Cable Vision Generations - Gregory Gutenko

In 1974 J. J. Murphy created the minimalist/structuralist film-work Print Generation (https://commarts.wisc.edu/people/jjmurphy). Cable Vision Generations adapts (or hijacks) Murphy's innovative memory-disassembling process/experience to the medium of analog videotape.
The original version of Cable Vision Generations is composed of 100 generational steps (dubs) and runs for 67 minutes. This "short attention span" edited version has 24 steps which are representative of the original's structure. 
The first step (of cable channel 'surfings') is a 95th generation dub. At midpoint of this sequence of channel "loops" the first generation of the channel rotation. The last step/sequence is a 100th generation dub. Every dubbed loop was copied through a digital time base corrector, otherwise the video signal would simply have lost sync and been unrecordable back to tape or digital file.

The cable channels were selected at random and looped to make one rotation that is copied and recopied a generation at a time. Cable Vision Generations begins highly degraded, loops towards its original generation, and then continues on towards re-degeneration. As with Murphy's Print Generation, the viewer experiences memory degradation of the original generation's images and sounds, even though these were witnessed repeatedly. The ultimate victor is noise. Video noise. Audio noise. The noise of forgetting.





Cable Vision Generations from Gregory Gutenko (Doctor Video) on Vimeo.