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 was very light show-like in its 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.