video is a perceptual prosthetic - Centre for Art Tapes

VIDEO IS APERCEPTUALPROSTHETICTOM SHERMAN1

…THIS ESSAY HELPS US UNDERSTANDTHAT SOCIETAL EXPERIMENTATION WITHTECHNOLOGY OPERATES SIMULTANEOUS TOOUR SUBCONSCIOUS PERCEPTION, AND THATTECHNOCULTURAL EVOLUTION IS A RESULT OFTHIS EXPERIMENT.realities as described by Franklin.With this questioning of reality, comesthe question of what place technology andscience have in a discussion on humanperception. Franklin believes we shouldtrust the human experience as a method ofscientific experiment, and not give in to puredata when attempting an experiment on ourenvironment. She also states: “…it has oftenbeen assumed that science is a prerequisitefor technology. …However, today there is nohierarchical relationship between scienceand technology. Science is not the mother oftechnology. Science and technology todayhave parallel or side-by-side relationships;they stimulate and utilize each other.” Iftechnology is becoming more and more a realtime experience of our lives, and if science andtechnology operate side by side, then it wouldbe true that our minds are learning to operatewith science and technology cognitively.In Video is a Perceptual Prosthetic, Shermanspeaks on similar lines, however he posits thatthe use of video can affect cognitive behaviour;the way we see and look for “pattern”as it relates to our environment. In this case,we see that video is not only allowing us toexperience our lives at a pace as quick as reality,but it is actually affecting our perception asopposed to “expressing” it. Sherman’s essaypresents a needed alternative to the traditionalview of video used both as a documenting,and art-making tool, proving the evolution oftechnology and personal perception.Mireille BourgeoisDirector, Centre for Art TapesNOTES1. Three Texts on Video,” in Canadian Art(Toronto, Ontario), Volume 22, Number 1,Spring 2005.3

VIDEO IS APERCEPTUALPROSTHETICVIDEO IS A POWERFUL PERCEPTUALPROSTHETIC DEVICE.Perceptual prosthetics is a field usuallydefined by immersive, virtual reality systems;perceptual systems completely artificial andfunctioning beyond the sensitivities of ourbiological sensorium. Or the field describesperceptual systems used in remote sensing,such as sensing systems for robotic devices indeep sea or extraterrestrial exploration.This paper describes video as a less exotictechnological instrument and ubiquitousmedium that nonetheless alters the waywe experience the world. Video allows usto describe the world in a relatively highresolutionvisual and acoustic data stream,an audiovisual display at electronic speed.Video memory is written (recorded) electronically,instantly, at a speed exceeding our ownbioelectric perceptual apparatus. Video is acognitive accelerator; it enhances the speedof cognition. Our perception and experience(consciousness) lags behind the speed atwhich the video instrument translates theworld into digital electronic data and writes4this data into memory. The articulatenessand read-and-write speed of video makes themedium extremely powerful as a perceptualprosthetic.Perception is disambiguation. Perceptionis a process of sorting things out, of makingsense of the raw data we draw from our environmentthrough our senses. As we perceivethe world we discover patterns within thetorrents of data. Video, with its extremely fastread-and-write time and instant replay, assistsus in perceiving our immediate environments.In an era when common-sense ‘perception’ isprogrammed and force-fed into populationsby corporations and government agencies,the prosthesis of video is necessary to fill theabsence of independent, individual perceptualreasoning. The missing capacity forperceptual independence in our societies isthe result of increasing roboticism engineeredby commercial and political interests.Back in the mid-1960s, when low-cost,primitive video technology became availableto artists and independent media producers,it was evident that video was a very powerfulperceptual technology. The author of this text

THE CYBERNETIC, FEEDBACK-BASED MEDIUM OFVIDEO IS A MAGNIFICENT TOOL FOR LEARNING,MANUFACTURING MEMORY AND STIMULATINGEXPECTATION.considers artists as primary researchers inthe field of perception. Independent mediaproducers also control their productions fromcontent to aesthetics. Artists and innovativeindependent media producers practice thescience of video message design, a disciplinegoverned by multiple levels of perceptualawareness. Media literacy, like print literacy,is exemplified by those who can read andwrite in the medium or media of their choice.The electronic, nearly speed-of-light translationof the world into a video signal, and theinstant replay feature of the medium, altersthe perception of users in a dramatic fashion.Although electricity theoretically travels at thespeed-of-light, in electronic circuits electricityis slowed by capacitance and resistancewithin the circuit—half the speed-of-light is areliable estimate. Half light-speed (electric orelectronic speed) is vastly quicker than humansensory cognition.The capacity to replay recordings instantlyor to simply be able to see an instantlyfashioned depiction of the world on a videomonitor (essentially a doubling of the worldsimultaneous with an event or action in anenvironment in real time) is revolutionary.Perception is shaped in the cognitive processby learning, memory and expectation. Thecybernetic, feedback-based medium of videois a magnificent tool for learning, manufacturingmemory and stimulating expectation.Video erased the illusionary mission of narrativecinematic film as soon as the first videorecorders were turned on. Video’s longstandingclaim as a medium of reality is still basedon its instant, electronic, half light-speedtranscription and replay. Video technologyhas proliferated and is now nearly completelytransparent, i.e. common to the point ofinvisibility. Video in the 21st century no longerappears to be magic. This transparency doesnot mean its power to alter perception hasbeen diluted or diminished. Video, in its ubiquitousstate, now distributes its transformativeperceptual power across the broadest socialand physical environments.Video technology developed as a visualexpansion of audio tape recorders. Videotechnology did not arise from film-based motionpicture technology. Video evolved fromaudiotape, electromagnetic sound recorders.5

Film technology evolved from still photography,where filmstrips were made with motionpicture cameras as sequences of images were‘burned’ into the medium of photochemicalfilm. The celluloid-based motion picturewas first silent and then had sound added asa separate technological component. Withvideo, moving visual images and synchronoussound were recorded simultaneously, literallyon the same medium, initially as analog electronicsignals recorded onto magnetic tape.The first video recorders were analogelectronic machines. The audio/visual (AV)machines of analog video were the offspringof television technologies. Television wasfundamentally a centralized form of video,but focused on the transmission of image andsound via high frequency radio and eventuallycable. The AV techniques of television, oncethe exclusive domain of corporate broadcasters,were eventually made available to individualsand media cooperatives through thedevelopment of low-cost video technologies.With this devolution of television (horizontalversus vertical technological development),a grassroots perceptual revolution began inearnest.Artists and independent media producersattempted to start a revolution, but engineersand major equipment manufacturers like Sony(with their ‘prosumer’ strategies, serving andcreating professional consumers, begun inTom Sherman on the cover of Videoby Artists, published by Art Metropole(Toronto), 1976.6

the early 1980s) were ultimately successful inturning the media environment upside down.Artists and independent media producershad a vision of a world where the productionand distribution of video data would be in thehands of everyone. Early in the 21st centuryvideo transmission is not confined to the topdown,one-to-many communications modelof television. We now live in a one-to-one,many-to-many transceiver culture.Marshall McLuhan, the literary historianand media environmentalist extraordinaire,once said that the greatest invention of the20th century was the instant replay. McLuhanwas fully aware of the groundbreaking workof Norbert Wiener, resulting in the birth ofthe field of cybernetics, the science of controlthrough feedback. McLuhan understood theunparalleled cultural acceleration that wouldoccur through feedback at electronic speedvery early. Artists and independent media producerssimultaneously understood the powerof video through their hands-on work withvideo systems. Video magnified the powerof learning for all those who used it. Videomemory permitted the quick objectification ofexperience and established aroused expectationsas automated pre-perception (again,video can be seen to ‘perceive’ and transcribefaster than bioelectric human perception)and with its transmission and transcription ofreality to low-cost memory, a new era in theexchange of data, the sharing of experience,was initiated. We literally chase video recordingscognitively while they are being made.Video thus speeds up cognition, the recognitionof pattern, and assists us in distinguishinginformation, those differences that make a difference,from massive fields of data. The videoinstrument lures us to experience the worldwith electronic speed and machine-enhancedfocus.Other prior media technologies had suchcataclysmic impacts. Photography, phonography(music recording), film, radio andtelephony, were, and continue to be, huge,transformative technologies. Photography,born in the mid-19th century, became andremained the people’s personal archival mediumthroughout in the 20th century. Film andcinematic storytelling were the predominantcultural form of the 20th century. Televisionswept through technologically advancedsocieties reaching levels of saturation at anunprecedented speed in the late 1940s, earlyto mid-1950s. But video was the first accessibleelectronic audio/visual technology.Video was the beginning of the devolution oftelevision. Television had provided access tohuge audiences for corporate broadcasters ina rigid one-to-many, top-down communicationsstructure. Video was a decentralized,off-air, audio/visual technology. It allows the‘reading and writing’ of video data and in itsubiquitous presence and utility, facilitates amassive dispersal of video data, encouragingthe development of multiple points of viewand the ‘banking’ (in memory) and exchangeof same.Video exceeds the influence of photography,phonography, telephony, radio and filmbecause of its real time audio/visual sensorybase. Video ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ the way we doas a species, engaging the senses of sight andhearing, describing actions and environmentsin visual and acoustic space simultaneously,in real time, in the exact same time it takesthings to happen outside the domain of video.Video engages the two primary ‘windows’ ofour sensorium and also resonates with oursenses of time and balance. While it is truethat video is no less synthetic a reality thanphotography, phonography, film, telephony,radio or television, we perceive the immediatesonic and visual display of video as an augmented,enhanced reality, not as a mediated,7

more obviously displaced depiction of reality.Video seems very real, indeed.A lot has happened since the late 1960sand early 1970s. Video is no longer exotic.Besides becoming ordinary and common(transparent), video has been engulfed bya flood of so-called ‘new media.’ The digitaltransformation of all analog technologies,begun in the early 1980s, has permitted theconvergence of previously discrete technologiesto the extent that now our smart phonesare jukeboxes, photographic cameras, movietheatres, text generators, teletype machinesand video transceivers. And yes, we can talkon our mobile phones. Wireless telephony isradio.Video as a technology and medium is on itsascent, nearly fifty years after its emergencein the mid-1960s. Digital video simulates all ofthe principle qualities of analog video, withoutthe signal degradation inherent in analogvideo postproduction, distribution and exhibition.The proliferation of video productiontools, the ‘digital SLR revolution’ and the useof point and shoot still cameras and mobilephones as video camcorders have put videoproduction capabilities into an unprecedentednumber of hands. Webcams and the use ofteleconferencing technologies like Skype haveushered in the long anticipated picture-phoneor videophone.Video, as a perceptual instrument, is mosteffectively used as a process-based technologicaldevice, not as a tool for producing finishedworks. Video is an instrument for examining afield of data in real time. It is a tool for discoveringinformation, not making it.When video became an accessible technologyin the late 1960s with the introductionof portable ½-inch analog tape machines, itwas a primitive audio/visual technology thatcould not compete with other more advancedtechnological media in terms of resolution ofimage and sound. It paled in comparison with16 or 35mm film or photography in terms ofimage resolution. In other words, video didnot do a very good job in representing theworld in high fidelity. Photochemical mediawere very mature when video was born. Whenone looked and listened to a video recording,he or she saw the medium in its opacity andinitially it was not a pretty sight. The imageThe Art Style Computer Processing System was presentedas a text-based video art work titled “TheoreticalTelevision” in 1977. Still from “Theoretical Television,”Tom Sherman, video, 28 minutes, 1977.8Tom Sherman, as he appeared in “Theoretical Television”in 1977. Still from “Theoretical Television,” Tom Sherman,video, 28 minutes, 1977.

networks. The cybernetic potential of electronic,grassroots media was established withprocess-based video.Once the capital cost of video productionequipment is secured, producing videorecordings is inexpensive and unrestrictive. Inthe earliest days videotape stock cost twentyor thirty dollars a tape or cassette. Video purists,from the birth of the medium, were notobsessed with archiving their quickly growinglibraries of video recordings, but insteadrecycled videotape by recording repeatedlyover previous recordings and reusing thevideotape until it literary wore out, becomingnoisy to the point of dysfunction.The technological evolution of video hasbeen breathtaking. Consumer level ½-inchreel-to-reel recorders gave way to VHS and¾-inch U-matic cassettes and then 8mm andHi8 formats and the complete transformationto digital video, including DV cassettesand HDV and solid-state memory. Cassettesgave way to DVDs and USB keys and on-linedistribution, the sharing of video files via theinternet. Professional level video equipmenthas evolved even more quickly and is extremelycomplex in terms of formats and compatibility.Individuals and organizations are left withgenerations of large libraries of recordingsthey cannot play. Technological obsolescencehas reemphasized the process orientationof the video medium. The video mediumremains unstable and finished video productionsmust be constantly updated format-wiseto continue to function decades in advance.Analog video, the precursor to digitalvideo, had its own inherent problems with theidea of product. Analog video degraded in thepostproduction process as there was an inherentdegeneration of signal integrity whenrecordings were copied. Dubs from dubs becamevery noisy quickly. This is why VHS dubslook so soft and blurry and sound muddy andtake on hiss. The primary advantage of digitalvideo is the capacity for reproducing recordingsad infinitum without introducing noise.Digital video is also unlimited theoretically interms of image resolution in camcorders. Highdefinition video (HDV) is currently definedas 1280 (width) x 720 (height) pixels or 1920x 1080 or as 2048 x 1536 (2K) or as 4096 x3072 (4K). It is hard to imagine photochemicalWE LITERALLY CHASE VIDEO RECORDINGSCOGNITIVELY WHILE THEY ARE BEING MADE.VIDEO THUS SPEEDS UP COGNITION, THERECOGNITION OF PATTERN, AND ASSISTS US INDISTINGUISHING INFORMATION FROM MASSIVEFIELDS OF DATA.10

forded by the lens and frequency spectrum ofthe microphones and no matter how resolutethe image and sound, the video version of theworld is not yet as packed with data as theworld defined by our unaided eyes and ears.The full fidelity of our natural eyesight andhearing is not possible in a video recording,but in this way the video description offers asecond, paradoxically more essential versionof the world, an other version where figuregroundrelationships are enhanced, wherelight is seen differently by the camcorder’schips and acoustic space is redefined by howthe camcorder ‘hears.’ We are aware of thesedifferences as we compare our perceptionwith that of the machine through its LCDscreen in real time.In the process of replay, a video recordingis examined in the exact time it took to be recorded,in another definition of real time. Thismemory of events and space/time is preciseto the millisecond, beyond the capacity of ourbiological, cerebral sense of memory. Video isan audio-visual clock with a machine-precise,literal sense of what happened. It goes beyondthe photographic image in evoking memory.It is full motion, concrete memory. This fullformmemory is apparent in the viewfinder orside mounted LCD-monitor and headphonesat the moment the video recording is beingmade. Then it is always surprising what onediscovers in multiple passes of a video recording.Things are noticed that were not seen atthe time of recording and different aspects ofthe recorded material rise and recede as thematerial is reexamined as long as the data is ofinterest for the observer.I have been reluctant to use the wordinformation in describing video recordings,because data is a better word for characterizingthe video display. The world is translatedby our sensorium, the sensory receptorsof our body, into bioelectrical data that weprocess in our brains. We translate this datainto information in our consciousness, theconscious awareness of the data that makesup our environment. Gregory Bateson, thegreat anthropologist, psychologist and cognitivetheorist, said that information is any differencethat makes a difference. For instance,we don’t pay much attention to temperatureunless to we are too cold or hot. When theTom Sherman and Bernhard Loibner perform as NerveTheory at Elektra in Montreal, November 10, 2001. Stillfrom “The Disconnection Machine,” Nerve Theory (TomSherman and Bernhard Loibner), multimedia performance,November 10, 2001.12Still image from “Talking to Nature,” Tom Sherman,video, 3 minutes, 2002.

temperature is comfortable, it is data and notan issue. An awareness that one is ‘freezingto death’ or ‘boiling’ transforms temperaturedata into information. The world as a fieldof data becomes information as differencesbecome significant. A video display is part ofour overall environment, but of course it differsfrom a chair we sit in, the hair on our arms,or an automobile we drive. A video recordingdoes not necessarily display data that ismore significant than any other thing we mayexperience. Video data may in fact be far lesssignificant than full-range physical data perceivedby our sensorium. But the comparativedifferences between video depictions of theworld and the unmediated world inherentlyyield insights into the perceptual process.When we examine the world using theperceptual prosthetic of video, that technologythat permits us to see and hear ourenvironment as an electronic, simultaneoussecond world, in real time, we are involved inan altered state of consciousness. Video is acybernetic technology, providing feedbackto our conscious negotiation of reality. Webecome cyborgs, person-machine interfaces.Our consciousness is altered as we becomeperceptual systems in tandem with videomachines. We see and hear differently in sucha sensual duality. We become aware of ourperceptual processes when we see throughvideo frames and listen through microphones.We experience the world as creatures involvedin the process of perception while in partnershipwith video. We focus on different thingsbecause we are wielding camcorders. We seeand listen differently as videographers. Webecome aware of our experiences throughinstant replay. We are intoxicated by ourmachine-assisted powers of description.Video technology collapses perception(sensing), experience (being consciouslyaware of perception) and description (thearticulation of perception/experience intomemory) in milliseconds. Whereas our bioelectricconsciousness is already digesting ourenvironment and actions in a slight delay (weare aware of the words someone is speakingto us milliseconds after we actually hearthose words being spoken), video actuallysenses and records environments and eventsfaster than we can sense (perceive) them in13

technologically unaided perception. Previousto photochemical and electronic perceptualtechnologies our species had to describe whatwe perceived and experienced in drawingsand the spoken and written word. We weredescribing and feeding back what we foundsignificantly different at a much slower rateof interaction. We chase video’s incredibleelectronic perceptual speed as the humanflesh and blood component in a dynamiccyborgian relationship. We are attracted tovideo recordings because of their razor-thininterval between sensing and description andthe posthuman precision of video memory.Using video technology to negotiate theworld is a perceptual research methodology.The process of sensing and describing theworld through video is a form of research.Whereas telescopes are used to examine theplanets and stars, and microscopes microorganisms,video is employed to study the worldas it is perceived. In a way it is a philosophicalmedium. The questions raised by consciousnessitself are amplified by an awarenessgenerated by video. Video highlights theexperience of witnessing the environmentand events. It makes us self-conscious ofwhat we are interested in and why. It helps usMcLuhan iPhone cropped.14

understand how we see and hear and it buildsawareness through replay, the review andrepeat performance of memory. It shapes ourperception of reality through the cyberneticprocess of feedback and the refreshing ofperception through replay. In a way, it is thesupreme technology for learning how onesees, hears and thinks. It is forward looking asit transforms the past into the present. Instantvideo feedback has flattened our sense of history(a video document of something that occurredin the 1960s feels like it was recordedthe morning it is being viewed, even nearlyfifty years later) and video can predict thefuture by existing as it does so magnificentlyin the present.I mentioned earlier that video was bornduring the 1960s, when conceptual art andpolitical activism were widespread. Video thenwas the new technology and utopian visionswere associated with the inevitable collapseof mass media like television, commercialcinema and newspapers. Nearly fifty yearslater we live in a technological culture definedby the internet, where anyone with access tobasic media tools and networks can have theirown ‘television channel’ and publish theirwriting and digital multimedia through blogs.Video messages and messages in many othermedia are exchanged through mobile phonesand personal digital ‘assistants.’ Social mediaare essentially photography and video fileexchange sites.Today video proliferates at phenomenalspeed, affecting perception wherever it isemployed to cultural advantage. Video is nowubiquitous and transparent, some would evensay it is common and mundane. People focuson the things that video depicts, not on theway it is transforming perception. Contentis king in an era characterized by the abundanceof video data. Form becomes formulaic,especially when the instruments of productionconverge into all-purpose devices like ‘smart’phones. As digital SLRs and point-and-shootcameras and phones record video, videocamcorder sales plummet.Once it was important for artists andindependent media producers to attack themonolith of television and other mass mediaoutlets because they were being used to engineersocial and political conformity. CreativityVIDEO IS AN INSTRUMENT FOR EXAMINING AFIELD OF DATA IN REAL TIME. IT IS A TOOL FORDISCOVERING INFORMATION, NOT MAKING IT.15