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William Larson: Vintage Electronic Montages 1969-75
Artist’s Statement
The prefix “tele-,” as in telegraph, telephone, telepathic, telecommunications, telemarketing, etc., dominated the language of media from the turn of the century to our current fixation on “cyber-,” the prefix of choice now permeating our hi-tech culture. Most intriguing to me was the teleprinter, a wonderful and sophisticated device for sending images by telephone from one place to another. It achieved its technical apogee around the late 1960’s, and once it penetrated the public’s consciousness years later, it came to be known simply as a FAX machine. With a somewhat covert history dating back to Giovanni Casselli’s Pantelegraph in 1856, which transmitted primitive images and bold text from Lyon to Paris, the FAX gradually achieved its own place in the cacophony of domestic electronics available by the late 1980’s.
The FAX caught my attention in 1969 with its ability to render a photographic image (in electronic code) suitable for transmission by telephone. In essence, it transformed the image into sound by assigning a different audio tone to the various gray values of the photograph. Perhaps, more profoundly, it transformed the image into a mediated electronic state where it was compatible with other electronically encoded information.
How it works, from our current vantage point, is reminiscent of the modern computer and the process of scanning, encoding, sending, and printing. The images evolve sequentially, that is, different elements such as photographs, text, voice and music are transmitted over time and at a distance to a single page with some prints assembled from as many as twelve different transmissions. The teleprinter used to generate these images, produced a rather high-resolution photograph comparable to a good newspaper reproduction and would transmit a full 8.5 x 11 in. page in six minutes.
Process and apparatus are no strangers to photography. The advent of a technological tool that processed the photograph electronically by drawing it into a compatible state of equilibrium with other “recording” mediums, redefined the possibilities of the image and how it might exist within an electronic system capable of filtering everything through a code, from one’s own voice to a family snapshot. All material introduced to the FAX sensor, from sound to image, is rendered visually with its own characteristics and distinct footprint visible on the final “copy” or montage.
The montages here embody the fragmentary sources that signify not so much a picture in the traditional sense, but rather a frozen moment of an intercepted field of telematic “information.” The images mirror the spatial incongruities of Moholy-Nagy’s photo-plastiques, and are meant to suggest the arbitrary intersection of electronic sources colliding at a particular instant in time, any time. One might think of it as tuning through electronic “static” to extract bits and pieces of coherent signal that make up the picture and provoke the imagination. In using state-of-the-art FAX technology in 1969, these one-of-a-kind images represent the first-ever electronically montaged pictures, foreshadowing the computer technology that would follow some thirty years later.