Thursday, August 5, 2010

ton oursler, cont. -- not to synchronize - 0s & 70s video art





"That’s the weird thing, that John Cage was a teacher in a way. But then all my installations, from the beginning, that had more than one channel going were random. What determined that initially is that there was no way to synchronize decks unless you had a lot of money. With the entire budget of an installation like 1,200 bucks or something, it would take the whole amount to synchronize a couple of decks. Plus I felt it deadened the experience, so I never synched my installations, and that operated on the sound track as well as the visuals. So it’s something I’ve been doing since the early ’80s. Being a hyperactive person, I like that the sound track can always be different. I plug it in, which is really cool, because I’ve always made ridiculously long tracks, so the combinations are many and varied, and make long loops. I can walk into the space and be surprised by my own work, like, Oh that’s interesting what you’re coming up with today. It has a life of its own."

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