Sketches of my Sister Plus Laurie

alanpowell2591

"Experimental video produced at Electron Movers, a video art coop in 1975. The video is made on 1/2" EIAJ B&W video. The dancers are delayed by running the video between two video tape decks. Te sound was produced on a Buchala audio Synthesizer at the national center for Experiments in Television. The video processing equipment was built by George Brown and Built by Alan Powell."

Magnetic Tape Video Looping

Unlike the relatively simple practice of audio tape looping that has been employed extensively in the music and art world since before the 1950s, magnetic video tape looping is allot more difficult. The main obstacles are maintaining tension, lengths involved and the way video is multiplexed with embedded sync signals and recorded on to the magnetic medium more often than not in a helical scan pattern. This means examples are few and far between.

A good place to start is destructural video blogspot which has a fantastic post that details some of the projects found online. For a more current feed of interesting video that falls under the destructural banner  check out the facebook group linked from the blogspot!

I also found this website detailing the video feedback work of Stevo Wolfson pretty interesting stuff and he has diagrams of all his various setups

Video Delay Lines

most video delay lines are just passive filters that provide very short (usually nano seconds) delay times to correct signals between sources over long cables runs and other related problems. However there are other ways to achieve real video delays for video installations and the like. I have a Korg Entrancer which does 6 seconds of delay, some DVD recorders have functions that allow them to output a delayed signal and there are commercially available studio units used for broadcast delays on live TV. There is also this, while still expensive its small form factor could be an advantage for cramped installations or live stuff.