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.