TIME WAVES, a triptych

Verse/GrailersDAO/Singular

Time waves suggest video as a spiritual mediumship machine.

The three 1/1 video works (Red, Green, Blue) use analog + digital video synthesis as a spiritual modality to summon color and light theory to ordinals.

Traditionally, Spiritualist artists operated as “world receivers”, communing through seances to conjure cosmically informed stream-of-consciousness painting and drawing, guided by external messengers. Well and truly in the era of digital modalities, how does the Spiritual artist transcend the rigid [time] canvas of ordinal theory? Finding harmony with blockchain as a medium, each color spectrum of R-G-B and its relative frequency in GHz are inscribed into the correlating time stamped block, enabling the theory of colour and light to illuminate the Ordinals ecosystem, permanently.

There are parallels between traditional Spiritualist art mediums and video synthesis: both disciplines engage with the systematic interpretation of color systems, and the invoking of spirit or signal to automate the image. Spirit or machine, a dynamic feedback loop between source and artist is fostered. The process of creating abstract video “glitch” art, feedback loops in particular, questions the locus of control; where does the control of digital media lie: with the user or with the machine : with the artist or with the spirit? This notion hints at a form of control emanating from a generative external source, not dissimilar to the mediumistic drawings and paintings conceived by Spiritualist artists.

Inspired by electronics engineer Eric Siegal, pioneer of video synthesis devices from the late 1960’s, video synthesis devices were akin to a "psychic healing medium", believing in the karmic transmission of energy flow between video synthesis and viewer. Each of the three video artworks begin as coloured circles (R-G-B) baked into a vintage CRT screen via an early 90’s Panasonic vision mixer. Each circle is subject to recursive feedback loops between the vintage CRT and a JVC VHS-C camcorder, then captured to VHS tape. These are transferred digitally, and further abstracted using a digital slit scan process - a technique that engages with time displacement and temporality within the video time-image. In using the slit scan technique - a nod to its early forerunner and experimental video artist, John Whitney - viewers enter a time-warp of amorphous colour fields that constantly move toward the viewer giving the feeling of traveling through energy fields, conjuring a sense of journey and mysticism within each colour.

The symbolism of the circular sun, omnipresent throughout the video pieces in the center of the frame, is a pertinent reminder of the sun as the source of life and energy, and of course, the sun as light to refract the visible light spectrum of wavelengths we perceive as colour.

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Time Waves debuted as part of a Grailers DAO curated group exhibition on Verse Works, titled “All at Once”.

The exhibition is supported by a curatorial text, “Keeping Time”, penned by Kevin Buist, published on Outland.