Video Paintings – Ambient television, from video art to screensaver
/ May 4, 2009
Brian Eno founded the “Ambient” label in the 1970s, coining the term ‘ambient music’ to denote electronically generated, unobtrusive background sound for private or public spaces. To complement this sound, Eno also produced video works that translate the musical concept onto the visual plane. In analogy to ‘ambient music’, ‘ambient art’ evolved, and finally ‘ambient television’ and ‘ambient video art’.
With today’s omnipresent private and public display screens, and increasingly broad bandwidths for the transmission of image data, this development has now taken on a new dynamic. Large-format flat screens in particular, which can be hung like picture frames on the wall, open up a whole new set of possibilities for the reception of imagery and, in connection with high-definition technology, for image production as well. ‘Video paintings’ produced especially for flat screens might even be considered a whole new genre.
From its inception, “ambient music” has occupied an ambiguous position on the spectrum ranging from serious art to insipid “elevator music”. Erik Satie, for example, can be classified as belonging more to the realm of serious art. He composed music that he dubbed “Musique d’Ameublement” – i.e., music as part of the furniture. Rather than pushing itself to the foreground, this brand of music is meant to be a natural part of a room or an environment, serving merely to create a pleasant ambience. “Musique d’Ameublement” does not demand the focused attention of rapt listeners, but rather, according to Satie, reverberates through the space on equal terms with light or heat. But when “Musique d’Ameublement” premiered in a gallery in 1919, a slight problem was encountered: the visitors, although they were encouraged to continue talking, fell silent in order to passively listen to the music as they were accustomed to doing. The performance was hence a failure in Satie’s opinion, as his concept was unable to overcome people’s ingrained listening habits.
Functional background music also has a second, utterly different, wellspring. In 1922 former military man George Owen Squier patented a sound transmission process and founded the company Wired Radio, Inc. A few years later the firm changed its name to Muzak (Muzak = music + Kodak) – which would become a generic term for this type of music. In the 1930s Muzak supplied background music first for factories and then for restaurants and shops. In the early days, selected melodies and interpretations were used. Later, on the basis of targeted medical studies, highly specialized sound engineers at Muzak developed their own, cyclically programmed music designed for the manipulative stimulation of mind and body. Unlike Satie, the company was successful at its efforts, but just as controversial. Smithsonian Magazine for example, called Muzak “a stupefyingly bland, toxically pervasive form of unregulated air pollution, about as calming as the drone of a garbage compactor.”
When, many decades later, Brian Eno released “Ambient #1: Music for Airports” (Cologne, 1978), the first ‘ambient videos’ were already coming onto the US market as VHS tapes. At first they were offered only to hospitals and doctor’s offices, designed to serve as a kind of visual tranquilliser to relax and distract patients. But the reaction of the medical world was sceptical to disapproving. Unexpectedly, the home video market proved to be much more receptive to this new idea. A market niche that still exists today had been discovered. The motifs and content of the early ‘ambient videos’ on VHS are barely distinguishable from today’s high-definition variation: surfing, waterfalls, landscapes and virtual fireplaces ...
And the most popular subject of all is still the aquarium. Nam June Paik was possibly the first to come up with this idea in his TV installation “Video Fish” (1975). These days, thousands of fish tank videos can be found in every conceivable variation on all channels and media – on DVD, on YouTube or as screensaver.
The mass medium of television, for which ambient video was originally designed, has consistently snubbed it, only rarely granting artists air time. In defence of the medium, however, it must be mentioned that the on-screen fireplace actually debuted on public television in Germany in 1969 when, at the suggestion of and in association with Gerry Schum, the Cologne television station WDR showed the work “TV as a Fireplace” by Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets as its closing programme between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
In 1971 David Hall, the British artist who coined the term “time-based art”, was given permission to scatter ten two-minute “TV Interruptions” throughout the main programming on Scottish TV. One of these programme interruptions begins with an empty white screen into which a water tap is moved and then turned on. The water flows in real time into an (invisible) tank, until the water level exceeds the upper edge of the picture tube. This work playfully shows how the picture space in television is limited by the frame of the screen. David Hall’s short film interludes were not conceived as ‘ambient videos’, however. They were instead meant to get people to think about the medium by disrupting the flow of routine programming. With rare exceptions like this, a media-specific TV art was in fact never able to unfold within the medium itself.
Artistic works evolved instead outside the television mainstream, finding a forum in the clubs frequented by the music scene – from the psychedelic light shows and liquid projections using old-school overhead projectors in the 1970s to the digital, computer-controlled projections on today’s electronic music scene. As a visual contribution to this atmosphere, these works range from up-tempo, abstract sound visualizations on the dance floor to meditative video wallpapers in the chill-out zone.
Ambient television – Muzak for the eyes? Or art?
The way we watch television has changed drastically during the past few decades. The days when the whole family gathered before the television as if around a campfire are long gone. The TV set in the living room has become simply part of the furniture. In some households the ‘telly’ sometimes runs the whole day without anyone devoting his undivided attention to the programme. In this sense, the ongoing flow of images and sound actually works the way Erik Satie envisioned for his “furniture music”. However, today’s programming is hardly conducive to creating a pleasant ambience in the rooms under its sway. This is due above all to the constant rapid changes in picture and sound that scream for viewer’s attention, trying to glue people to the screen. Particularly disrupting are the effects of acoustic branding and the ‘wake-up calls’ thrown in by the programmers – from jingle to high-frequency sound logos. Stress dramaturgies and high tempos, still appreciated years ago in music television, are today simply annoying.
The advent of high-resolution flat screens, hung on the wall like picture frames, are also changing display and viewing habits. Not as prominent and bulky as classic television sets, the large-format flat panels not only cut a fine figure in the living room, but are also suitable for hotel lobbies, clubs, spas, galleries and smaller public spaces. Since these displays are as a rule ‘HD ready’, they also open up new dimensions in content and quality.
A small market offering programming specifically designed for flat screens has already grown up. It’s becoming evident, however, that commercial offers in the ambient sector are merely carrying on the tradition of kitsch using different, digital, means – from living room paintings with bellowing stags to lava lamps and sunsets. All that’s changed is the style, to one geared more to an esoterically inclined audience. Instead of saturated colours, pastel tones dominate, and replacing catchy melodies and rhythms are extremely slowed down, electronic tone sequences. One example among many can be viewed here: colorcalm
And here is a somewhat more discriminating offering from Detour Design
Detour offers a collection of moving floral wallpapers along with abstract motifs, such as a selection of computer-generated Op Art works. The borderline between kitsch, arts & crafts and fine art is thus as elastic and fluid in this field as are the computer-generated images and sounds. But there are other examples in which flat screens become the carriers of serious artworks. With video paintings, ambient television has already given birth to its own genre.
Example: Video paintings in the Open Gallery
The British Open Gallery devotes itself exclusively to fine art, specializing in video painting as a genre in its own right, consisting of video works that are hung on the wall just like a painting. The artists in the Open Gallery’s collection, who include Sarah Turner, Tina Keane and William Raban, usually have a background in experimental and documentary film, and some of them come from short film.
The works in the gallery’s collection are part of a specific genre to the extent that they stay within certain boundaries with respect to recording procedures and motifs – while exhibiting very diverse, personal styles. Unlike computer-generated video paintings, these are pictures taken with a camera. Most works consist of a single shot taken with a stationary, immobile camera. The motifs are usually landscapes with subtle movements depicted in real time, a kind of modern British landscape painting – contemplative, non-narrative and silent like a ‘real’ painting.
Unique to the Open Gallery is that the works are offered for sale as objects only in conjunction with displays and software specially developed for them. Customers can have the displays tailored to their needs, but must purchase the pictures, so to speak, with frame. Any reproduction – as with DVDs – is therefore ruled out. These are thus original multiples.
Computer-generated video paintings
A different strategy has been adopted by the Canadian artist duo NomIg, who perform live, curate programmes and also make video paintings. They are crossover artists in every sense of the term. In their works they apply the strategies of musical composition and sound technology on the visual plane of the digital video. The aim is to create a symbiosis of sight and sound without privileging the one or the other level. NomIg’s ambient videos are usually abstract; even when they seem realistic, they are not representational or camera pictures but always computer-generated images, i.e. actually animations.
The video paintings that NomIg likewise creates exploit the specific technical possibilities and spatial conditions offered by (conventional) digital flat screens. They do not aim to attract attention to themselves but rather exercise their appeal unobtrusively, in the background. Just like real paintings, these video paintings are silent. There is movement, but it is so slow as to be barely perceptible. On the threshold to the static picture, a passing glance is unable to detect any movement. The animation work is done partly manually and in other cases with the help of computer programmes written expressly for this purpose. For one of their video paintings (“untitled”) NomIg stretched out 45 seconds of material to play 90 minutes long. Due to the high technical quality (HD 1080i) – and this is another specific property of video paintings for modern flat screens – these images have an extremely high resolution, a fine texture and a great deal of depth.
Ambient video art and IPTV
Along with distribution on DVD (mainly in Blue Ray format) or with the help of proprietary software on hard drives, video paintings and ambient videos are increasingly spreading through the Internet. As is to be expected, there are countless examples on video file-sharing platforms like YouTube, although these works are unsuitable for HD screens due to their low resolution and can at best serve to document an artist’s work. They are often teasers or outtakes, such as here, an excerpt from a work by the Hamburg VJ company Tranceanimation.
Vimeo also has its own channel for video paintings, along with the option of ordering HD videos on the Internet in what is in any case the much better 720p format.
“Souvenirs from Earth TV” – television for people who aren’t watching television
A whole new path is being taken by “Souvenirs from Earth TV” from Cologne (p.s. Cologne seems to be the secret capital of Ambient Video :-). “Souvenirs from Earth TV” has been on the air since October 2008, broadcasting video art and ambient video art in high resolution on a French IPTV network. Shows with titles such as “Strawberry Fields”, “Night on Earth – sensual dreamy sleepy strange colorful” or “A dry cool Place – postcards from planet earth” can be viewed around the clock. In addition to video art and video paintings in the narrower sense, avant-garde video clips and curated programmes are also shown.
The original idea behind “Souvenirs from Earth TV” (SFTE) was to offer content for those times when people are not actively watching television, filling what would otherwise be the switched-off, darkened screen on the wall with content. Managing director Marcus Kreiss and curator Alec Crichton believe that the increasingly widespread new flat screens can become private terminals of sorts for global video art. A home interface for changing exhibitions, artistic works and video paintings.
After a long lead-up time before the station went on the air, SFTE is now exploring multiple routes, selling DVDs and curating programmes for galleries, art spaces and festivals. With an office in Paris and a permanent screen set up in the bar of the Palais de Tokyo, SFTE is particularly active in France. This is the only place to date where SFTE is able to broadcast its programme on IPTV (via broadband from the Internet provider Freebox, on channel 129). In Germany there are higher licensing and legal broadcasting hurdles to overcome. Here the programme is only available on a few cable networks. In France, by contrast, SFTE already reaches 2.3 million households.
The shows produced by “Souvenirs from Earth TV” are silent – as befits the concept. However, an optional parallel non-synchronized stream of electronic music is offered to go with them. SFTE works with Electrolux for this purpose, who have created soundtracks in Germany for such shows as “Space Night” (featuring footage shot in space) for the Bavarian Broadcasting company.
SFTE is able to draw on an impressive pool of some 70 video artists and filmmakers for its programming. Among them are many video art pioneers represented in some cases by older works, as well as renowned artists such as Bill Viola. SFTE is not exclusively a platform for video art, however. Part of its programming consists of short documentaries from all over the world, which resemble concept videos made with webcams. Also included are the company’s own productions in its own inimitable style, which is just as different from classic video art as it is from the above-named video paintings.
The video paintings by “Souvenirs from Earth TV”, which run about 15 - 20 minutes, are notable for an extremely decelerated rhythm and an unobtrusive pictorial aesthetic. Unlike abstract computer-generated video paintings or documentary landscape pictures, the company’s productions are figurative and performative. They don’t have a plot, but instead feature anecdotal-narrative elements with a dramatic arc. The aesthetic recalls upscale advertisements – and they are surely conceived in part as calling cards for the firm. SFTE produces advertising videos – mostly in the high-end lifestyle sector – to finance its projects and offers companies opportunities for product placement in video art. The future of the station will depend on achieving success in these commercial ventures, because “Souvenirs from Earth TV” is broadcast free of charge, without commercial breaks!
At first glance, ambient television and video paintings seem to resemble a whole range of familiar formats such as screen savers for the computer, loops in video art exhibitions or VJ shows in the music scene. Despite echoes of existing formats, though, they differ considerably from, for example, television, cinema or video installations – as regards both their aesthetic form and their reception as media. The most convincing concepts and projects work closely with the specific qualities of flat, large-format displays, with their scale and spatial surroundings and the reception situation. Common features include high visual resolution relative to the dimension of the displays, working with the specific technical and aesthetic possibilities available for creating imagery with regard to settings, pictorial depth or camera movements, and other classical parameters. Also specific to these works is their oscillation between moving image and still. This is joined by the optional absence of speech and sound and the option for camera-less pictures. Upon closer examination, therefore, it does not seem out of place to claim that video paintings on HD flat screens now constitute their own media-specific visual form, heralding the emergence of a new genre.
Reinhard W. Wolf
Some links:
„Ambient Set“ von Tranceanimation
„Koi“ von TransLumen
Fish Tank Screen Saver von Dream Aquarium
Bahn TV, Deutsche Bundesbahn
Ambient Corporate Documentary, Schweiz
ArtDisplay, Paris
Colorcalm, Los Angeles
Eventclip Video, Karlsruhe
Plastic TV, Paris/London
Tee la Novela, Berlin