Another posting in response to posts by Tom Sherman and others, on Tom’s website, on May 18.
I’ve noted above the divisions between film and video that I noticed from the beginning of consumer video technology (I put this at the arrival of video porta paks from Japan in the early 1970s). At that time, no one saw video at Anthology Film Archives, and it was well over a decade before I saw it at the SF Cinematheque, either.
But what excited me in the mid 1980s was the introduction of two technologies: interactive video disc (analog) and Truevision’s “Targa” video graphic card.
The Targa card took analog video input and output RGB analog video synched with a digital overlay. In 1985 I started a company with old friends and new, integrating hardware and software to produce interactive marketing systems using videodiscs, touchscreens, and Targa boards. By 1987 I’d learned enough C programming to make my own authoring and performance system that also used analog, interactive video discs, computers, Targa boards, and video screens. I called it “Living Cinema”.
My goal with Living Cinema was to create cinema in real time. It wasn’t film, and it was both analog and digital. It had prerecorded elements, but also real-time elements. And the aesthetics reached both into film and video history (as well as music and other audio histories). If you’re interested, some samples are archived here: https://www.robertedgar.com/cinema-performance/
The thing is, at the moment when the personal computer appeared, there was a period of time when the analog and digital smeared into each other.
A couple of years later, I was at Commodore working with Amigas when the Video Toaster was released. Another hybrid, but one that landed more solidly in the video editing studio.
If you look back to the writings of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, you find that his concept of montage overlapped his concept (and practice) of writing. He didn’t want to write linearly, he wanted to create a “circular book” where words and texts had multiple links to other words and texts. This is like a big video disc, just awaiting the cinematographer/viewer to leap from shot to shot, frame to frame. Thus Living Cinema. And thus hypertext: just below is a long URL that is a hypertext link to my 1986 article on this subject–preceding the web.
Sorry about all the self-referencing, but I’ve been navigating down these exact paths since I was at Synapse… film/video, analog/digital, art/business, and preconstructed/live performance. And all of these paths I find fecund… not academic really, but because when you mess them all up they provide a lot of juicy play… between the lines.