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The Video Synthesizer
New York’s Mercer Arts Center was a brief-lived flash of the early Seventies, for better or worse. A century-old hotel, reduced to warehousing skid row derelicts, also became home to a city-backed bunch of artists who put on plays, gave concerts, and exhibited displays of what they figured to be tomorrow’s art. TV was going to be part of that future scene; experimental video was a big part of the sizzle, a Mercer Arts specialty. Then, on the afternoon of August 3, 1973, the building collapsed into the street, killing four people. Witnesses said it was like a scene of sudden Biblical retribution. Inspectors later determined the cause was unauthorized construction that undermined the structure. Residents of Little Italy never trusted the neighborhood’s arty interlopers and were more inclined to blame or thank the Almighty for spontaneous slum removal urban renewal.
In arts circles, a legend arose that one of the things destroyed was a unique invention, a video synthesizer that could potentially create any image. The shattered device existed, but it was not a true “synthesizer,” and anything like a real one was still decades away, beyond the border of the digital revolution. But the rubes were impressed, and far too many NYC arts sophisticates are rubes through and through. Or, as wrestlers call fans, “marks.”
I knew the man who built it, the gadfly who claimed to have invented the video synthesizer. An interesting case. He hung out around the technical side of the NYU television department. He was awfully full of himself, coming across as, and looking very much like Harry Mudd, the fast-talking schemer of Star Trek: TOS.
Full disclosure: there was a touch of jealousy here. I suspected that I knew (a lot) more about technology than he did, but as a 19-year-old, $2 per hour technician with a work/study job, I didn’t have any say in the matter. I hasten to say I had nothing much against him either. He did build things, but he was no master inventor, the claim of his obituaries in 2016. He was far closer in spirit to the Obama-era kid who de-packaged an alarm clock and was treated as a potential Einstein. I’m not singling him out as anything worse than a self-promoter and an exaggerator. He was hustling a reputation. In the arts, that’s what you had to do.
The reason that a semi-mythological, semi-magical video synthesizer sounded credible in 1973 was the then-recent big-time success of audio synthesizers. Although Theremin-type electrical musical instruments were a radio-age novelty a century ago, and Hewlett-Packard’s first product was a tone generator delivered to Walt Disney in 1939 for use in Fantasia, most music historians say that the real timeline of electronic music started a few years after WWII.
California engineer Donald Buchla’s roomful of carefully calibrated, voltage-controlled modules used a built-from-scratch, scientific approach to tonal modification, using tools like filtering, ring modulation, and dynamic range compression. It represented the leading West Coast electronic music sound. Morton Subotnick used Buchla’s top-of-the-line synthesizer to record a modestly selling LP, Silver Apples of the Moon. Three years later, Subotnick’s equipment ended up in a (literally) underground sound laboratory at New York University in the East Village, where I encountered it in 1972.
Robert Moog’s competing, and vastly more commercially successful, New York synth approach was heavily keyboard-based, packaged for working musicians, not laboratory experimenters. “Moog Synthesizer” was once as well identified with electronic music as Xerox was with copiers, or Kleenex with facial tissues.
There were other techniques out there. With recording tape, a German wartime invention, razor blades and splicing tape found quirky rhythms and textures in existing sounds. In the Fifties, the Cologne radio lab was one of the centers of the tape approach. Experimental TV had a harder time. Analog videotape was hard to physically edit with any precision. It was done, but it was painstaking and slow. Andy Warhol created a psychedelic color ad in 1968 for Schrafft’s, a restaurant and ice cream chain. The company proudly claimed they’d commissioned the first work of video art.
How could a video synthesizer be faked? Allow some gray areas around “fake.”
Presentation had a lot to do with a product demonstration, as Steve Jobs or Polaroid’s Edwin Land knew. When the rumored video synthesizer was built again, only small groups were admitted into its presence. Room lighting was subdued, strictly-for-show oscilloscopes cast a green sine wave glow. The monitors were mostly discarded TVs found in the street. Their cabinets were removed, and their exposed chassis added to the science fiction atmosphere. He sat at a keyboard like Rick Wakeman, the modules stacked in a semi-circle surrounding him. Joe Hippie could put on a show.
He used a bunch of off-the-shelf mixing devices to alter the phase and amplitude of signals. If you didn’t know much about technology, and few writers or critics did, a session could present an impressive-looking random light show of mirror-like feedback, like the credits of an old episode of Doctor Who.
An old man stares at his keyboard, half a century later, and ponders. Which way do I go? Kindness or truth? Is it right to cast shade, even restrained and measured shade, on those we’ve known who are now dead? And yet…if you’re (probably) one of the last ones left who remembers a time and a place, you owe it to history to tell the truth.
After all, someone might innocently look this guy up and end up being Wrong on the Internet.
Published in General
The collapse of the Mercer Arts Center is the climax of the first episode of Martin Scorsese’s 1-season HBO series, Vinyl, where it acts as the sort-of founding event of the Seventies punk-new wave scene. Vinyl also claims that disco and rap were formed in almost the same place, almost the same time.
There’s considerable artistic license. The building didn’t come down in response to a really rockin’ midnight concert, but in late afternoon.
BTW, why am I busting chops over a definition of what a real synthesizer is? It’s sort of a “stolen valor” thing with me. This guy was a tinkerer, pretending to have the deep scientific understanding of @hankrhody.
Based on the sky-high rhetoric of the early Seventies, the synth in question would have stood somewhere between a 2005-to-present animation workstation, and generative AI. There was no way in hootin’ heck to build that in 1973, let alone build it out of 50s-vintage TV signal switchers and half-dead color TVs pulled from the garbage.
I quibble with the past tense. Beyond the charades and pretense lurk more charades and pretense. Smoke Gauloises and wear a ratty black beret.
Nice touch.
Just sine waves? Not Lissajous?
Hey, we’re not talking The Outer Limits! Of course you are suggesting the coolest looking patterns known to (hu)man. But in retrospect I’m guessing that he was simply displaying 60 Hz current.
Well, it can be done with just “wall power” going into both axes. But those are usually kinda boring.
We had to have a Video Toaster. Had to. The lab manager howled like a dyspeptic baboon. Even our utterly non-tech business manager scratched his patchy scalp. “What’s an Amiga 2000 doing in here?”
“Flight demo tapes.”
“What are you trying to do? Win an Emmy? We don’t need … oh, hey … that is cool.”
Gary, ya need to ‘splain what a video synthesizer is.
John Logie Baird, who was first to use a scanning wheel to make (mechanical) television work, and Peter Goldmark, who used a color filter wheel to make color television, were inventors or tinkerers. Both of them stayed with their electromechanical systems too long, and were reluctantly forced to give up on them.
Like the subject of the OP, the CBS labs inventor Peter Goldmark had something of a chip on his shoulder, and his memoirs constantly refer to equations and unspecified formulas. It feels like a “tell”.
Meanwhile, later projection TVs used such wheels…
In reality, it was a bag of technical tricks, the kind you’d see deployed in Eighties rock videos, just more raggedy and lower quality. Thing is, most TV control rooms could muster most of those effects even in 1973. If News4Macon can do it too, even do it better, should we allow the avant garde to claim it as an achievement?
Because what the video synthesizer was supposed to be was far beyond that. It was defined as an image creator, capable of building up any image from basic building blocks. “Give me a rotating yellow pyramid against a striped background…now, blend it into a rotating cone…now angle into the cone, like a tunnel…” That was so far beyond the tech of the time it was like trying to reach the Moon by climbing a higher tree. But it flattered progressives that somehow, their avatars surpassed the possible.
As soon as I read the first line, I was ready to post the clip from this show.
BTW, baseball’s National League was formed at the hotel in February 1876, when it was at its poshest. It had fallen a long way before it fell the rest of the way.
Whoa, I remember it well. There was a weird transitional period when Commodore’s ruling family, the Tramiels, left the company and bought Atari, their chief competitor.
In the end neither the Amiga nor the Atari ST survived the mid-Nineties, but they were amazing at that price.
Both companies had third-party accessories with genlock and other semi-professional tools.
Fallen stature before structure. Maybe there is a metaphor there for other institutions that have lost credibility (and stature) more recently.
Video Synthesizer was one of those Electronic magazine projects that I wanted to build ‘someday’ but really never saw much purpose for it, in my life anyway… I think the designs of the 70s or even 80s were just glorified test pattern generators. It wasn’t until the late 80s early 90s that the Amiga 2000/1500 came along, that practical useful video effects could be produced on a garage band budget.
In fact I think the first few seasons of Star Trek NG was done with Amiga computers.
Gary and @roblong need to get together and do a special podcast about Hollywood. Just sayin’ . . .
This cat you’re talking about brought “Magic Alex” to mind. He was the guy in The Beatles’ orbit who was supposed to be a genius talent and inventor, but was neither. There are some pretty funny stories about him. I think it was Lennon who was particularly under his spell.
Depends on the exact moment in time we’re talking about.
For folks who don’t know: A “video synthesizer”, at least from my view, is a video signal on a color TV monitor where the artist has control over the horizontal and vertical scanning signals, and a color TV camera is pointed at that monitor to deliver the result.
The video input often consists of geometric shapes, or title cards. And by mucking with the scanning signals the image gets twisted, split, folded, flipped, spun, or otherwise mangled.
The appeal is in psychedelia, of course, as well as the surprise of a video system doing something you haven’t seen it do before.
There was a pretty good documentary on video synths on YouTube, but damn, I can’t find it anymore.
Buchla and Moog invented modular synthesizers at almost exactly the same time, around 1964.
Moog, in upstate New York, built it as an almost traditional keyboard instrument playing electronic versions of traditional timbres.
Buchla, in Berkeley, was more interested in abstract sounds. “Bloops and bleeps.” He didn’t even have a keyboard.
They’ve been called the East Coast and West Coast schools of synthesis. Moog was wildly successful, while Buchla held an artsy niche.
Both displayed absolutely brilliant electronic design skills.
There was an Egyptian entrepreneur/con man named Marwan who convinced Saddam Hussein that he could add enough after market equipment to Iraqi tanks to effect a significant upgrade in their abilities. Not necessarily a crazy idea, but he was in over his head, resulting in the loss of his head.
Thanks, Stad!
An excellent explanation, Don. Two gifted designers, very different approaches. Buchla wasn’t the promoter that Moog was. On the other hand, Moog had a thriving business whose name dominated its industry, and yet somehow managed to run it aground.
Part of the reason may be location. Trumansburg, New York is a tiny town, way upstate, and it became tough to find skilled assembly workers. Seymour Cray did the same kind of thing in Chippewa Falls, WI more successfully.
One thing I left out of the OP: computer-composed music, like the Illiac Suite. Columbia University and Bell Labs did work in this area, which had a faddish moment in the early Sixties. Although later some computers interfaced with synthesizers, at the time computer composing became regarded as cute, but essentially irrelevant to music.
A lot of early electronic music is like watching a kaleidoscope: pretty patterns that don’t mean anything.
Well, the musical instrument industry is difficult. You can’t just make a product, you need a special appeal that is embraceable by musicians. And while the electronics is the voice of the instrument, the controls, keyboard, packaging, presentation, and all the other product-oriented things are every bit as important. And the technologies they were dealing with at the time were changing really, really fast. And there’s a struggle between cramming lots of features in and being able to hit the intended price point.
The other synth company, ARP Instruments, outside of Boston, offered instruments similar to Moog, was more successful, actually went public, and was the largest electronic music company… until they made some bad financial decisions and crashed around 1983.
(I own 1 Buchla, 1 Moog, and 3 ARP synths.)
A ha! Someone who actually knows! In truth, I write Ricochet posts with the express purpose of tricking brainy people into conversation.
It’s like Tom Sawyer’s fence painting contest.
I never touched an ARP–that was after my time–but besides the Buchla, I did get to use an Electrocomp, sort a poor man’s Buchla.
I didn’t link YouTube clips of that Warhol TV ad because they’re re-creations, and clumsy ones at that. The real thing is out there somewhere, but the art collector who bought it won’t post it. There’s a still image from Warhol’s original that gives some idea of why it made an impression 57 years ago.
Contrary to publicity, it wasn’t in fact the first piece of video art, but it was the first done by a “name” artist, which as far as the public was concerned was what mattered. To tell the truth, if anything it looks like something that Peter Max would have done.
Part of the problem is that YT itself basically archives nothing. If some member put up stuff about it, and then later closed their account for some reason, POOF! it’s gone.
Get a Blu-Ray burner and archive your Downloads every week. Hard local media beats the cloud, and is much harder to retcon.
The local used media store near me is closing the end of the month. I’m very sad. On the bright side, everything is heavily discounted so they don’t have to move it to the other store 20 miles away. Picked up five movies for $4.50 yesterday.
I’m amazed how many of my friends/co-workers don’t have any disc players in their homes anymore. And not just 20-somethings either.
Okay, this isn’t it, but it’s close: