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The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued. 2 vols. Edited by Kathy High, Sherry Miller Hocking, and Mona Jimenez. Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2014. Pp. xxv+638. $86.
As artists gained access to the technologies of television production in the 1960s and 1970s, many began to build their own tools for electronically processing analog video signals to produce novel visual effects. For many artists, the construction and use of mixers, keyers, colorizers, and scan processors became the basis for aesthetic and critical engagements with electronic technologies, as well as collaboration with engineers. This expansive book consists of forty-three chapters by thirty-one authors-most of them artists or curators, many of them also participants in this history- on the people and machines that made up video processing in the United States.
There is a growing interest among both art historians and historians of technology-exemplified in the recent work of Zabet Patterson and Matthew Wisnioski, to name only two scholars-in relationships between art and technology. This collection of essays, interviews, and primary source documents further demonstrates that the history of artists appropriating technologies is a...