There is a New Yorker cartoon showing two hipsters looking at a turntable captioned, “The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.” Indeed. For all the vinyl fetishism these days – I blame you Wes Anderson – there is no getting around the problems with records as an […]
Archiving digital images and sound is an underexplored challenge. We all assume that our digital files will simply be available now and forever. Unfortunately, that’s far from true. Without a concerted preservation effort, today’s files will not be readable or recoverable in as little as 20 or 30 years. Properly stored, 35mm motion picture […]
The 2018 Oscar-nominated films for best picture and best cinematography all had one thing in common: they were shot on film or with Arri Alexa cameras. Nary a RED to be seen. So why consider shooting RED vs. Alexa? The quick answer is for situations where resolution is more important than colorimetry shooting RED is [...]
“MEANDRES & MEDIA, L’CEUVRE DE JOHN SANBORN” was an exhibition in Paris (2106) and a book about the work of Video and Media artist John Sanborn curated by Stephen Sarrazin. These are my recollections of working with John in the 1980s, as published in the book. New York City in 1982 was a very different place […]
Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a Korean American artist who is rightly considered to be the father of modern video art. Nam June was a hero, mentor and friend who taught me many things. Perhaps the most important being that creating art and keeping a sense of humor about […]
In 1969 SMPTE released standard 12M – a specification for applying a universal time code to video. Assigning a unique number to every video frame was critical to the development of electronic editing as it enabled a list of all the edits in a program to be compiled. Thus was born the Edit Decision List […]
Joost Rekveld wrote a fascinating and detailed blog post about analog computing. Worth a look just for the vintage big-iron eye candy. Click the image below to hop over to it (please do come back when you’re done).
If you attended or read about this year’s Consumer Electronics Show it was hard to escape the hype about the new high resolution televisions. 4K! 8K! Unbelievable amounts of K! But how much display resolution does one actually need? The short answer: it all depends on viewing distance from the screen. The long answer: resolution […]