Martin Rumsby

?As a kid I was always curious about something called ?The Future.? Still am. But no matter how fast I move the future seems always to be just that one step ahead. The other thing of course is the risk that if one doesn?t watch it, one?s past may catch up with one.?

? Michael Nicholson

Seeing himself as a composer of images the artist Michael Nicholson conceived of these four short non-figurative video works as a visual music akin to classical music. They are based on video synthesis projects that Nicholson had undertaken with video engineers in Australia in the early 1970s. These earlier versions of this work were successfully exhibited in both Australia and Japan in the 1970s. This footage, created on the three-quarter inch U Matic video format, has been subsequently cleaned up and re-edited into new form by Diane McAllen, as directed by Nicholson, at the New Zealand Archive in Wellington. Earlier forms of this project have been exhibited in both Australia and Japan from the mid to late 1970s.

Drawing on precedents from film, music, and art Nicholson fashions self referential video structures that exist parallel to rather than as a representations of external reality. Although probably unintended since Nicholson aspires to classical form, the bright and garish colours of the forms speak almost of a latter day, non-figurative Pop aesthetic or of that of the Chicago Imagists. The accompanying electronic soundtracks create a sense of spatiality around the visuals. This is a double form of spatiality, one which extends aurally, in three dimensions into the viewing space, creating a depth around the visuals, and the other, a sense of universal space 'out there', somewhere else, both beyond and within us. A space in which, if we look deeply enough, we may be able to apprehend as an aural and visual perceptual consciousness.

The four movements begin tentatively, like a fragmented interplanetary transmission of optical vibrations. Vibrations that range from stark black and white through to primary video colours, merging in and out of one another in a tenuous stability that evokes the very interior of a technological vision.

The arrival of this work signals a coming to the fore of a genre which has, until now, been latent in New Zealand art. This being an optically printed or ?special effects? model that posits cinema as a visual and aural medium capable of carrying a formal language, primarily in shape and colour, that may, in some way, accord with music. Nicholson's luminescent opus bears correspondence not only as an electronic variation on Len Lye's dancing cinematic forms but also to Nova Paul's recent three-colour separation studies as well as Janine Randerson's convergences of art, science, and technology in her intermedia work. Randerson drawing, to some extent, on precedents established by the composer Alexander Scriabin's attempts to correlate music and colour in his symphony PROMETHEUS, THE POEM OF FIRE (1910) and filmmaker Jordan Belson's collaboration with the composer Henry Jacobs on a series of concerts incorporating abstract imagery and electronic sound in the late 1950s. Unlike Lye's work, however, Nicholson's visual music cannot be so easily mistaken for a music video which, ironically, it is. It is just that Nicholson's concept of music and video is different from the popular conception. The difference for Nicholson being between orchestral music with visuals and visual music with or without sounds, as an independent medium within its own right.

Expressing an antipathy toward both post-modernism and the business model of art Nicholson worked collaboratively with specialists in video synthesizing, composing, and editing. A drawing would be created then put into a video synthesizer to see what could be done with it in terms of colouring, distortion, movement, and rhythm. The result is beautifully orchestrated and choreographed non-figurative compositions of electronic biomorphic forms that evoke an elemental creative principle. In this they may express Nicholson's sense of wonder at a universe that he believes was created by a magical big bang emerging out of nowhere. Indeed, it may be that on the evidence of this opus, that Nicholson is a magician himself. This sense is conveyed by the self-referential use of electronic feedback, the medium becoming its own source and, like the biomorphic forms in Len Lye's TUSALAVA (1928), consuming itself as a transformative and reproductive act. The technology creates itself out of itself, doing so by as simple an act as pointing a video camera at an active television monitor and recording it. The ragged edges and bleeding colour of some of the forms, which one would associate with video degeneration speaks, again ironically, of an organic quality in the technology. The organic of the electronic image producing machine coming to life.

The process is, then, transformational, as forms and patterns emerge, proceed, and morph into one another, sometimes in zigs and zags, at others like electrical arcs and oscilloscope patterns, dancing lines and globular shapes, becoming in and through process a story of things sensed and felt. Just as the artist and his collaborators have entered into a creative process, aiming to maintain an equilibrium within a process, so the role of the viewer is to similarly enter into the process as creative seeing, thinking, and feeling beings. The story, as Nicholson puts it is,

"Absolute colour video is structure and a process within the structure, an episode within the process, activity within episode, event within activity," being structure and medium in rhythm.

From the history of visual art Nicholson cites painters such as Kandinsky, Klee, and Miro along with the influence of Australian aboriginal rock drawings who all created work through which the spirit speaks with particular directness. By shaping such influences in electronic media Nicholson, himself a painter and sculptor since the 1950s, seeks to make colour and light speak as eloquently as steel may do for sculpture. Whereas an eye moves around a painting or photograph, and the eye and body around a sculpture, the eye and the brain read moving images in time, creating what Nicholson calls a 'timeprint', timeprints from a different, slower and more contemplative era. Embedded within such timeprints may be the very movement of consciousness in the artist, the work, the technology, and the viewer. What may such processes of visual consciousness be? And how may they figure in art?

"Events subject to unidirectional time have a past, a present state and a future outcome. An event is embedded in a process. For a process to proceed, the forces tending to chaos and the forces tending to order within it must be held in equilibrium. If one or the other dominates, the process will either atrophy or implode."

Alternately, as Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in CIRCLES,

??this incessant movement and progression of which all things partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul?.

The energy, or forces, that Nicholson marshals, create pattern as a stable enduring integrity, shaped by movement in choreography of light, electronic colour, shape and movement.

In producing such work Nicholson may be asking, 'How can the precedents of Twentieth Century painting and music be restated in the electronic moving images of our era. Can contemporary media technologies be used to express that which may be known or felt, but rarely seen?' and, ?Can a non-figurative visual language be developed from New Media technologies?? and, ?Can art be created from within technology.?