video instruments including the Raster Manipulation Unit (aka the Wobbulator), the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer, the Sandin Image Processor, the Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer, the Digital Image Articulator, Pantomation, and the software HARPO, among others.

Organized by Rhizome and the New Museum’s Education Department with Experimental Television Center.