Jordan Belson had studied painting at Berkeley and was greatly influenced by the films of Fischinger, McLaren, and Richter, which he had seen at Frank Sauffacher’s Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Belson’s exquisitely constructed spacescapes, planetary forms, and mandalic structures in films such as Allures (1961) and Re-Entry (1964) …
San Francisco experimental filmmaker Scott Bartlett spent the mid-1960s making film loops for various West Coast light shows. In the summer of 1967, he partnered with Michael MacNamee and liquid light specialist Glenn McKay, of the light show outfit Head Lights, to make OffOn, the first “electrovideographic jam” in America, at a television studio in …
Beck was inspired to create a new kind of color organ–“a personal visual instrument” that would take advantage of new technology to achieve new optical effects. If the connections between various handmade moving-image art and video art were not already readily apparent, Beck conceived a visual synthesizer “in the lineage of Thomas Wilfred’s Lumias [sic] …