Video and sound by Kit Young. In Memoriam: Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski.
I was very curious when I was invited to make a piece about Stan. I did not know him and his work. Who could this person be and why had I not heard of him? I am very thankful to the Intermedial Festival for the introduction! Many of his statements about the arts, technology and life resonated very deeply with me. Now, after I have completed this piece, I feel that we are related. He could be my uncle in our family of artists who work across mediums in an interdisciplinary way. I feel both challenged and inspired by his work and wish he was still present. What stories he could tell! And what would he accomplish with the advances in technology that have been made in the last 30 years? Let us work to continue his legacy.
In making this piece I wanted to be true to Stan's method of working in a performative way. In the first minute of the piece I show clips from his 1980 interview that were inspiring to me. I masked the background so that just he was visible. This allowed me to immerse his image in my video synthesis and feedback systems. The video clips of Stan were loaded into a video sampler that let me play the clip backwards and forwards, at different speeds, from anywhere in the clip so that both his image and his speech were fragmented and repeated. Another main piece of technology I used was a Wobbulator, or raster manipulator invented by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe in the 1970's, (they were contemporaries of Stan!). I was lucky to be able to build one with the help of the artist Jen Kutler who led a workshop to guide us through much trickiness. The Wobbulator distorted Stan's image as I fed a sine wave into it's coils. The images were distorted in different ways depending on the volume and frequency of the sine wave. I did a couple runs of this performance, with one hand controlling the video sampler and the other controlling the Wobbulator and signal layering. The results were edited together in Final Cut Pro.
Again, thank you Stan, for giving us creative freedom!