The Electronic Canvas of Stephen Beck.

Stephen Beck by
César Ustarroz.
This article is based on an interview done on January 12, 2009 in Berkeley, California. It is an
excerpt from César Ustarroz’s Book “VJING THEORY - Audiovisual Production and Representation
in Real-Time, A link to the Cinematic Avant-Garde of 20th Century”.

In a retrospective review of the origins of video-art, we discover the significant and

multifaceted figure of the North American Video-artist Stephen Beck, whose trajectory
deserves acknowledgment for his contribution to real-time audiovisual production.
The creative personality of Beck’s work takes shape in different fields of artistic
expression like video-sculpture, installation, music, performing art, music videos,
videogame design, and research. There is no definitive borderline in Beck´s work; he
employs video and technology to translate and represent his singular experience.
Between 1969 and 1970, as an electronic artist in residence at the National Center for
Experiments in Television (NCET) at KQED-TV in San Francisco, Stephen Beck
developed his own video synthesizer, the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer, an ingenious
invention designed a year before destined for the generation and manipulation of
analogue images in real-time, with which he gave a series of audiovisual performances
between 1972 and 1973 (Illuminated Music).

Beck performed the Illuminated Music series live before an audience. He used the
Beck Direct Video Synthesizer, interpreting a musical piece previously recorded or
conducted live, and the images were displayed by television screens or projectors.
The performative character of Illuminated Music provided new meanings for the work.
Spontaneity, ubiquity, the non-objective nature of the art work, the ephemeral quality
and the immediacy of its representation are all characteristics that highlight the
uniqueness of the piece. Illuminated Music translates the experience of the interior
states of consciousness of the artist in a non-verbal language, with a symbology and
Eastern imagery. In Beck’s own words:

Stephen Beck: I had the image come to me from listening to the music, and as I
often do, much of my work in visual art and video is based on what I see with
my mind’s eye, my eyes closed, inner imagery. I’ve seen inner imagery for as
long as I can remember, even since I was a young boy - phosphenes,
 hypnogothic, hypnopompic, eidetic, hallucination, meditation. So, as I would
listen to the music and start to see certain visual elements I would notate them
into the score for the visual composition.

Now, each performance of Illuminated Music that followed over the next two
years, if you looked at all six of them, you would see there is a similar structure.
It begins with these tiny rotating particles, suggesting perhaps, subatomic
particles or some kind of magnetic, gravitational, orbital, based on sine waves,
and then it kind of expands into these waves of lines and lace, becoming from
kind of one dimension of a point to two dimensions of lines and weavings.
Eventually, solid smooth orbs and spheres appear along with a final spiral
vortex, symbolizing the great energy of the cosmos, as symbolized by the spiral
and this has been exhibited in many cultural icons throughout history.

Stephen Beck reorients non-objective art in Illuminated Music I and II through an

extraordinary communion with the soundtrack. It is a creative synthony that
demonstrates the multidisciplinary character of Beck’s artistic background, with its roots
in electronic music (Stephen Beck studied electronic music with John Cage at the
University of Illinois, Urbana). In his work we can perceive that music is an inspirational
source, both in the execution of the audiovisual piece in real-time, and in adding the
sound a posteriori as a component that determines the meaning of the audiovisual
message. The structure of his message, as Beck himself describes, presents certain
analogies with the musical structure of jazz pieces: the presentation and development
of a theme with variations. Beck uses a grammatical syntaxis that gains strength with
improvisation, the reading and in situ interpretation of a musical piece.

S. B.: …that was kind of my concept, wanting to try to create a form of visual
jazz, that would flow in time like music but be visual, and also have a
compositional structure that was formal and intact, but still allowed for variations
in the way that it was played and performed.

In Beck’s art there is a vision where technology and art flow together in a fertile
encounter. At the end of the sixties, Gene Youngblood, in his seminal piece Expanded
Cinema (1970), demonstrated a collaboration between engineers and artists that was
already happening in west coast America. In the vein of Harry Smith, Jordan Belson,
and the Whitney brothers, in the work of Beck, we can appreciate the creative side of
the man-machine symbiosis. Technology is a tool at the service of the artistic
expression.

Beck continues the tradition of Colour Music and Lumia, with the intent to reach a
synaesthetic union of sight and sound. In other words, Beck’s art is “painting the
music”. By creating and manipulating form, colour, texture and movement, Beck
introduced the embryo of the electronic image in the construction of an audiovisual
discourse in real-time. His live acts represent a pioneering experimentation with the
medium, utilizing new technologies for the production of image in movement – a new
step in Video-Art. Beck’s twenty-five frames per second contributed to the acceleration
of the processes of interaction and participation in new media.

S. B.: At this point in time, in terms of real-time video performance, that was
pre-digital era. There was no programming, there was no pre-recording (of
video), it was played live on the synthesizer.

New audiovisual instruments, production, distribution, imaging devices, and media

shape the Post-media universe witch in turn is contextualized in the Post-industrial and
Post-modern era. The video-artistic career of Stephen Beck has experienced the
transition from Pre-digital to Post-digital.

S. B.: Well I always like to say that my art spans from pre-digital to post-digital.
Pre-digital meaning the era that I started, the late 1960s, when for all practical
purposes, there was not much available to videoartists in digital computing that
could do a dot, draw one monochrome dot on a screen, it would take hours to
draw some more, they had to be filmed with stop action, such as John
Whitney’s work, Arabesque. Post-digital meaning the current era, meaning
digital is all pervasive. I still describe myself as live and analog, meaning I
prefer the analog texture, the analog approach, even though of course, I’m
using digital tools, fully and completely now like everyone else because of the
ease, convenience, quality control.

Another one of Beck´s most celebrated video pieces is Voodoo Chile (1982), a music
video with recorded music of Jimmy Hendrix. It still survives as a specific path of artistic
expression where we can not separate music from image. There is a clear search for
unity throughout the dialogue between music and visual interpretation, opening the
Huxleyan doors of perception. In making Voodoo Chile Stephen Beck mixed real-time
with video editing.

S. B.: All the varieties of scenes that you see in Voodoo Chile, optical seeding,
video synthesis, a lot of use of video feedback, analog fractals, which I had
learned to control with special circuitry in my Beck Direct Video Synthesizer to
obtain video feedback-type effects and energies that were very unique. And
they also had the rights to an image of Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar, but my
concept for Voodoo Chile was to not show Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar, but
to show a light-show like visual interpretation of his music. Not, you know, a
definitive visual interpretation, but my visual interpretation.

Almost four decades have passed and Noor (2005-2009) rises as the most recent
project of Beck’s work, an ambitious project in constant development. It is a live
organism where imagery and motifs from Eastern cultures come to life through abstract
form and patterns, models of representation and expression, showing the richness of
Beck’s cinematic speech.
Working in his laboratory leading the Noor project and teaching at the University of
California at Berkeley, Stephen Beck still continues choosing experimentation as a way
to structure his vision of culture with video as a medium. Lately, he is exploring the
creative possibilities of digital tools, searching in the language of programming for new
forms of representation. Noor is a metaphor that teaches us Beck´s primary concern:
trying to decipher and explain the complex consciousness of a human being, and
translating it with images in movement.

S. B.: To me, the goal of my art is to inspire – inspire others to achieve,

to strive, to aim high, to never give up, to keep on pushing, to reveal the
beauty of life, in a world that is often filled with ugliness and tragedy and
darkness. So working with light, working with video, working with Noor is
the latest form, the latest path, the latest method by which I hope to
realize and intend to realize this vision.
César Ustarroz earned his degree in History at Zaragoza University (Spain), has studied
Anthropology at the University of Barcelona (U.B.), completed three years of study in film direction
at Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos de Cataluña (Barcelona) and is involved in the doctoral
program in film at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (U.A.B.).

More info:
www.stevebeck.tv