The Contrary of the Movie Theater and Scan Processing

I enjoyed this week's reading as the theorist (Gabriel Menotti) had a concise conveyance of opinion on the presentation of VJ projectionists. Menotti notes the improvisational, non-narrative form of VJ material, and contrasts it to the highly planned and produced works of the cinema. Lastly, Menotti notes the similarities between the highly technical roles of the VJ and the film projectionist, offering one large difference: he assigns the role of the VJ as a "positive performance", in which the VJ creates coherence from imagery. Menotti conversely assigns the role of a "negative performance" to the film projectionist, as it is the projectionist's job to avoid incoherence during the film.

I also downloaded the Rutt-Etra Synthesizer in Max MSP but was only able to get it to behave properly once [image of the chimp from this run-through]. The effect on the Rutt-Etra image looks very similar to the Woody Vasulka video I found, entitled "C-Trend", from 1974.






When I looked into further meaning for "C-Trend", I read that a Scan Processor was used to manipulate the raster and the line deflection of the image. The black areas of the image are not affected as they lack voltage, but the grey/white lines contain energy and can be heightened or depressed. The "Rutt-Etra Scan Processor" I then found out, is another name for the "Rutt-Etra Synthesizer", which I thought tied everything together nicely!