SEMANA 7 GOOD TIME IS REAL TIME

SATURDAY, 2 APRIL 2022, 9 PM 
farO presents GOOD TIME IS REAL TIME
Jane Veeder and Phil Morton

We're approaching the end of our 8 week programme.
To celebrate, we’ll pay tribute to two of our long time heroes, Jane Veeder and Phil Morton, and their collaborative work that pioneered the pre-digital adventure of analogue video.

We welcome everyone to join us for dinner, at 9pm, while playing three road trip video tapes, shot on the mythical path of America Deserta:

Program 7
32’21’’, 1978

Program 9 (Amateur TV)
30’56’’, 1979

and

Ha-Ha, Many Mammals, Leary, Jane’s Fall (unedited raw material)
12’30, 1980

Analogue video, processed on Sandin Image Processor, colour and b&w, sound
Transferred to digital by The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive
Shown with kind permission from the Archive and Jane Veeder

*

In the late seventies, during the summer breaks of the Chicago Art School, Jane Veeder and Phil Morton left their Electronic Visualization Center to travel out west, to work on a new type of art.

Phil had converted a General Motors van into 
a mobile video station, with customised windows and an awesome paint job. Equipped with two cases of video tape and the most advanced portable (though heavy) sound and video technology they migrated to the 
West towards the Sun. They snaked the trails of America Deserta, where nothing officially exists and everything can happen, set up camp and took day trips to their favourite places, collecting footage of a joyful journey that collapsed mythical with real time, under the surveillant eyes of cactuses, ongos and wild animals.

In the fall, they would drive back to Chicago, far from the desert where the years are counted by the thousands. In their video lab they would rework the material to recover real time. 
The footage was expanded adding other image sources and using Dan Sandin’s real time image processor and Tom Defanti’s ZGRASS graphics language, both fellow teachers at the same Art School. Sometimes this recycling process was edited into Video Programmes, presented at schools and media centres to introduce early video practitioners into their philosophy of the immediate through experimental electronic image visualisation. 

Sitting and contemplating the reverberating light going through the cathode ray tube was like sitting again under the desert sun. Like the Sun, the TV would become a model of 
an unmediated life source. With this 
live production-reception feedback network, they conceived video beyond a recording medium, as a system for interactive learning that would allow us to tune in through real-time communication. Theirs was an art programme for a social revolution, rewiring consciousness to be closer to desire and imagination.

Woody Vasulka’s interview with Morton and Veeder (1977) has great insights on the artists visionary project. It can be found at www.vasulka.org.
jonCates’ article Phil Morton and Jane Veeder: Our Desired Futures and the mobile Media Art lab (2014) speaks in more detail about the video programmes. Available at www.joncates.medium.com

*
Thank you
Jane Veeder, for kindly accepting this invitation.
jonCates, founder of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive, for the generous effort in making Morton’s work accessible under the free-distribution policy he stood for. The archive can be followed at www.copyitright.org

This session had the technical support of Borja Caro and Carlos Gaspar, and photo coverage by Pedro Alfacinha. The programme was printed by António Rijo de Carvalho and Gonçalo Duarte. Camping food by João Simões with the support of Conserveira de Lisboa. 
At the entrance, on display for the last time, the SLANT STEP.

Produced with the support of Fundo de Fomento Cultural Garantir Cultura–Compete 2020, República Portuguesa–Ministério da Cultura.

Programme (PDF)