Electronics Faire: Analog Video Feedback

This workshop serves as a hands-on introduction to the artform and many possible permutations of analog video feedback. We will begin the session with a brief discussion of analog video, technical considerations, and its place in the continuum of electronic art. The main interactive and hands-on portion of the workshop will involve walking participants through the art of video feedback at three different stations. These stations will make use of analog cameras, cathode ray television, and video mixers. We will focus on the use of accessible, cheap, and easily available equipment to achieve various classic aesthetics and forms in video art. The workshop will conclude with a demonstration and discussion of how to interface analog video rigs with modern digital tools (capture cards, laptops, scalers, rescanning, etc), how to record your work, and how to play it back in live or installation contexts. Participants will also have the opportunity to work with breadboarded circuits in the form of the ‘dirty mixer’ which can be easily replicated and modified. DIY dirty mixer kits will be available as takeaways for participants.

About the Instructors:

Grant Bouvier is an electronic artist and composer from Philadelphia whose sound and video work focuses on dead media formats, glitches, weird circuits, analog whatever, and uncertainty. He seeks to subvert the computationality of the postdigital world to reveal the bizarre and eerie states that exist beneath its glossy surface. The future will be like the past, only different.

Justin Leggett is an interdisciplinary artist and event producer in Philadelphia. His focuses include the juxtaposition of lo-fi and hi-fi media formats, immersive projections, and the documentation of club culture. His work consistently features the resampling of personal vignettes, primarily through deejaying, analog video signal processing, and the use of scanners. Justin organizes the Philadelphia event series High Beam. High Beam is an immersive electronic music party that has featured projection mapping, thermal imaging, alternative materials as decor, and expansive food/drink menus.