Experimental Television Center: A Video Lab in Binghamton, Then Owego

In July 1971, Ralph Hocking opened the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton, New York, as a nonprofit where anyone could borrow video gear and learn to use it. Within a year Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe were building a Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer on site: a machine that colorized and mixed live and prerecorded signals from multiple sources. One unit went to WNET's TV Lab; another stayed so visiting artists could work the same instrument free of charge.

On September 19, 1972, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse opened Work from Experimental Television Center, roughly 40 tapes plus performances by Charlotte Moorman, Shigeko Kubota, Paik and others. Kubota appears in period photographs at the synthesizer on the Everson floor. TV Bed and TV Cello, built with help from Ralph and Sherry Hocking, had already been shown there that January. The Center's early collaborators also included David Jones, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Walter Wright.

In 1979 the studio moved to Owego. Over four decades the residency hosted more than 1,500 artists, among them Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, Shigeko Kubota and Barbara Hammer, while Dave Jones and others designed colorizers, keyers, frame buffers and the Wobbulator that residents could patch like an instrument. The residency closed in 2011; the tapes and papers went to Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive. What began as community access to a portapak became one of upstate New York's longest-running laboratories for video as signal.

Sources

• Experimental Television Center timeline
• Experimental Television Center at the Everson, Everson Museum of Art
• Experimental Television Center, Signal to Code, Cornell University Library
• Tools and Technology, Rose Goldsen Archive
• Thumbnail: Shigeko Kubota with the Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer at the Everson, photo Evangelos Dousmanis, courtesy Experimental Television Center / Everson Museum