Cathode Ray Tapestries at The Rotunda
Beginning in March 2023, Sound Museum Collective invited ten Philly-based artists from diverse disciplines to explore the art of analog video. The residents met weekly to collectively learn techniques of video mixing, synthesis, and feedback.
About Video Synthesizers:
A video synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and "clean up and enhance" or "distort" live television camera imagery. The synthesizer creates a wide range of imagery through purely electronic manipulations. This imagery is visible within the output video signal when this signal is displayed. The output video signal can be viewed on a wide range of conventional video equipment, such as TV monitors, theater video projectors, computer displays,etc.
About the Three Video Installations:
HARD//WIRED
by Ann Dolly + Nia Benjamin
Synthesis is, for us, an imaginative tool to collapse binaries and create a new visual language to resist the invasive “datasphere” in the face of social collapse. We are using this old equipment tocreate imagery for the “party at the end of the world,” and to highlight technologies of liberation and survival that are found in many cultures.
in transience
by Sarah Milinski, Kendell Hayes, Diandra Williams & Mercy Z
Although the concept of entropy—the gradual decline into disorder—originates from physics, the phenomenon applies to all aspects of life. Decay is both irreversible and universal. It consumes all. Everyone must face the pain it creates. Given its inevitability, how do we find joy in chaos, ecstasy in entropy? What if we could reverse this seemingly unalterable aspect of life? What would we discover on the
other side? Our project, in transience, mixes live footage from a contemporaneous event with
videos of decline and decay, edited to create imagined reversals into life and construction. Through our ‘entropy photobooth,’ we offer users a space to reflect on the joyous new beginnings found at the end of things.
Within:
by Kat Nzingha, Pony P., and Alissa Eberle
An installation of video and sound exploring the concept of within; using light, the body, self reflection, the uncanny, and memory realms.
