Talking to distant friends and relatives via Skype or FaceTime has become so common as to be unremarkable, a feature of contemporary life easily taken for granted.
But only a generation or so ago, such technology was in the realm of science fiction. It was possible, but expensive, and therefore rare. In the 1960s and ’70s, big companies experimented with it, and Bell Telephone, then still a powerful monopoly, created something called the Picturephone.
It was meant to be a conferencing tool for big corporations, but on June 8, 1977, Illinois Bell let a group of artists from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) test out the Picturephone as an interpretive or expressive medium. Two groups of artists convened in conference rooms a few blocks apart in Chicago, and for half an hour, which was all the phone company would give them, they explored a technology that hasn’t been widely used for art since.
Norwich resident Bruce Posner, then a student at SAIC, was there, but even he had forgotten about the experience.
“I don’t remember anything,” he said in a recent conversation in the Jones Media Center, in Dartmouth College’s Baker-Berry Library. “It was a big blank.”
Recently, Posner, who works as an artist, filmmaker and film curator and archivist, happened upon a retrospective of the work of groundbreaking artist Aldo Tambellini. Included in the footage was some of the Picturephone experiment and Posner saw himself on the screen, which brought his memory back.
As a result, Posner and others involved in the 1977 conversation plan to reprise the event on Monday. The two artists who were central to the original experiment, Sonia Sheridan, who lives at Kendal at Hanover, and Tambellini, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., will converse via Skype or a similar video-conferencing service, and other artists who were involved plan to call in, as well. Posner will oversee the event, which starts at 7 p.m., from the Howe Library, where he holds his regular Cine Salon screenings of neglected or forgotten classic films. He has titled the event Picturephone Primitives.
Exactly what the event will consist of is unclear, but the same was true of the original event to which Monday’s conversation will pay homage. Mainly, the conversation will be a chance for Sheridan, 94, and Tambellini, 89, to communicate and for their former acolytes to be in their disembodied presence.
Katherine Hart, a longtime curator at the Hood Museum of Art, will be present with Sheridan. Monday’s event is “a chance to bring these two venerable people together to have a sort of exchange,” Hart said in a recent phone interview.
“As we age, these happenings energize and keep us alive,” Sheridan said in a recent email conversation.
Sheridan headed a celebrated art project at SAIC called Generative Systems that explored the intersection of creativity, science and technology. From 1970 through 1980, Sheridan and her students experimented with early video-tape cameras, copiers and other new image-making machines. She has lived in Hanover since 1993. The Hood Museum exhibited her work in 2009 and 2010 and holds an archive of her output.
Tambellini worked in a similar vein, exploring video as an artform in relation to other forms, drawing, painting, sculpture and poetry. He began working in New York in 1959 and was an established artist by 1977, having had exhibitions at major New York museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. Tambellini has recently had work on view at the Tate Gallery in London.
During the 1977 Picturephone event, Posner started in one of the rooms, then left and ended up at the other, stopping briefly along the way to videotape another artist who was miming outside. Posner was in his early 20s at the time.
Finding the recording of the event led him back to his memories of it. “It’s been a process of walking into a 43-year-old door that I haven’t been through” since, he said.
The recording itself is a peculiar document. Each room contained three cameras, and there were multiple artists in each room. While each of the artists might have had ideas about how the event would unfold, or at least what their part in it might be, there was very little coordination among the participants.
“It’s almost impossible, even for we who were there, to know what was going on,” Posner said. None of the artists had been in the conference rooms before the call was to start. Some of the artists drew figures, while others took Polaroid photographs and held them up to the camera. Two women passed scarves back and forth, wrapping them around their heads. Sheridan, after Tambellini confirmed with her that she was present and could see what was happening in the other room, held up cards bearing synonyms: “Hurl and throw,” for example. It’s hard for a viewer to know what to make of it all.
“All I can remember is it was hot,” Posner said. “Everybody is trying to figure out what to do,” he added, calling the piece a “trainwreck.”
But Sheridan didn’t give any indication that she thought so. She is given to gnomic pronouncements; art for her has meant exploration, not finished product.
“I was thinking of the students on one hand, and of Aldo on the other,” she wrote in response to emailed questions. “What do you think I was doing in relation to Aldo. Tell me and I will then tell you. It had to do with the nature of the other person and my experience with his male sex and my husband. I was also thinking about certain kinds of power.”
If nothing else, Monday’s event will be a reminder of the power of two artists in conversation, and will remind people that a technology that most people now carry in their pockets was once a field of trial and error. Smartphones and tablets aren’t used any differently today, and they are still best for one-on-one communication, Posner noted.
“This has been a real thrill for me personally,” Posner said. He wanted to honor Sheridan and Tambellini, while he still can. Neither is in perfect health. At some point, the words and images that passed between them will have to suffice.
Cine Salon’s Picturephone Primitives takes place from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Monday in the Mayer Room of Hanover’s Howe Library. The event, which will include a screening of the original Picturephone event, is free and open to the public.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
