UK visual musician Peter Donebauer was inspired by Jordan Belson’s cosmic cinema, as well as his work on 16mm film before switching to video. His live video-music collaboration with composer Simon Desorgher, Entering (1974), was made at a studio at the Royal College of Art, shown on the BBC, and exhibits the layering, erasure, and transformation of abstract imagery. Donebauer worked with Monkhouse’s Spectron, and the two artist engineers decided to collaborate on creating a video synthesizer, the Videokalos, dedicating themselves to performing live shows with it. Donebauer said that he was after “abstract natural forms,” saying that the video feedback and imaging created: “organic-spirals, eddies, obviously related to the phenomenon which creates shells, galaxies, etc. Through this process I was suddenly thrown back into my earlier fascination with nature. Here I was, probably using the most advanced technical equipment available to an artist at the time, and suddenly I realized these electronic processes were mimicking the forces at work in nature.”
The Videokalos was a sophisticated piece of equipment, capable of working with five separate video inputs, each of which could be colorized differently; a series of wipes; a switcher/mixer; and a twenty-two-by-twenty-two-inch pinboard that lent itself to a variety of combinations of effects and the ability to key up to four levels of color for each source.
The Creation Cycle (1972-78) was a series of seven pioneering video recordings made over 7 years. They arose from an exploration of the nature of the universe, the nature of human consciousness, and the connections between the two.
The imagery and sound of all the pieces were performed and recorded by Peter Donebauer and Simon Desorgher “playing” and improvising around a theme together in real time, with both participants having visual and aural feedback of each other’s transforming contributions as they affected the piece in real time and thus in turn their own continuing contributions. The resulting final recorded tape represents the best live “take” from several recordings done at the time.
Peter developed his visual techniques through access to the old ATV colour studio donated to the Royal College of Art by Lew Grade. These techniques involved manipulating the studio in many ways for which it was never designed, enabling the development of a form of “Electronic Painting” equivalent to the “Electronic Music” that was being first developed around that time. This led on to the later development of the Videokalos image processing synthesiser.
Peter was the creative force conceptually. The artworks resulted from a period of liminal personal experiences and are all somewhat “shamanic” in their creation – a period of many days internal meditation, followed by two days immersion in a darkened studio, and a resulting artwork to share with others. The works have been described as “intermedial”.
Simon performed and co-ordinated the sound elements using a mixture of traditional musical instruments and electronic processing and generation. He studied flute and electronic composition at the Royal College of Music, London.
