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Appropriately enough forsomeone vvhobegan hieca-reer aaa science fiction illustrator, EdEmshwiUe/haoa!-ways worked with the most advanced technologiesavailable 1c a visual artist . !nh!s pioneering experimen-tal films of the fifties and sixties, Emshwiller seemed toget more out of 16mm technology than anyone around,combining technical virtuouoiiyandpoetic vision inclas-sic workm like Relativity . As a videoatet in the 19701,hnwaoamong the first 1oexplore the limits oftheScani-mate system (Scepenra&ma . 1Q72) ' the instant-replayvideodisc (Crossings and Meetings,1974) andcomputer- controlled editing (Dubs, 1078). revealing ineach case new expressive possibilities for the electronicmedium . By the late seventies, EmshwMer had becomeintrigued with computer animation, and in 1979 at NewYork Institute of Technology he produced yet anotherclassic, the haunting 8unatone.whose central image --an enigmo1ic KXona Lisa-like face of stone that tan,forms into a radiant aun--haabecome no less than acultural icon heralding the New Age of computer art .As might have been expected, Emshwiller's newest

videotape, Skin Matrix, relies heavily on computergraphics . It is a hypnotic and beautiful work, with someof the most unusual imagery to be seen anywhere thesedays . And yet the computer Emshwiller used is about asfarfrom state of the art as one can get--a dnyBa!!yAr-cade designed for playing video games, which the artistpurchased for $50 at a discount stn/e . In a deliberate .move 1oreaffirm atruth ourculture seems tohave forgot-ten --that art is an act of the imagination, independentufthetechnology through which it's expressed --Emeh-wiiierhauproduced inSkin Matrix an elegant and myo-te(ious visual poem using the simplest end most

Gene Ybungb!ood

Video stills from Skin Matrix by EdEmvmwller. PHOTOS : mm*penov

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auescib!aofelectronic tools . We talked about the mak-ing cf We tape, and about its meaning for Emshwiller inboth a technological and poetic sense .

GENE: Your working method was very intereving . ITSlike the slogan of the Chicago community, "We do it incwr living rooms." You did all the computer graphics andassembly editing in your living room using a 8a!!y Ar-cade and u B*tmmax . You made a very elegant tapeusing very simple technology .

That was one of my deliberate constraints from thebeginning . It's like an artist who says I'm going to workwith crayons and newsprint . Art is always a function ofthe imagination in interaction with tools . And all toolshave limitations, whether it's a BmUyora Cray . I've al-ways by the wayinwhich thetool in-8uenceoyour thinking . Vie artists arrogantly believe wecontrol what we do . But no--vve respond tomnenviron-ment which includes our tools and limitations of time andresources . The biggest limitation is ourmwn imagina-tion . !t vvaaaninteresting challenge forme.having madeSunak»newith state of theart equipment, to see if I coulddo something aesthetically satisfying with the Bally .

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GENE: -he success o(thetapee comes at least in partfrom thevvayyourespected \halimitations ofyour instru-ment The Bally doesn't make good images so you didn'ttrytodothat ; instead, youused it togenerate very beau-tiful anima1edheypa11erno ' a function it serves very well .

ED : VS. !took Ne deaofand+yiasingandturned hup-side down . ! said, that's a fascinating element 0o work

with ;

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front and really

atbis . i didn'teven use the crude pixel resolution that'sotamdwd withthe Bal!y

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160. Nothing so fine as that . I made itinto larger blocks that were a minimum of five or tenpixels onamdo I'd program a series of those and stickthem together to get that deliberate blockiness s(there'd be no question about it : this is personal com-puter graphics . But otthe same time it evokes a sense ofprimitive art forms. There are several computer-graphicheads composed of big blocks, almost like !woode!ibepaLe!ydoinganAztootype of drawing . The challenge wasto use a simple concept with enough variation to sustaintension and interest .

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NR How tong did you work on i1?

ED:Two years . Most of the visual material was gatheredwith a 85mnnstill camera and oportapak . I shot between600 and 700 slides of stones, wooct sand dune, all overthe coma, Ile primitive masks and statues were shotat the Metropolitan Museum . They're mainly Azten.Chi-neme and Egyptian . I also shot about twenty hours ofvideotape . The only studio work was usually with a livemodel over whom |wampnyeo1ingother images .images . And Iused the studio for mixing and for the final CMX edit,which was mastered on one-inch . I edited for six monthsm1home using a Betomaxenda Sony E250 .

Myfirmtassembly edit waethree hours and fortyminutes culled from twenty hours . I wrote the edit list forthe CMX that way and just took it into the studio and put

her two versions of the tape in five ten-hour days ofhUng . The longest version is 17 minutes . That's a ratio

of about 70 to one .

GENE : The aesthetic seems to be a kind of matting orgating ofimagery in different ways

: Yea . Layering or combining images . Thafs wherethe computer played avebig role . The image gene-rated bythecomputerwaothe ge1e Or thoonandoff ofa given video source . I wrote about 240 programs to dothat . !'dgethome around five in the afternoon, collapseon the couch, put the Bally in my lap and the monitor onthe coffee table and program until midnight or two in themorning almost every day. That took many months while!vvasalso wo,kin simultaneously as Provost of Cal Artsand Dean of the School of Film and Video . My biggestproblem was that the Ba!!y is only a 4K computer andBasic takes up 2K by itself, so you have less than 2K towrite your program in . 3o for a given video section I'dhave to use several small programs to achieve the effect\vvanted . But I wound up using only about 20 out of the24Qgraphics programs I wrote .

GENE: How are they structured?

: Some are set in motion within prescribed con-straints . For example an image of a woman gets drawnand undrawn, various parts of her are keyed in and out,little boxes within herjump around . That's a form ofani-mation based on a series of branches, each of whichenables certain random actions to take place . There's afrequency attached to each of these things . For in'

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si "m*. the grid pattern that /omeo ",

~ixinC point that might occur one tim`

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f lrThe random aspects are all set within carefully '3finedconstrains . A transformation wi!! occur at oenain ran-dom intervals and will be repeated some nurnAmes within upper and lower limits . For example, withinan eye's bUnk it'll happen between thr , and seventimea, and then move on to the mouth . The fwith which these things happen is '=1

in d byprogram .

GENE : You play with figure-ground neisfio:mhips . Theimage will poke through end then be pushed to the back,

ED : Yes . That kind of play always fascinates me.idea of using tat two-dimensional patterns but creatinga sense ofdepth byshifting back and forth between sub-tle movements . !nthephyaio!nQyofourperceptual aym-tem,the way we perceive depth isn't only determined byscale, orluminance orcolor, it's very often a function ofmovement . A one-eyed person often can determinewhat's in front of something else by motion .

GENE: How did you combine Al this material?

E : The way!work involves akkoYtrial and error, a lot

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of serendipity and selecting -tut his heuristic in theoemnathpt !trytocreate conditions which will combinetogive me certain things I want . In the studio, the slideswere put in the telecine, as well as projected directly onperformers . So I'd have slides in the background and inthe foreground, an actress with slides projected on her--*hioh might be the same or different texture as thebackground. Then !'dhave aro!!-intape with other tex-tural imagery, and the computer graphics would be onanother monitor with a camera taking that image andusing A as a woe between, say, the roll-in tape and thetape being recorded atthotime. The roll-in tape might bean earlier version ofacombination of all the elements Ijust said . Sothat wou/d be layered again . }'d mix every-thing with the owitchec For example, the section I callthe 'grid section' has four video images happeningsimultaneously . /hadvarious possibilities !could call upwith mykaypad . YCould aay/want the series of verticalbars tooccur, andpush that key. Or there was a horizon-tal set, orone with expanding orcontracting boxes . (]r!could do all of them in series and start over again, andthey'd runthrough thesequence . !nreal time, !cou/dbewatching the monitor and call up one of the wipes. Thestudio switnherwamtaking that information andallowingit to combine various images . Forinstance, intheback-ground youeee dunes and in the middle ground there'sthe edge of a body, skin, and in what would normally bethe shadow ofthe body contour a/e wood textures orrocks, and within those might be another hand touchinga body. It was a very complicated tape to make. Peopletalk about video being immediate -- well there's a17-minute tape that took two years, 700 slides, 20 hoursof videotape, many months of computer programmingand six months of editing .

GENE: The tape seems to be primarily about texture .

ED: Texture and energy. Natural patterns . At one point Iwoothinkingcdcalling A flxyngy 7huoen Energy iamani-test of course as !puter graphics and video . And then thwel pure energy-- like the waves of pure energy at the beginning of thetape . It's very literal . Slashes of energy that becomewaves . And the next thing you see are those wavessolkidified in an organic structure which is a wood ginain,a stump . That is penetrated by my own chest, my flesh,my body, which like the stump is a product of energytransformations . Then it goes on into textures and pat-terns in nature - skin, wood and sand dunes . And I useda lot of faces because they represent the energy of theliving organism, the cognizant being - the eyes, theknowing manifestation of nature . Next we see the crea-tions of that imagination - explorations of the "innerface" and the recognition of connections . At the end,there's a transformation of o woman into a robot, apseudo or imaginary woman, a woman of the mind whodoesn't even exist . A kind of spirit . Mind is also amanifestation nfenergy . Those are some ideas that in-formed myselection ofmaterials when !vvaacreating thaspace.

GENE : The masked faces are very mysterious .

For me they have many different meaning;3 . Oneto do with mortality, another with signs and symbols

--- things we create to represent ourselves . Persona .The visual transformations result from going betweenthe two, dividing up the face with that which representsit . There's a poetic resonance between the statues andthe women whose faces ividectaped . The aUuoionaanemultiple, which in what i mean by poetic . Nodes whichcan relate one to another . It also makes me think otpoints oƒ light which emit out possibilities that create in-terference rings Wen they encounter one another . Andthose interference rings form images which have ereso-nance oftheir own.

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ENE: This theme ofbreaking through to some innerreality runs throughout all your work .

: Yes . !aee8irinMeW very much in continuum withearlier works like Scapematemand Sunskone .It reiterates basic themes through new and slightlydifferent forms . Forexample, inSkin Matrix I used simpletechnology to produce a very complex image structureand dense soundtrack, whereas inSunntone!usedcom-plex technology to produce simple images and verysparse sound. That was a deliberate opposition, astretch in the other direction .

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