Thurs. Nov. 9, 8:00pm Echo Park Film Center Ernest Gusella’s videotapes combine experimental engineering, avant garde music, psychedelia and Dadaist theater. As he once put it, “my art is 1/4 fornicalia funk, 1/4 New York punk, 1/4 European bunk, and 1/4 Canadian skunk.” With a background in classical music, Gusella immigrated from Canada to the United States where he studied with composers John Cage, Steve Reich and Constantine Xenakis, and became involved with the emerging video art scene through friendships with Nam June Paik and Kitchen founders Steina and Woody Vasulka. Many of Gusella’s tapes make use of sound and image processing tools designed by himself, other artists and sympathetic engineers. These include the VideoLab, a voltage controllable, multi-channel switcher, keyer, and colorizer designed by Bill Hearn that was used in Gusella’s 1978 work, Exquisite Corpse. Here, a composite image of the artist is created through live switching between shots of different parts of his body. Other works explore the relationship between video and audio signals, often using one to generate or transform the other. Fans of today’s neo-primitive video (Example: Forcefield) and early experiments with Analog Video Synthesizers (The Vasulkas, Ed Emshwiller, Nam June Paik) will be blown away by these videos. Apart from two titles available through Video Data Bank, Gusella’s work is hard to find and hard to see. This screening includes a selection of short work from 1974-1978. Organized by Julia Dzwonkoski and Kye Potter
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