Swedish painter and photographer Ture Sjölander found the communicative breadth and fluidity of video imagery immensely appealing. Working with Bror Wikstrom, he created Time, shown on National Swedish Television in 1966. Time was a half-hour program of “electronically manipulated paintings.” According to Chris Meigh-Andrews, author of History of Video Art, Sjölander “worked with TV broadcast engineer Bengt Modin to construct a temporary video image synthesizer which was used to distort and transform video line-scan rasters by applying tones from waveform generators.” What is more, Sjölander and Wikstrom seem to be the first artists to have done so.

When Nam June Paik visited Sjölander in July and August of 1966, he saw images from Time that almost certainly spurred him onward in his own image-processing experiments. Further linking the relationship between video and painting, the images in Time were also produced as limited-edition, signed and numbered works silk-screened on canvas.

Sjölander’s work the next year, Monument, was done in collaboration with Lars Weck and featured image-processed “portraits”–via distorting signals and electronic filters–of the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, Hitler, Picasso, and the Beatles. Broadcast in five European nations, the program, backed by a reverberant sci-fi soundtrack of vibraphones and organ washes, was seen by more than 150 million people. These electronic paintings were also made into a variety of still images including tapestries, LP art, paintings on canvas, and posters. Sjölander, Wikstrom, and Sven Hoglund’s 1969 Space in the Brain extended Frank Malina, Jordan Belson, and other moving-image artists’ fascination with inner and outer spaces. The artists manipulated still images of the Apollo 11 mission–given to them by the American government–into full-color abstractions to produce a “space opera” set to searing acid rock by Hansson & Karlsson. The piece makes use of close-ups of an eyeball, much in the manner of Kubrick’s “Stargate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, before layering in shifting, rotating washes of hot pink, searing yellow, and electric blue forms, concluding with the overlaying of those video shapes on top of still images of deep space.