The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued (edited by Kathy High, Arts RPI, Sherry Miller Hocking, ETC, and Mona Jimenez, Moving Image Preservation, NYU) presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and 70s, and how that history of collaborations among inventors, designers and artists has affected contemporary tool-makers.

The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued presents stories of the development of early video tools and systems designed and built by artists and technologists during the late 1960s and ’70s. They examine the intersection of art and science and look at collaborations among inventors, designers, and artists trying to create new video tools to capture and manipulate images in fascinating and revolutionary ways. The contributors include “video pioneers” who have been active since the emergence of the aesthetic and technologists who continue to design, build, and hack media tools. The book also looks at contemporary toolmakers and the relationship between these new tools and the past. Video and media production is a growing area of interest in art and this collection will be an indispensable guide to its origins and its future.

It explores the impulses underlying tool creation, and the systems that help collaborations in art and science flourish. It looks at the social and economic matrices of support for designing tools as well as the organizational principles that encourage artists to use them. It explores the language artists used to describe the works they created with these tools – variously called electronic image-processing, video synthesis, video art – all flawed. It portrays an intensive study of the language of the video image by artists using these initial personal media-making tools. It presents models for understanding the tools and systems, and how they were used, and explores the possibilities of preserving them.

The Emergence of Video Processing Tools focuses on histories primarily from the Northeast of the United States, particularly New York and the state-wide development of its media arts community – including the funding support and the growth of university and artist centers. Becoming Unglued seeks to disconnect media instruments and their makers from old categories and definitions, to build awareness of the wealth of historical information about the early media instruments and to begin a dialogue about the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media artists and art practice. Along with ETC’s DVD sets ETC: Experimental Television Center 1969-2009 (set of 5 DVDs containing up to 70 artist video works, with 132 page catalogue) and Early Media Instruments (set of 10 DVDs with a ‘how-to’ review of the machines/tools at ETC), significant new resources have been created for educators, students, researchers and curators. The authors and editors drew extensively upon the archival and object collections of the Experimental Television Center (ETC), the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology (now at the Cinemateque Quebecoise) and personal collections of Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller Hocking and Steina Vasulka and Woody Vasulka, which include machines, technical documents, photos, correspondence, event publicity, audio/video interviews, and art works from the 1960s and 1970s and more. In addition, numerous contemporary interviews with tool designers, builders and users were conducted, providing additional documents, photographs, schematics and proposals.

The Emergence of Video Processing Tools marries an important historical story with contemporary practices. The book is a lens to view the phenomenon of tool development. What aspects of an historical moment encourage this kind of inventiveness? What drives artists to seek custom built instruments, and how are they used? What are the influences of cultural policy, technological innovation, and the socio-political environment on tool development and use?

The content of the issue will revolve around concepts that were critical in the formative years of video art, and remain resonant in 21st century digital culture. We will draw into the discussion new makers who have relationships with analog devices, either as part of their art practice or as an essential element of their conceptual base, as well as new media artists whose conceptual approaches are similar to those of early media practitioners.