My main purpose in interviewing these artists was to expose some observations made by artists about the nature of technology and performance in art. All of the artists work with video and other technology in a variety of performance situations. I was interested in asking questions about what they feel is the role of the performer, the audience and the impact of the technology itself on performance and the public¼s perception of performance. The interviews deal primarily with these issues while providing some background on the artists and their work within this context. They are not comprehensive biographical interviews.
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Carol
Goss worked in film, television and theater prior to making video art
at the Experimental Television Center
and doing live video synthesis performances in New York City and San Francisco
in the 1970s. She co-founded Improvising Artists
Records & Video in 1974, credited with making the first 'music video'. She
has exhibited internationally as well as lectured on visual perception and symbolic
abstraction at Columbia University and Selcuk
Universities in Turkey. Her work in abstract and non-narrative forms led her to
found the Not Still Art Festival in 1996, an annual event in the Cooperstown region,
which has received support from the Decentralization Program of the New
York State Council on the Arts, from Media Alliance's Media Action Grant program
and Presentation Funds.
Walter
Wright's background is in architecture. He started creating electronic
images and sound at the University of Waterloo
in 1966. He has been a video animator, an associate director at the Kitchen, artist-in
residence at the Experimental Television Center, a teacher, a programmer, and
an illegal alien. He is presently a legal alien and designs computer games for
GameFX in Arlington, MA.
Eric Rosenzweig
comes from a musical background. He has performed with many musical groups in
Europe and Canada. He became interested in non-linear media and performance and
worked for a brief period with the filmmaker and optical printing guru Mark Nugent
on collaborative music and film performances. He later created the performance
and installation group Screen with
Willy LeMaitre and Phil Deborsky in 1993. Screen creates large scale performances
and installations which both utilize and react to technology and its effects upon
the human condition. Some of Screen's more recent projects include "Fleabotics,"
a series of projects concerned with reanimating detritus and creating self-perpetuating
animations of inanimate objects.
Nancy Meli Walker studied fashion design before becoming interested in video art. While in Japan, she learned about stained glass and cast glass and started making cast glass TV sculptures. In her initial work she used random commercial television signal, but quickly became interested in video technology and she now focuses entirely on video. She met Benton Bainbridge in New York in the early 1990's and he invited her to join up with 77Hz. Since then nancy and Benton have worked together in two other collaborative groups, The Poool and NNeng, performing yearly and monthly (respectively).
