Opening event for Videospace, gallery exhibition and video series, Thursday, September 14 at 6 p.m. in the museum's Gallery 6, including David Kwan and Dean Santomieri Performance!Lost to the white noise of media history, the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) was an unusual artists' research center tenuously aligned with San Francisco's public television station, KQED. Initiated in 1967, the NCET sought an answer to a simple but hitherto overlooked question: Can artists work with the medium of television? Under the guidance of director Brice Howard, the NCET developed the concept of "videospace," an expressive realm that shunned the conventions of theater and cinema. In videospace, the electron served as raw material, and the monitor's surface of phosphors as a lively canvas. Over the NCET's eight-year history, a groundbreaking body of works was completed that redirected video technology toward unconventional visual modes. Early works such as William Jones's Graham Tape Delay, Richard Felciano's Linearity, and Joanne Kyger's Descartes exemplified the preoccupation with performative disciplines-poetry, dance, music-and image manipulation. The second wave of works stressed a more direct immersion in the primal materials of the medium. Rigorous, often elegant image-processing characterized such creations as Stephen Beck's Cosmic Portal, Willard Rosenquist's Lostine, and Don Hallock and William Roarty's Untitled.After two years of prying, poking, and preserving, over forty videoworks from the National Center for Experiments in Television have been added to the PFA Collection. These four screenings offer an eye-opening glimpse of the NCET's pioneering efforts to forge a new kind of television.Be sure to visit Videospace in Gallery 6 of the Berkeley Art Museum, September 14 through November 15. This gallery component (further described in the BAM/PFA magazine, Look) features several viewing stations, artifacts from the NCET including the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer, and The Videola, a large-scale prismatic cone that displays kaleidoscopic video images.Videospace is curated by Steve Seid, PFA Video Curator, and Maria Troy, Associate Curator, The Wexner Center for the Arts.Videospace was funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Special thanks to all the artists, and especially to Stephen Beck for his generous advice, and to David Dowe for having rescued many of these videotapes.Wednesday September 13, 2000
