Intermedia Systems Corporation was an American media technology company, co-founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969 by Gerd Stern and Michael Callahan. Stern and Callahan had been members of the media art collective USCO in the 1960s when they had lived in Rockland County, New York. [1] Intermedia Systems Corporation produced multimedia art internationally during the 1970s. [2]
Gerd Stern was offered an Associate in Education faculty position at Harvard University by Harvard professor George Litwin, a former colleague of Timothy Leary's. Stern moved with Michael Callahan to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they used USCO equipment to begin their own company in cooperation with Litwin and other behavioral scientists affiliated with Harvard Business School. Stern and Callahan co-founded Intermedia Systems Corporation in 1969, the year the company handled some management and administrative details for the Woodstock festival. Intermedia Systems Corporation made pioneering hardware to control multi-channel audiovisual programming, and in the 1970s produced multimedia art internationally. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Intermedia Systems Corporation's approach to applied research in the arts was featured in Stewart Kranz’s 1974 anthology, Science and Technology in the Arts. Litwin stated in the book, “We are trying to use mixed media—multimedia technology—to create environments that have particular kinds of psychological effects." Stern explained that the interdisciplinary company conducted experiments, and existed in the space between psychology, business, and art. [5]
In 1974 Stern gave a talk on "the present state of communications systems and some possible directions for evolution," at a conference titled "Educational Communication Centers and the Television Arts." [6] The conference was coordinated by Gerald O'Grady, and held at the State University of New York in Albany. Grady was Director of the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York in Buffalo. [6] In addition to pioneers of public television experiments, other presenters included video artists Steina Vasulka, Woody Vasulka, and Ed Emshwiller, as well as composer Joel Chadabe. There was also a demonstration of one of Experimental Television Center's video synthesizers. [7]
Callahan worked at Harvard University from 1977 until 1994, at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. He and his wife Adrienne co-founded Museum Technology Source in 1986. The company, based in Massachusetts, initially made electronic devices that allowed museum patrons to use video and interactive exhibits. [3] [8]
Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying live or recorded images and sounds.
Dick Higgins was an American artist, composer, art theorist, poet, publisher, printmaker, and a co-founder of the Fluxus international artistic movement. Inspired by John Cage, Higgins was an early pioneer of electronic correspondence. Higgins coined the word intermedia to describe his artistic activities, defining it in a 1965 essay by the same name, published in the first number of the Something Else Newsletter. His most notable audio contributions include Danger Music scores and the Intermedia concept to describe the ineffable inter-disciplinary activities that became prevalent in the 1960s.
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his Intermedia column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was expanding consciousness. Youngblood gathered and expanded upon intermedia ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Over the years, intermedia has been used almost interchangeably with multi-media and more recently with the categories of digital media, technoetics, electronic media and post-conceptualism.
Electronic art is a form of art that makes use of electronic media. More broadly, it refers to technology and/or electronic media. It is related to information art, new media art, video art, digital art, interactive art, internet art, and electronic music. It is considered an outgrowth of conceptual art and systems art.
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization. In 1987 it moved to its current location.
Gary Hill is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1970s and 1980s, he in fact began working in metal sculpture in the late 1960s. Today he is best known for internationally exhibited installations and performance art, concerned as much with innovative language as with technology, and for continuing work in a broad range of media. His longtime work with intermedia explores an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. The recipient of many awards, his influential work has been exhibited in most major contemporary art museums worldwide.
STEIM was a center for research and development of new musical instruments in the electronic performing arts, located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Beginning in the 1970's, STEIM became known as a pioneering center for electronic music, where the specific context of electronic music was always strongly related to the physical and direct actions of a musician. In this tradition, STEIM supported artists in residence such as composers and performers, but also multimedia and video artists, helping them to develop setups which allowed for bespoke improvisation and performance with individually designed technology.
A video synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and "clean up and enhance" or "distort" live television camera imagery. The synthesizer creates a wide range of imagery through purely electronic manipulations. This imagery is visible within the output video signal when this signal is displayed. The output video signal can be viewed on a wide range of conventional video equipment, such as TV monitors, theater video projectors, computer displays, etc.
USCO was an American media art collective in the 1960s, founded by Gerd Stern, Michael Callahan, Steve Durkee, Judi Stern, and Barbara Durkee in New York. The name USCO is an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us. The collective was most active during the years 1964–66. USCO exhibited in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is considered a key link in the development of expanded cinema, visual music, installation art, multimedia, intermedia, and the Internet. In addition, USCO's strobe environments heralded new media art.
Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka are early pioneers of video art, and have been producing work since the early 1960s. The couple met in the early 1960s and moved to New York City in 1965, where they began showing video art at the Whitney Museum and founded The Kitchen in 1971. Steina and Woody both became Guggenheim fellows: Steina in 1976, and Woody in 1979.
Bohuslav "Woody" Vasulka (born Bohuslav Vašulka was one of the early pioneer video artist known for his solo work and collaboration with Steina Vasulka, his wife. The VASULKAs, as they are sometimes called, were experimenting since early 1960s with images, video tapes, computer graphics and Digital Video Effecter, a technique that was important for television programmes.
Michael Edmund Kolowich is a new media and internet content entrepreneur and documentary filmmaker. He is chief content officer of OpenExchange Inc. and is founding producer of DigiNovations, a digital multimedia production company in Acton, Massachusetts. He was founder and CEO of KnowledgeVision Systems Incorporated, which merged into OpenExchange in October, 2019. He was a partner at Bain & Company, chief marketing officer for Lotus Development Corporation, founding publisher and columnist for PC/Computing magazine, was founder and president of Ziff-Davis Interactive, served as president of AT&T New Media, was chairman, president and CEO of Individual Incorporated, and co-founded NewsEdge Corporation.
Amy Greenfield is a filmmaker and writer living in New York City. She is an originator of the cine-dance genre and a pioneer of experimental film and video.
Aldo Tambellini was an Italian-American artist. He pioneered electronic intermedia, and was a painter, sculptor, and poet. He died at age 90, in November 2020.
Experimental Television Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit electronic and media art center.
The Video Noisefields (1974) by Steina and Woody Vasulka is an important example of early formal and technical experimentation with analog video. The video runs for twelve minutes and five seconds and materially visualizes the deflected energy of the electronic signal. The video switches between two sources throughout, which creates a flickering effect. The imagery is based on the deflection of electronic signals, and a colorizer is used to add color variation. In the video, a circular form materializes on the screen and presents a division between inner and outer. A pulsation between the two is sustained throughout.
Jud Yalkut (;1938–2013) was an experimental film and video maker and intermedia artist.
Kathy Rae Huffman is an American curator, writer, producer, researcher, lecturer and expert for video and media art. Since the early 1980s, Huffman is said to have helped establish video and new media art, online and interactive art, installation and performance art in the visual arts world. She has curated, written about, and coordinated events for numerous international art institutes, consulted and juried for festivals and alternative arts organisations. Huffman not only introduced video and digital computer art to museum exhibitions, she also pioneered tirelessly to bring television channels and video artists together, in order to show video artworks on TV. From the early 1990s until 2014, Huffman was based in Europe, and embraced early net art and interactive online environments, a curatorial practice that continues. In 1997, she co-founded the Faces mailing list and online community for women working with art, gender and technology. Till today, Huffman is working in the US, in Canada and in Europe.
The Women's Interart Center was a New York City–based multidisciplinary arts organization conceived as an artists' collective in 1969 and formally delineated in 1970 under the auspices of Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts. In 1971, it found a permanent home on Manhattan's far West Side. A trailblazing women's alternative space, the Center provided exhibition and performance venues, workshops, and training courses for artists in a wide range of media for over four decades, with a focus on developing women's skills, bringing their work to the public, and fostering innovation. Prominent visual artists exhibited at the Interart Gallery, which in 1976 mounted the first ever festival of black women's film. The Interart Theatre—the Center's off-off-Broadway stage—and its productions won numerous honors. The Center hosted the Women's Video Festival for several years and ran a video program responsible for a variety of notable works.
Video Gallery SCAN was the first Japanese art gallery exclusively dedicated to the exhibition, preservation, and promotion of video art. Founded in 1980 by the female performance artist and fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, SCAN was an independent, artist-run organization situated in Tokyo's Harajuku neighborhood. While small in scale, the Gallery was a multifunctional space whose services included a video distribution service, video archive & library, screening studio, and exhibition area.