Black Matters

Black TV is the title of Tambellini’s best-known videographic film, which is part of a large intermedia project about American television. Compiled from filmed television news programs and personal experimental videotapes, Black TV has been seen in many versions during the four-year period in which Tambellini constantly re-edited it (1964-68).

To the sound of a heartbeat and made entirely without the use of a camera, this film projects abstract forms and illuminations on a night-black background and suggests as Tambellini says, “seed black, seed black, sperm black, sperm black.”

Produced by WGBH-TV in Boston, the Medium Is the Medium is one of the earliest and most prescient examples of the collaboration between public television and the emerging field of video art in the U.S. WGBH commissioned artists — Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini — to create original works for broadcast television. Their works explored the parameters of the new medium, from image processing and interactivity to video dance and sculpture.

Through the uses of kinescope, video, multimedia, and direct painting on film, an impression is gained of the frantic action of protoplasm under a microscope where an imaginative viewer may see the genesis of it all. – Grove Press Film Catalog

This videotape was originally made in the television studio in Rochester, NY on a 2-inch Quad broadcast tape in 1969 with a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts as part of a program series which was produced and aired by New York State Educational Television. I created a live event in the television studio using an urban classroom of children and my films and videos. The sound was the children’s spontaneous songs mixed with the repeated countdown of a rocket launching; the conversation between the astronauts and Mission Control and U.S. troops engaged in battle in the Vietnam War. This tape is shown as a non-scripted improvisation. The studio environment and the children were bombarded by media.

Beginning in 1965 with Black Is, Tambellini launched a series of politically charged experimental films that explore the expressive possibilities of black as a dominant color and idea. For the most part Tambellini’s seven “black films” are made without the use of a camera but rather by carefully manipulating the film itself by scorching, scratching, painting and treating the film stock as a type of sculptural and painterly medium.

This film, like an action painting by Franz Kline, is a rising crescendo of abstract images. Rapid cuts of white forms on a black background supplemented by an equally abstract soundtrack give the impression of a bombardment in celestial space or on a battlefield where cannons fire on an unseen enemy in the night.

Often cited as the first television program made by artists, "Black Gate Cologne" is a live event involving films, light objects and the participation of the studio audience, comprised of footage from two consecutive 45-minute broadcasts with different audiences filmed at the WDR "Electronic Studio' in Cologne, Germany.

Documentation of Sonia Landy Sheridan and Aldo Tambellini in conversation with Bruce Posner.

A high-contrast spiraling white light [which] shimmers, radiates, contracts, twists in orgasmic ecstasy, dwindles to nothing, and blazes forth again on the black video field.

It was difficult to find labs where I could make copies of my first tape; however, I found a place near LaGuardia Airport called Video Flight. They agreed to copy my tape. And while they were doing this I saw test patterns and other electronic images on the monitors that excited me. I spoke with the young engineers and decided to collaborate with them, returning to make a second tape of the electronic images. This manipulation of the test patterns became my second tape. The sound heard on the tape was from an oscilloscope, which I controlled, and through the sound I manipulated the images; later in the tape there is the sound of my own voice improvising as I reacted to the images. In 1973, Public Television in New York City, Channel 13, opened a new television lab and gave some artists access to it. The 55-minute black and white tape from 1966 described above was reprocessed in 1973 at Channel 13 using the Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer; thus the title 6673.

Tambellini here focuses on contemporary life in a black community. The extra, the “X” of Black Plus X, is a filmic device by which a black person is instantaneously turned white by the mere projection of the negative image. The time is summer, and the place is an oceanside amusement park where black children are playing in the surf and enjoying the rides, quite oblivious to Tambellini’s tongue-in-cheek “solution” to the race problem.

Video by Aldo Tambellini.

7-inch reel, 1/2-inch videotape.

A study of light and real-time transmission.