Video Art

Jury-rigging one videotape across 2 open-reel videotape machines to make a time-delay system, two actors build up into multiple layers on the screen… Decades later Zieman heard a name for this direction in electronic image-making: Twitch Art… “ It felt a bit Proto-Punk at the time, to me.”

A coherent meta-philosophy emerges from Zieman’s onscreen writing, however intentionally distressed and hard to read.

Closely observed socially normative behaviors: “Cue the injured on a cane, dissolve to crutches, to white flags with ambulances.” Zieman’s early artistic exploration of the new technology, “Time code, A/B roll editing”, which in 1979 was only beginning to become available in the most advanced tv facilities. Zieman shoots with a 40 lb.color video portapak rig.

This film is almost only a “Camera Test”: Zieman films with the new 4K Sony FX6 camera in Tangier, near the Straits of Gibraltar. When viewed properly in Ultra High Definition, the composition of very small subjects in the frame can be truly celebrated, which wasn’t possible previously. Highest respects to the borrowed music track and artists…

This is one of 3 on-stage video projections Zieman was commissioned to make, to accompany a concert of new music compositions by notable young composers. These were performed at Lincoln Center, and on nationwide tour, with Lincoln Center’s avant-garde new music group show “DEMOCRAZY”

An award-winning solo video art work exploring themes of water scarcity, and water pollution.

Zieman covered an entire dance studio with large cheesecloth fabric, then directed the dancers.

It’s hard to re-imagine the technical limitations of those early days of video. With only B&W video cameras available, John added all the colors in post. No slo-mo available, so he re-shot images off a monitor. (“re-scan”)

He used “video feedback” to create special effects, like water and bubbles.

Simultaneously, his music composition includes aspects of “Musique Concrete”: the tradition of editing natural sounds into music, achieved by cutting audio tape with a razor blade, and splicing tape.

His field recordings of water sounds; droplets, faucets, pans, streams, kids in a park were sometimes modified electronically, processed through a Moog music synthesizer, layered, and mastered in a 4 trk analog studio.

John Zieman’s Super8 movie footage, shot in 1978, in Dorchester MA. Zieman composed the music in a large professional recording studio nearby, during that same period.

Zieman experiments w feedback, now in 4K! (using the Sony FX6, 03.26.21) Pictures straight out of the camera, no color correction. Music is Zieman’s experimentation with a pseudo-random sequencer patch from his experimental electronic music studio archive, circa 1978?