6 The Road to Manipulable Images: Video Art

The first systems incorporating technical interaction were based almost exclusively on acoustic input, while they generated movement, light, and/or sounds as output. It was not until the development of video technology in the 1960s and 1970s that real-time recording and manipulation of moving images became possible. As early as 1963, in his first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television, Nam June Paik invited visitors to distort television pictures either directly with a magnet or by means of sounds amplified through a microphone—both methods to manipulate the magnetic field of the cathode-ray tube. Around 1970, together with Shuya Abe, he developed one of the first video synthesizers, which allowed electronic montage, manipulation, and color-coding of videos. The manipulation of video images through sound was continued after Paik, for example in Steina Vasulka’s Violin Power and in David Stout’s work, although in these cases mostly without audience participation. Audiences were first invited to participate in video art in closed-circuit installations that recorded the image of the visitor and then reproduced it on screens, sometimes after a time delay. However, these works were mainly based on visual feedback loops.