As a key figure of the 1960s Lower East Side arts scene, Aldo Tambellini used a variety of media for social and political communication. In the age of McLuhan and Fuller, Tambellini manipulated new technology in an exploration of the “psychological re-orientation of man in the space age.” He presented immersive, multi-media environments and, having made his first experimental video as early as 1966, participated in early collaborations between artists and broadcast television.
“Electromedia was the fusion of the various art and media – breaking media away from it’s ‘traditional media role’ – bringing it into the area of modern art – bringing the others arts – poetry – sounds – painting – kinetic sculpture – into a time/space reorientation toward media – transforming both the arts and the media …” (Aldo Tambellini)
Aldo Tambellini will be present to introduce and discuss his early work in film and video.
Programme curated by Mark Webber for Evolution 2007. Programme repeated at Lucca Film Festival 30 September 2007.
ALDO TAMBELLINI: ELECTROMEDIA & THE BLACK FILM SERIES
Saturday 26 May 2007, at 3pm
Leeds Opera North Linacre Studio
A true intermedia activist, Aldo Tambellini was a key figure of the Lower East Side arts scene, working in sculpture, painting, poetry, film, video and theatre. Believing it was “no longer sufficient for the creative individual to remain in isolation,” he co-founded the alternative arts community Group Center in 1960. After publishing counterculture newsletters and making early happenings to protest against the art establishment (such as presenting The Golden Screw Award to the Museum of Modern Art), Tambellini embraced new technology as a tool to explore the “psychological re-orientation of man in the space age.”
His first ‘electromedia event’ BLACK (1965) fused painting, music, poetry and dance with projected ‘lumigrams’ (hand-painted glass slides) in an immersive environment. The idea of ‘black’ as a spatial and psychological concept dominated Tambellini’s work for many years. “Black to me is like a beginning … Black is within totality, the oneness of all. Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions.”
The Black Film Series, a sequence of seven films made between 1965-69, is a primitive, sensory exploration of the medium, which ranges from total abstraction to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and black teenagers in Coney Island. Before picking up a camera, Tambellini physically worked on the film strip, treating the emulsion with chemicals, paint, ink and stencils, slicing and scraping the celluloid, and dynamically intercutting material from industrial films, newsreels and broadcast television. Abrasive, provocative and turbulent, the series is a rapid-fire response to the beginning of the information age and a world in flux.
In 1966, Tambellini purchased the first Sony video recorder and made an experimental tape by shining a light directly into the camera lens, burning out the photoconductive vidicon tube. This monochrome tape was broadcast by ABC Television in 1967. Black Video Two – spontaneously improvised from test signals whilst the first tape was being duplicated – was later colourized using the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer at WNET (1973) to create 6673.
One of the first artists to explore television as a means of personal expression, Tambellini collaborated with Otto Piene on Black Gate Cologne, an hour-long multi-media happening broadcast by WDR in January 1969, and contributed to The Medium is the Medium at WGBH Boston, alongside Nam June Paik and Allan Kaprow (also 1969). That same year, under commission from the Howard Wise Gallery, Tambellini worked with Bell Laboratories engineers to create Black Spiral, a manipulated television set, for the groundbreaking exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium”.
During his tenure at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and 1980s, Tambellini established Communicationsphere, connecting artists with technicians and engineers to “dissolve the boundaries between media, the arts and life.” Most recently he has returned to writing and performing poetry, and made the award-winning digital video poem Listen (2005) in collaboration with Anthony Tenczar.
Reaching beyond its application as an aesthetic tool, Tambellini has consistently used media as a means of social and political communication, often working in collaboration with others to investigate the creative potential of electronics and technology.
BLACK FILM SERIES
“Tambellini is one of the pioneers of lntermedia. His Black series in film and intermedia is obsessed with Black. His Black is like a ‘blind spot’ – a phantasy with the speed of nightmare. Hypnotic effect of organic microscopic forms. From darkness of the daemon to brightness to sperm to womb to friction contraction expansion. It is a trip for blind America.” Takahiko Iimura, Eiga Hyoron (Japanese Film Review)
BLACK IS
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 4 min
seed black
seed black
sperm black
sperm black
a film made entirely without the use of the camera
(Aldo Tambellini)
BLACK TRIP #1
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 5 min
Black Trip #1 is pure abstraction after the manner of a Jackson Pollock. Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. (Grove Press Film Catalog)
BLACK TRIP #2
Aldo Tambellini, 1967, 16mm, b/w, sound, 3 min
“An internal probing of the violence and mystery of the American psyche seen through the eye of a black man and the Russian revolution.” (Aldo Tambellini)
BLACKOUT
Aldo Tambellini, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 min
This film, like an action painting by Franz Kline, is a rising crescendo of abstract images. Rapid cuts of white forms on a black background supplemented by an equally abstract soundtrack give the impression of a bombardment in celestial space or on a battlefield where cannons fire on an unseen enemy into the night. (Grove Press Film Catalog)
BLACK PLUS X
Aldo Tambellini, 1966, 16mm, b/w, sound, 9 min
Tambellini here focuses on contemporary life in a black community. The extra, the “X” of Black Plus X, is a filmic device by which a black person is instantaneously turned white by the mere projection of the negative image. The time is summer, and the place is an oceanside amusement park where black children are playing in the surf and enjoying the rides, quite oblivious to Tambellini’s tongue?in?cheek “solution” to the race problem. (Grove Press Film Catalog)
BLACK TV
Aldo Tambellini, 1968, 16mm, b/w, sound, 10 min
The film is an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through a television tube. Tambellini presents it subliminally in rapid?fire abstractions in which such horrors as Robert Kennedy’s assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality at Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out?of?focus impressions of faces and events.” (Grove Press Film Catalog)
ABC-TV INTERVIEW
Aldo Tambellini, 1967, video, b/w, sound, 3 min
This interview with Aldo Tambellini was shot on 21st December 1967, at the Black Gate Theatre, for an ABC Television series on the New York Lower East Side Arts Scene. It includes an excerpt from Black Video One, his first experimental videotape, which had been made the previous year by shining a light directly into the camera lens, burning out the photoconductive vidicon tube.
BLACK (EXCERPT FROM THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM)
Aldo Tambellini, 1969, video, b/w, sound, c.6 min
“In 1969 [Tambellini] was one of six artists participating in the PBL programme “The Medium Is the Medium” at WGBH-TV in Boston. The videotape produced for the project, called Black, involved one thousand slides, seven 16mm film projections, thirty black children, and three live TV cameras that taped the interplay of sound and image. The black-and-white tape is extremely dense in kinetic and synaesthetic information, assaulting the senses in a subliminal barrage of sight and sound events. The slides and films were projected on and around the children in the studio, creating an overwhelming sense of the black man’s life in contemporary America. Images from all three cameras were superimposed on one tape, resulting in a multidimensional presentation of an ethnological attitude. There was a strong sense of furious energy, both Tambellini’s and the blacks’, communicated through the space/time manipulations of the medium.” (Gene Youngbood, Expanded Cinema)
SCREENING ON A MONITOR IN THE FOYER
6673
Aldo Tambellini, 1966-73, video, colour, sound, 55 min (looped)
6673 is based on Tambellini’s second tape, Black Video 2, which dates from 1966. It was created at the Video Flight dubbing house by manipulating test patterns and other electronic signals. The soundtrack combines audio produced by an oscilloscope (which also distorted the images) with Tambellini’s wordless, vocal improvisation. In 1973, Tambellini added colour and further manipulated the original material using the Paik-Abe Synthesiser at WNET’s artists’ television lab in New York.
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