Abstract shapes of shifting colors dance over an otherwise mundane video of a cup of coffee, recorded with a handheld Portapak analog camera and displayed on three projectors. Actually it’s two videos; a lagging copy hovers over itself like a ghost, a polychromatic distortion, following the actio ns of its original, trailing behind the pouring, the drinking, the camera adjusting.  Across 12 screens and two digital prints at Visual Studies Workshop is “Signal into Memory,” a video art exhibit created by artist Peer Bode. Co-curated by VSW’s Tara Nelson and Nilson Carroll, the exhibition running through June 6 is a look back at Bode’s experimental work in the 1970s and ‘80s. The minimalist gallery space features a selection of Bode’s “Process Tapes” from his time at the Experimental Television Center in the Southern Tier, packaged and presented with immeasurable help from fellow artist and partner Rebbekah Palov. From left, video artist Peer Bode and co-curators Tara Nelson and Nilson Carroll of Visual Studies Workshop. PHOTO PROVIDED From the left onscreen, a hand picks up the cup and Bode takes a sip. The cup returns. Suddenly everything shifts. The ghost on the monitors rewinds into the past with a mechanical whir, tearing away from its established relationship and widening the temporal dissonance between the two channels. “Cup Mix (2 Channels)” was filmed by Bode in his apartment in Buffalo in 1977, then edited in real time at ETC. It’s part video experiment, part examination of rituals, part exploration of perception and the present. Bode’s work frequently touches upon the medium of video itself, the nature of video and audio signals and how an audience perceives those signals. It can be metatextual, self-referential, existentialist. Behind the L-shaped couch creating a chamber for the projector trio, six monitors are arranged like an electronic sculpture, a nod to setups seen at ETC at the time. A voice pops out: “Back hand, front hand, back hand, front hand.” Six identical hands flip back and forth, pivoting visually on the pointer finger. The screen shifts from black and white to color, a stark blue background with strong yellows and oranges on the hand, almost thermal.  “Back hand.” Black and white.  “Front hand.” Color. Rhythmic. Mesmerizing.  “Front Hand Back Hand,” 1977, ETC. “Often the subject is quite simple, because it is meant to point back to the process,” Carroll said. “It isn’t about what you’re seeing in the frame and this traditional cinematic sense, even though there are definitely cinematic moments. It is about watching a process unfold.” Experimental Television Center in the Southern Tier. PHOTO PROVIDED Some of the tapes on display have only recently been digitized with the help of Carroll and VSW’s media transfer lab. Bode hadn’t seen some of this work in 50 years, and the exhibition served as an opportunity to revisit these pieces and extract some new edits. Looking back, he views his work in this era as some of his strongest and most radical. “It’s unforgiving,” he said. “It just isn’t going to give in to a certain kind of narrative structure, a storytelling structure or cultural critique structure. This work really has a power to it.” On the screen of a heavy Setchell Carlson cathode ray tube television, a postcard of a camel is held in frame. Its head seems to glitch, leaving an imprint on the screen as the hand holding the postcard moves slightly.  “Camel with Window Memory,” 1983.  The glitch is a single frame held in buffer memory — the machine’s storage was so small, it’s all it could hold. This is a performance, edited live. In the exhibition program, Bode lists “Harald Bode 9-Channel Light Sensor to Control Voltage Instrument” in the tech breakdown. Bode was raised amid invention. His father, Harald Bode, was an engineer and electronic music pioneer; a builder of instruments; inventor of the modular synthesizer. Harald developed and built most of his musical inventions in his home workshop, and a young Peer absorbed firsthand that process of creation.  Artist Peer Bode. PHOTO PROVIDED Bode’s mother, Irmgard Bode, was an excellent cook and had a great sense of humor. Peer credits her with creating a rich homelife that allowed creativity and imagination to flourish.  Peer’s older brother, Ralf Bode, blazed the path in film, finding a more commercial but still artistic career path as a cinematographer, working on the movies “Saturday Night Fever,”  “Rocky” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” Peer’s artwork wasn’t something his brother really understood, but Ralf still supported him (and bought him a lot of videotapes for his projects). Bode was born in Germany just two years before his family moved to the United States. They first lived in Vermont, then eventually landed in North Tonawanda outside Buffalo. Bode studied at Binghamton University in its newly formed cinema department, later continuing his education with the media studies program at the University of Buffalo. Nowadays, he lives in Hornell, a little more than an hour south of Rochester.  As a partial career retrospective, “Signal into Memory” is the kind of thing that’s right up the alley of Visual Studies Workshop. The institution supports, curates and archives avant garde visual art from all sorts of experimental artists and has been a keystone for video art, sprouting up in the late ‘60s around the same time as ETC. Both made Western New York a major hub for the world’s burgeoning video art scene. Amid stacks of 16mm film reels and old guerilla news tapes from the ‘80s and ‘90s, Nelson emphasized the balance of supporting this kind of work in the arts and being a public resource and space. “We want to be a sort of challenging institution that thinks deeply about the meaning of images,” she said. “But we also understand that [this style of media] a little out there. We want to help people feel welcome and approach the subject matter.” Video is pervasive in culture. It’s omnipresent — it begs examination, analysis and artistry. To be challenged like this is paramount. In the ‘70s, Bode and his contemporaries knew they were making art, crafting something important.  “computer tape #2” by Peer Bode. PHOTO PROVIDED “Little did we know that the media culture we were engaged with in that time would move forward and become the cultural basis, the information basis for the whole world,” Bode said. On a gray monitor that’s as deep as it is wide, a man with a beard and glasses reaches to his right and twists a knob on a board full of knobs. Colors ooze through the scene, everything taking on green and orange and purple hues in rolling, repetitive flashes. Bode zooms the camera in on a typewriter, an ashtray. A conversation plays out in white subtitles; it’s a group at the ETC experimenting with the Jones Colorizer in real time.  “Computer tape #1” and “computer tape #2,” Sept. 4, 1977.  Two off-center blobs of color pulse, flowing outward over and over again, colors shifting as different channels are turned on and off, positives and negatives, flashes and flashes. Hypnotic. vsw.org Kellen Beck is a Rochester-based writer who has covered science, tech and entertainment since joining Fairport High School’s newspaper “The Lampion” in 2010, among other publications. Email him at [email protected]. The post Peer Bode’s video art exhibition at VSW recalls the 1970s and ‘80s appeared first on CITY Magazine. Arts. Music. Culture.. ...read more read less