Peer Bode

Last Name: 
Bode
First Name: 
Peer

studied cinema and new media with Larry Gottheim, Ken Jacobs, Peter Kubelka, Nicholas Ray, Ralph Hocking, Paul Sharrits, Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad and Woody and Steina Vasuka. At the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton and Owego, New York, in the late 70's till the present Peer Bode has worked on electronic video instrument projects with Ralph Hocking, Sherry Miller, Walter Wright, David Jones, Richard Brewster and Hank Rudolph. In the 70's Bode choreoghraphed video and dance performances together with Meryl Blackman, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, Lois Welk, Cara Brownell and Charlie Seltzer. As Programs Coordinator at the Experimental Television Center 1977-85 and 1986-87 Bode worked and taught in the ETC residency program with more than 400 national and international artists. Peer Bode in the early 80's was also a member of the Tuesday Afternoon Club led by electronic instrument designer David Jones together with Barbara Buckner, Neil Zusman, Mimi Martin and Mathew Schlanger meeting together weekly to hand wire prototype video processing tools. Peer's father, Harald Bode was a pioneer in the development of electronic music instruments in Germany and the United States from the late 1930's to the late 1980's. His instruments include the Warbo Organ, the Melochord, the Polychord, the first modular audio synthesizer, the Bode Ring Modulator and Frequency Shifter ( which became part of the Moog Synthesizer), the Bode Vocoder, the Moog Vocoder and the Barberpole Phaser. Peer's brother, Ralf Bode, was a cinematographer in New York and Hollywood . His many films included "Saturday Night Fever", the Philadelphia scenes of "Rocky 1", "Dressed to Kill", "Coal Miner's Daughter", "Gorky Park", "Don Juan De Marco" and others. Peer's mother, Irmgard Bode, was the fabulous passionate and humerous human glue that made it all make sense, also an inspired cook, dedicated gardner and colorful radio host. Peer Bode is an internationally exhibiting American new media artist of German and Norwegian descent. He is also an active educator and studio advocate and facilitator of independent electronic media . He is associated with the renowned American Owego and Alfred schools of new media imaging. Bode is Professor of Video Arts at the School of Art and Design and Co-Director of the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred University, Alfred, NY. His work is produced at the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY, the Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred, NY and Pep Studios, Hornell and Rochester, NY. The IEA and the ETC are supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Peer Bode's work is included in "a Survey of American Video Art - The First Decade", a project of Chicago's Video Data Bank (http://www.vdb.org ), curated by Chris Hill. Peer Bode has collaborated on numerous electronic tool building projects with video systems designer David Jones and artist Ralph Hocking. He is also a member of the "Carrier Band" together with Andrew Deutsch and Pauline Oliveros. Their CDs "Carrier" and"Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody" are on the Deep Listening label ( http://www.deeplistening.org/dlc/label.html ). The new 2003 CD "Autumn Light" with Stephen Vitiello, Peer Bode and Andrew Deutsch is available on forcedexposure.com. Peer Bode has recently exhibited new media work and lectured in Hongzhou and Beijing, PR China. His electronic history piece "Transport 1, 2 3" will be shown at the European Media Art Festival 2003 in Osnabruck, Germany. Peer Bode Selected Video 1975 - 2001 Blue 1975 4 min. 50 sec. 1 - 87 1976 4 min. 35 sec. 100 Sec. Lumination (S.A.I.D. Spatial and Intensity Digitizer) 1976 1 min. 40 sec. Cup Mix ( 2 channels ) [excerpt] 1977 10 min. 47 sec. Picture +/- Changes 1977 10 min. Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap) 1978 5 min. Keying Distinctions 1978 3 min. 30 sec. Apple(s) 1978 4 min. 19 sec. Music on Triggering Surfaces 1978 3 min. Vibratory Sweep 1978 2 min. 50 sec. Ring Modulation 1978 7 min. 47 sec. Counting and Remapping 00-FF (partial disclosure) [excerpted] 1979 7 min. 16 sec. Flute with Shift 1979 3 min. 55 sec. Lava Shifts 1979 3 min. 55 sec. Site(s) 1980 7 min. 42 sec. Video Movements 1980 5 min. Switch / Drift 1980 7 min. 30 sec. Light Bulb (with circular update, camera zoom + 1981 3 min. 30 sec. pan + variable clock) Rectangular Update 1981 2 min. 45 sec. Comp Book Updates 1981 4 min. 30 sec. Ladder (with vertical update, camera zoom and pan) 1981 2 min Invented Eye #1 1983 2 min. 48 sec. Camel with Window Memory 1983 4 min. 22 sec. Green Window 1983 1 min. 30 sec. Landscape 3 x 3 x 16 x 3 1984 1 min. 43 sec. Synthetic Series #2 1984 2 min. 35 sec. Art of Memory 1985 3 min. 30 sec. Blind Fields 1985 4 min. 50 sec. Animal Migrations ( and why they don't get lost ) 1985 11 min. 30 sec. Artist's Studio / After Braque / Conversation 1988 19 min A Few More Magic Words 1993 20 min. Animal Migrations ( and the mediums they face ) 1985 / 95 22 min. Electro Memory Notes 1998 10 min. Bonzai Mem-ory for Two Windows 1998 15 min. Lightning Memory 1998 3 min. Moments for Kathy Acker, the best God, signed God 1998 12 min Silicon Alley Allegany/Manhattan 1999 10 min. Give It Away 2000 28 min. History Electronic 2000 15 min. Transport 2001 10 min Peer Bode Selected Video Blue 1975 4min. 50sec. An electronic synthetic color video, based on a memory of Larry Gottheim's film "Blues". 'Natural' and 'electronic' real time events. New American Electronic Cinema. B&W video camera, Paik-Abe colorizer, 1/2" vtr, blue berries, bowl and milk. Viva Video. 1 - 87 1976 4min. 35sec. Inspired by Ralph Hocking's Fish Biting Tape. 87 stones thrown, shifting water sounds, a real time performance event. Holding the camera and throwing 87 stones into the frame. 1/2" b&w reel to reel Sony portapack. 100 Sec. Lumination (S.A.I.D., Spatial and Intensity Digitizer) 1976 1min. 40sec. My first recording with Don McArthur's "Spatial and Intensity Digitizer". Image/signal in digitized state/space; noise field. 100 seconds of very beautiful digital noise light. Cup Mix ( 2 channels ) 1977 10 min. 47sec. A cup and saucer, pouring and drinking coffee, a duration ritual of contemplation and invigoration, doubled (tape copied), mixed, keyed + synthetic color, played back fast forward, fast backward, sync events, the opening of a space to put the self. 1/2 inch b+w portapack, 2 reel to reel video tape decks, David Jones keyer and colorizer Picture +/- Changes 1977 10 min. Electric chair. Chair and oscillator difference that is based on the varying image light intensities from broadcast television programing. 2 oscillators, b&w camera , David Jones keyer and colorizer, Peer Bode (personally built) light intensity to control voltage converter. You don't see the broadcast television program. You only see the electric chair controlled by it. Power/control. Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap) 1978 5min. Homage to Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge photo grid put into a video system space. Movement is created by detuning the horizontal and vertical video sychronization (time base) signal. Drift and horizontal doubling takes place. When the horizontal frequency doubles the man doubles on top of himself. A para-cinema shutter discovered by combining video luminance keying of the sync signal together with time base drifting. A basic video structure; sync and a basic video process;keying together create a video based film like shutter, simulating a crude persistance of vision system. Primitive physical structures of the video signal, combined, bring Muybridge's photo grid into an electronic animation of false movements. The overall time composition is a simple structure of increased time display of the photogrid and decreased time duration of the photogrid drifting. Two b&w cameras, time base detuning and keying. Keying Distinctions 1978 3min. 30sec. Time base sync drift, keying, bricks and white noise. b&w camera, time base detuning and keying. Apple(s) 1978 4min. 19sec. One apple, two b&w cameras, color burst, independently altered time base, in a permutation sequence of keying normal and reverse, camera one then camera two as key clip. Music on Triggering Surfaces 1978 3min. Image and sound interface. The image and its movements as a sound score. Vertical and horizontal time base shifting, a book, legs of a chair, a dot marking the place of light intensity measuring, light intensity/ voltage control of electronic audio oscillators. The image is a moving field of information, a score to control sound. B&W camera, v and h time base drifting, keyer, light to c.v. interface. Vibratory Sweep 1978 2min 46sec. Time bases and vertigo. A TV repair test pattern is run through an oscillator controlled Paik-Abe Wobulator. The image and sound are simultaneously altered. The deflected test pattern is picked up by two rescanning cameras that are then keyed together. The score and time shape of the performance recording is that of sweeping the oscillator frequencies up to near hearing limits and then down again while permutations of the two keyed cameras are played out.. V.S. is a real time recording of simultaneously performed activities that took 2min 46 sec. to take place. The activities are complex, the space is delirious. Ring Modulation 1978 7min. 47sec. Image states/ sound states. A bell hand held ringing, two oscillators each independently controlling a sync event- a red and blue color together with sound and no sound state and a sweeping video clip together with audio filtering. Both oscillators sweep up incrementally one after the other and then down. The visual and sound bell is emersed in the electronic space/state. One b&w camera, two oscillators, David Jones keyer and colorizer, audio filter. Vibratory spaces to live in. Calm and ecstatic Counting and Remapping 00-FF (partial disclosure) 1979 7min. 16sec. A table, a cup, a typewriter, a hexadecimal number and letter count. I am remembering a Hollis Frampton film. The video image is slowly undulating from magnetic deflection. This is a digital video recording using a hand built analog to digital and digital to analog converter with arithmatic logic unit. Design and building assistance from David Jones. This recording is a counting through logic permutations ; adding, subtracting, oring and noring, to change the order of the sixteen shades of grey. The color subcarrier that is mixed into the video signal is also cut up and altered. The image is a digital and analog video text. Flute with Shift 1979 3min. 39sec. Sound image interface / electronic flute. The b&w camera image with subcarrier has its sixteen shades of grey swapped, ( a to d and d to a with alu controlled digital process). A linked audio filter alters the flute's sound. The flute has become a larger instrument. Rube Goldberg would have been proud. Lava Shifts 1979 3min. 55sec. Lava sound maps / Lava color maps. Moving over Hawaiian lava flows, Ralf Bode, my brother and cinematographer, Saturday Night Fever, Coal Miner's Daughter etc., shot the original footage with his 1/2 inch reel to reel Panasonic video portapack. The tape was then electronically reprocessed and recoded. A light intensity to control voltage interface box built by Peer Bode was used to link the image changes to audio filtering and frequency changes. The tape was digitally image processed in real time ( A to D and D to A , color subcarrier mixed and Elf2 computer ALU logic sequenced ) with a digital video buffer box built by David Jones and Peer Bode at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. The colors are artifacts of the analog signal encoding and the ALU logic sequences we learned about from Woody and Steina Vasulka. The modular audio synthesizer used was built by Richard Brewster. The colors and sounds are raw and they glow. Site(s) 1980 7min. 42sec. Real time mix of digital and analog electronic processes; digital grey level flipping, oscillator signals converted to video, two b&w cameras, keying and video feedback. The recording involved an intuitive action process within a multileveled system. The changes moved through a permutation of parameters, waiting and then changing, waiting and then changing. Water flows, system flows, observation sites. Video Movements 1980 4min. 55sec. Self image; camera looks at its own power sync box mixed with a second camera looking at the large contained space. Hand controlled shifts in the sync time base, mixes, and color. This takes place in the presence of the image and the recording. Switch / Drift 1980 7min. 30sec. Two cameras / video sequenceing back and forth, opposite ends of the large studio space of the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY.. The sound is the oscillator running at the speed of the switching. Electronic montage, continuous performance. I am watching and changing the switching sequencing of the two cameras showing one end of the space and then the other. I am in the room. David Jones comes to visit. Light Bulb (with circular update, camera zoom + pan + variable clock) 1981 3 min. 30 sec. Real time digital buffer recording. Rectangular Update 1981 2 min. 45 sec. Real time digital buffer recording. Comp Book Updates 1981 4 min. 30 sec. Real time digital buffer recording. Ladder (with vertical update, camera zoom and pan) 1981 2 min Real time digital buffer recording. Invented Eye #1 1983 2min. 48sec. Pedagogy and real time electronic processing. Composition notebook designs are encoded as analog and digital video signals and reworked through a high speed audio oscillator controlled sequencer. Pedagogy becomes biology? Vibrations. Camel with Window Memory 1983 4 min. 22 sec. Postcard camel, oscillator window, real time buffer, light to cv interface, Brewster audio modules, stop watch. This recording is one of my favorites. The camel, the ship storage unit of the desert rhyming with the digital storage processing system I had put together. A window is a framed zone or screen with in a larger area. Window memory is what I named selected areas of memory past, interacting with the streaming present. The changing digital image is also the dynamic score or information surface controlling the variables of the analog sound process: vc oscillators and sample and hold functions. Digital and analog hybrids, intuitive boundary playing. Green Window 1983 1 min. 30 sec. Tree leaves, real time buffer, Jones colorizer. Landscape 3 x 3 x 16 x 3 1984 1 min. 43 sec. Moving landscape, 9 Amiga windows, 16 frame real time buffer. Synthetic Series #2 1984 2min. 45sec. Recomposite recordings of "Video Locomotion (man performing forward hand leap)" 1978, "Ring Modulation" 1978, "Counting and Remapping 00-FF (partial disclosure)" 1979, "Site(s)" 1980, and parts of "Art of Memory " 1985. Linked singular sites and performances become visual and sonic proto intelligences, timely births of electronic narrative, struggled and negotiated codes, automatic artificial intelligences. Art of Memory 1985 3 min. 30 sec. Studio shot, Muybridge images reactivated with oscillator time based window update. Blind Fields 1985 4 min. 50 sec. Performance recordings, analog and digital, assembled into a seemless series with European techno music. Commissioned by curator / artist Sara Hornbacher for "Techno Bop" at the Limbo Lounge in NYC in 1985. Post/Structuralism, electronic processing, appropriation, numbers, places, Marylin Monroe's first screen test, MTV executive's shoe tapping. Techno music by Telex, recorded off the radio. Moments of the Other music videos. Perculations of the independent medias / art interrogations. Animal Migrations (and why they don't get lost) 1985 11 min. A carefully unfolding meta-story of nature, time, mathematics and vampires ... of (music controlled robot arms painting ... a cybernetic allegory ... new digital rhetorics and the unknown Whitney Biennial 1987 , John Hanhardt, " Peer Bode's Blind Fields (1985) and Animal Migrations (1985) use found footage, abstract images, music, and text to extend image processing into new metaphors for the transformed and changing image. Bode's style charts a refreshing change for the relationship of the image to sound and text. In his work, sound and text support and play with the meaning of the image rather than illustrate it." A Few More Magic Words 1993 20 min. An accumulation of occurances ... the spoken voice reinterpreting stone petroglyphs. meandering across a find of electronic ruins ( bodies?) text questionings across unknown cultures and bodies. " are you Micmac i am not Micmac" i am German and Norwegian you are Micmac then you can read this i don't know what songs you sing ... ( text over Micmac symbols for "i, you, them" ) symbols, texts, layers electronic reinscriptions stone petroglyphs reapearing in silence and then reinterpreted this time by a narration spoken by a computer voice. Who is speaking these questions of origins and identity ? Native American Micmac language is thought to share many elements with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Old questions of origins, migrations and identity come back to us new configurations. Stones, bodies, electronic signals, video, digital, hand written text, sound, voice, and computer diction ... A production and feedback of materially different inscriptions voicing back and forth between writing and bodies. A struggle to reach across distances and to integrate critical issues and desire. Attempts at new perspectives on the corporeal body including visual adventure, experimentation and pleasure. Video as body inscription revival. Video as PostMedia practice and imagination. Animal Migrations (and the mediums they face) 1985/95 22 min. A Post Media Video by Peer Bode 1940 Hollywood film ("You'll Find Out"), 1985 selective recycling and real time digital video processing, 1995 structural and deconstructive editing and image recirculation into 'Animal Migrations (and the mediums they face)'. Broad hints of American fears of 1940 Europeans, intellectuals,homosexuals, debutantes and a newly invented electrical musical instrument with voice/body confusions, music and a platform for new myths of life and automata here and in the here after.Digital video imaging activated with a hand wired real-time digital video frame buffer, Amiga computer and additional tools at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York., digital tool design: David Jones, a work of the Personal Electronic Cinema / Post Media. Electro Memory Notes 1983/1998 10 min The spaces of an archeology of double and triple and ... inscriptions... concrete memory...1983 recordings with heroically hand built digital video frame buffer built with avant-garde poly electronic tool designer David Jones, up to 1998 recordings and re recordings with oscillators, book computer printouts, toy piano, modulated bell, together with a audio frequency shifted and voice activated German army signal light. Bonzai Mem-ory For Two Windows 1998 15 min In the overlayed spaces of white noise, oscillator inter modulations, hand adjustments, digital video frame buffer memory, barber pole audio phaser, mx-1 windows, compound text; (bonsai small potted tree banzai cheer may you live ten thousand years), brownian movement, brownian memory, living in the found, the composed, the improvised and the received... Lightning Memory 1998 3 min. Lightning bolts sampled into digital memory and in real time performance re animated and re recorded. Moments for Kathy Acker, the best God , signed God 1998 12 min. Remembering Kathy Acker with electronically reconstructed internet bodies. Silicon Alley Allegany/Manhattan 1999 10 min. Memory locations, geography updated. Spatial and temporal textures, altered locations, geography as memory. Give It Away 2000 28 min. Give it away, gaming and recoding Las Vegas 1999 Emersions into languages, cinemas, signs, new technologies and heat. Recoded and timeshifted in 2000 with a 48 frame real time digital video frame. buffer bulit with David Jones in Owego, New York 1979- present. Also color manipulated and recoded at the Experimental Television Center, in Owego, New York. The audio was altered with a 1960's Frequency Shifter designed and built by Harald Bode. The tape was edited on an IMac with IMovie. Personal studios for living the spaces of experimental and independent strategies. Rescue missions from the. mass media sacrifices and gamings. History Electronic 2000 15 min. Technical notebooks (1949) of pioneering electronic music instrument developer Harald Bode coded and recoded with a digital video frame buffer hand built by David Jones and Peer Bode (1979/99). Additional images are of locations in Venice, Germany and Colorado. Sound in the video was performed live at the concert, "Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody" 2000, at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia on the Bode vocoder and various custom electronics with Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Deutsch, Peer Bode and Dick Robinson . Transport 2001 10 min. Technical notebooks (1949) of pioneering electronic music instrument developer Harald Bode coded and recoded with a digital video frame buffer hand built by David Jones and Peer Bode (1979/99). Additional images are of canals in Venice, train traveling in Germany and the Rocky mountains in Colorado. Various additional sound/image performances at the Experimental Television Center, Owego, NY 1979-98 are interspersed . Music in the video was performed live at the concert, "Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody" 2000, at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia on the Bode vocoder and various custom electronics with Pauline Oliveros, Andrew Deutsch and Dick Robinson.