[John Hansen, 1998]
John Hansen is an example of someone who came to art through an interest in electronics, someone whose training afforded him the technological skills but whose fascinations brought him into the arts. He was born in Denmark (in 1946) where his father had built radio transmitters and receivers for the Danish Resistance during WWII and subsequently worked in cinemas building and maintaining sound systems. The family immigrated to Australia when he was six years old and moved to the small town of Hayfield in rural Victoria where his father set up a radio repair shop.
The atmosphere of the country town gave him
“a lot of freedom in what I was doing. I was building crystal sets when I was eleven years old, and taking [the] motor off the motor mower and putting it on my billy-cart and getting nine months probation for running it round the roads. I bought my first transistor in 1958 and promptly blew it up two minutes after getting home. But it was a fertile environment and... it was better to be in the country doing the sorts of things that I was doing.” [1]
He grew up surrounded by electronics and it was only natural that he would end up studying the subject. After looking at the possibilities he elected to study Communications Engineering at RMIT in Melbourne because it offered the more practical course. At seventeen he moved to Melbourne, living in South Yarra and then Carlton, and got caught up in the “sixties wave””. [2]
In 1967 he took a job at the PMG Research Laboratories 3] which, Hansen commented, “had the best equipped electronic labs in the Southern Hemisphere”. [4] He worked there for two years while finishing his degree part-time and graduated in 1968.
While at the PMG Hansen was turned on to electronic music after attending a seminar led by the composer Keith Humble at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne University.[5] He met the maverick jazz musician and inventor Steve Dunstan there, and found a friend who had an almost freakish skill in making electronic circuits for producing sound. On Dunstan's instigation he started to build electronic music devices such as theremins, white and pink noise generators, and oscillators. But he drifted away from electronic sound into visuals and shortly after finishing his studies began doing liquid lightshows at Melbourne University Union rock-and-roll nights with Hugh McSpedden of the Edison Light Company. These “encompassed lots of liquids and oils and Polaroid filters and sticky-tape and that evolved into motors that turned these things and sequenced and strobe lights and all this type of thing.”[6]
He built motorised coloured oil/water devices that were driven by stepper motors. Hansen elaborates:
“When I met Hugh McSpedden, he was already doing lightshows. ... He was doing them with Eddie van der Madden and I sort of came on board, I had a projector, 35mm Liesegang single slide at a time projector. It was my father’s and it’s still downstairs, still gets used. While I was at PMG Research Labs ... I was involved in building a chart recorder that was dynamic enough to [give] large decibel swings but sensitive enough to do small resolution steps. It was a thing we were designing from the ground up, using stepper motors, and I actually built a stepper motor driver circuit and had a stepper motor driving a cylindrical oil and water filled perspex wheel that I sat in where the slide holder would go and so made liquid lightshows like that and also driving Polaroid filters around and sticky tape type things. We predominantly did Melbourne University Union nights and T.F. Much Ballroom days.” 7]
Eddie went to Sydney (to work with Roger Foley (Fogg)) and Hugh continued doing lightshows and I must have come across the Guerrilla Television (1971) book I think. That was probably what started to put me in that direction.[8]
Discos were a dirty word at this period yet lightshows, and the paraphernalia that became so much a part of the disco scene, began with these rock concerts, and were also used in new very smart nightclubs. Later, in 1972, Hansen was commissioned to do the interior for a night club called Space Place which was on the first floor of the London Hotel in Elizabeth St, Melbourne.
Fig.1: A pair of photographs of the Space Place installation by Hansen. [Courtesy: John Hansen]
In 1969 Hansen had taken a position as a professional officer in the electronics workshop at the Zoology Department at Monash University. His work there involved image enhancement and analysis systems for use with video microscopy – low light-level stuff – and miniature tracking devices using LEDs with telemetry transmitters to locate, track and record physical data from unrestrained nocturnal animals. [9]
“At Monash I was monitoring animal movements and biometrics and building little transmitters to put on animals to track them in the bush and for the nocturnal ones I put little light emitting diodes (LEDs) on them which was a new phenomenon in those days. And I thought "well this is pretty good, we could use this as jewellery", so I started making electronic jewellery.” [10]
The zoologists also used video equipment to record animal behaviour and this gave him his first access to video recording equipment.
Hansen’s experience with stepper-motors at the PMG Research Laboratories, in building computer-controlled microscope tables at Monash, [11] and his general interest in electronics equipped him to build kinetic sculptures. The catalogue for his 1974 Bonython Gallery (Sydney) exhibition of electronic jewellery [12] notes that he showed kinetic sculpture in a 1970 Captain Cook Bicentenary Celebrations sculpture exhibition [but doesn’t say where this was held] and in 1973 he built a major piece for an exhibition of “Outdoor Art” held by the Melbourne Herald newspaper in Fitzroy Gardens (Feb, Mar 1973) [<13]
“That was a three foot diameter, hexagonal, extruded shaped perspex that sat on a chrome stand and was about four foot high, a little top heavy. Inside [it] had 12-volt bulbs on epicycloidal rotating mechanisms coming towards the perspex and going away. ... I had the perspex fabricated and it was too large to fit in the house when I was living in Wattletree Road... So I had it out in the front garden. When the perspex arrived I bolted it to everything else and had it sitting there. I had a room in the back of the house and that night I had this dream that there was an aeroplane crash in the front of the house. Somebody came running in in the morning and woke me up and said “John, John, your sculpture's fallen over, it's all broken” and I said “yeah I know”. I have that sort of connectivity with things I make. It was actually Walter Fisher who inspired me to just get another one made, and I did, and exhibited that.” [14]
Here was a young engineer with an insatiable curiosity for the electronics he was working with, doing lightshows with Hugh McSpedden’s Edison Light Company, living in the experimental music and art underground, and with the drive to experiment, to build all sorts of derivatives from the things he was using at work. His use of video at Monash, like just about everything he touched, showed him more ways that he could explore the audio-visual synchrony that formed the aesthetic mainstay of the experimental subculture of the time. He also came across the book Guerilla Television [15] and video became a major interest.
“And then that first video thing [Melbourne Access Video and Media Cooperative (MAVAM)] started up [June 1974] in Drummond Street, the forerunner of Open Channel, and I actually got involved with that for a little while. I didn't really like the democracy of the whole meeting format, all that stuff was rather boring, but the video equipment that they were aspiring to, and did indeed get from grants and things, was quite novel. And thinking about it that's probably where the progression took off. It was fairly hectic in those days, in terms of living, and once I came to Selby and was in one spot and working at Monash, I think the tyranny of distance was another reason for not continuing with [the] MAVAM situation.” [16]
All of which eventually led to his exploration of the electronic generation of images. Again he began by producing lissajous figures only this time using a modified TV set. The circuit, with which a technician could modify the deflection coils on a TV thus making the electron spot move around the screen under electronic oscillator or audio signal control, was based on a TV Oscilloscope circuit that had been published in Practical Electronics in 1968.[17] It led to Hansen's first electronic image generating device, c.1971. He
“modified a television set, black and white, of course, valve even, into an x, y and z – z modulating the intensity – type oscilloscope. Used all my audio synthesisers, ring modulation and this sort of thing to drive this television set. Problem was it was black and white so, to make it colour, I built a cinemoid filter wheel, bolted it in front of it and spun that at 1500rpm with a washing machine motor, synchronised it and got beautiful colour images on the screen. Eventually the thing smashed. It fortunately didn't kill anybody, I think we were all lying on the floor at the time, and that sort of defined an era of visual synthesis that was black and white, mechanically made to colour.[17] The x,y principle I also used in static drawings and building drawing machines which would do this sort of thing.”[18]
“At that point I formed Cybernetic Synergy and I got a Sales Tax number and the first thing I purchased was the washing machine motor to drive the colour wheel, and it was the first time anyone had purchased an electric motor like this with a Sales Tax exemption and the tax man came knocking at the door, the next day almost, and I got a rapid lesson about Sales Tax.”[19]
Mechanical analogues of this gear had been experimented with since the late 19th century and Hansen also applied the same principles to static drawings [Fig.2] by building a harmonograph which
“was a mechanical drawing machine which worked on pendulums and weights that were moveable to various positions to create different harmonics, and once set in motion that would scribe its way round till it came to rest and produced some very interesting patterns.” [20]
Fig.2: Pen and ink drawings made with the mechanical harmonograph. [Courtesy: John Hansen]
His work at Monash with LEDs had an important impact for Hansen when he realised that these little flashing lights that used almost no battery power would make great jewellery and began to make pieces for his friends [Fig.3].
“The electronic jewellery dropped in there as another spin-off from the Monash things. I'd actually put a LED on a nocturnal animal to track it at night-time. I can't think of where flashing lights might spark a memory! [he says with a smile] And so that put a bit of a hiatus on the video audio-visual thing and the jewellery was fairly prominent there from at least 70-71-72 was when I was peaking with that stuff having exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney.[21]
He showed these to Marianne Bailleau who had established Realities Gallery in Melbourne. The gallery was showing kinetic sculpture and abstract painting and had also shown a collection of Optronic Kinetics’ work. She took an interest in the jewellery while also commissioning Hansen to produce some electronic sculpture introducing him to a Toorak interior designer, Tibor Hubay,
“who had the job of renovating a hotel [22] in Elizabeth Street, [Melbourne] first floor, and it was called the Space Place. I had to make three electronic sculptures for that. ... One piece was a five foot diameter steel moire-pattern wheel turning in a big perspex frame with all these lights sound modulating. Then another piece, a wall mounted piece, was a two foot cylinder of laterally placed perspex rods behind which were a patchwork of cinemoid filters. You know you used to get those sample [books] of cinemoid, we were cutting squares out of that to make a patchwork of it. Behind that were rows of two foot flouros so as the perspex turned they cast distortions. It was quite nice actually.” [23]
“There's some very interesting footage of that [shot by] John Hughes who was making a film on me. We did the [mechanical] harmonograph up in the shed and then we went to Space Place a couple of days after it was opened and did all that. There's actually some interesting shots of the construction of that stuff which all occurred in the lounge room.” [24] [This is the film Cybernetic Synergy.]
Hansen then had exhibitions at Realities Gallery in Melbourne and later at Bonython Gallery in Sydney, (24 May – 15 June 1974), [25] which were quite successful and nearly began a career in making electronic jewellery.
Fig.3: Electronic jewellery using LEDs made by Hansen [Courtesy: John Hansen]
But becoming a manufacturer was not the direction he wanted to take, being more interested in the electronics than in business. “I came to a crossroads with the whole thing of either mass-producing it or dropping everything else and becoming an electronic jewellery artist and neither of those seemed to really gel.” [26] So he put the jewellery work to one side, and having been interested in electronic music while now being more interested in electronic visuals he began producing light sculptures and colour organs and returned to working with video electronics, which he had commenced in 1971.
Hansen’s video synthesiser
With the self-destruction of the CRT oscilloscope and colour wheel that produced images of modulated audio signals and his discovery of video he found that he could apply the results of his experiments with colour organs to all sorts of circuits which could be modulated in the same way [27] and he applied the techniques to chroma-key effects, colour generation and video feedback. But the most important innovation in Hansen’s synthesiser was his utilisation of the circuit for the [TV Ping]Pong video game, one of the earliest domestic video games. An ad in a popular electronics magazine offered a set of the schematics for the game which Hansen purchased.
“Pong was simply a way of making square pixels slide across the screen and when it hit something, depending on its angle and trajectory and speed it would deflect in a proper fashion in different direction, and using that principle I built up about eight of these and used them to deflect objects or key sources across the screen.” [28]
In 1974 he applied for and received a grant of $5000 from the Australian Council for the Arts to build a video synthesiser. He used the money to buy a colour TV monitor, a Philips NV1500 video cartridge recorder and a Grass Valley mixer with wipes and a chroma-key module. He housed the mixer and all his custom built circuitry – audio filter bank from a “musicolour” kit, the Pong circuits, pattern generators, patch-boards – in a console made from extruded aluminium which
“was bristling with patch panels, knobs and pegboards. Housed in a self-built wrap around console, it was sort of portable.” [29]
The Pong generators could be driven by audio signals so the objects they produced would sail around the screen bouncing off things and, if feedback was being used, trailing streams of coloured feedback that gave most beautiful effects [Fig.4]. Otherwise the synthesiser functioned mostly as a colouriser through which a black and white camera input could be coloured, mixed with patterns, shaded colour ramps, the Pong objects and feedback and then put out as video.
Fig.4: Images made with the Friden video synth Pong circuit and feedback.
[Courtesy: John Hansen]
The whole thing was housed in a Friden calculator [30] which was essentially an electronic calculator with a small CRT display. Hansen stripped out the calculator electronics but retained the housing to which he added more functions by making up circuits that produced patterns and shapes that could be moved around the screen. There was a series of these but one of the most interesting was a modified version of the first video game called Pong. In Hansen's device there were six Pong circuits each of which could be moved around the screen and shaped by oscillators and other kinds of electronic sound generators. Selection of sources to outputs was with the matrix board replacing the original small CRT monitor.
Among the early film and video makers in Melbourne was John Hughes who, in 1974, produced Cybernetic Synergy a film about John Hansen and his early electronic visuals and light works that exploited moiré effects. Although it was shot on film its content makes it important to include here as a reminder that video work could be done not only by recording things to tape but it could also be produced live and not pre-recorded.
The synthesiser’s biggest use turned out to be at the Computers and Electronics in the Arts exhibition (curated by Doug Richardson) at Australia '75 in Canberra.
“[Fig.4] is a picture of the video synthesiser, at Australia '75. It was heavy on colourisation as well as audio, and you can see my dulcimer over here, which would modulate the visuals and [the] black and white camera which would be colourised. The console was full of peg boards and everything, of course, real time, live, switching peg boards around to get different sequences, [so the interconnection of circuit modules] that we did at Australia '75 occurred fairly easily with the types of designs that we had in those days.
“The Arts Council, I believe, invited me up as the grant occurred within the previous twelve months of Australia ’75 and the synthesiser was progressed sufficiently to exhibit. I may have told Stevie about it and got him up as well because we ended up with a whole entourage of us went up. I remember there was a big analogue synthesiser there. [the Timbron from UNSW (Harvey Dillon)]. [31]
“I remember we first got there and we were all setting up and we all had our individual spaces, and I was next to Chris Ellyard and Iain Macleod from ANU. They were setting up there. Their PDP-11 and all the monitors were being set up, and Philippa's floors and I don't think there was much real dedicated “you will do this” or “this will happen there”. Everything was very fluid, it just seemed to amalgamate together as a continuous process through the whole show and by the end of it we had some real connectivity between all of us. Particularly between Philippa, Chris and myself. There were some very good cross-connections with Philippa's floors modulating some of my patterns and taking Chris's feed as a video, and I also had a black and white Ikegami camera set up that I fed through and colourised and had a little pegboard and I also had my dulcimer in some fashion as well.” [32]
Fig.5: Hansen's video syntheiser set up at Australia 75.
[Courtesy: John Hansen]
Ellyard had a frame store made in ferrite cores attached to the PDP-11. So Hansen was providing camera throughput and colourisation and patterns and things and they going through his synthesiser.
The 2nd generation: a microprocessor-controlled video synthesiser
In 1977 Hansen bought a microprocessor chip, with which he designed and built a computer graphic system that was fully compatible with broadcast quality colour television.
“The video synthesiser provided a lot of valuable experience and created live imagery, and sort of got superseded because there [were] microprocessors coming out and the potentials of what these things could do was so enticing that the moment they were available I bought one and started to think “well how can I make this into a video synthesiser?” First thing I had to do was build myself a keyboard and a terminal display. I built these up... the terminal display was able to be synched to the video so I could use that terminal, 32 characters by 18 rows, all capital letters. I could synchronise that and mix it in with my video.
Fig.4: The Friden calculator conversion to a video synthesiser. [Courtesy: John Hansen]
“The next task I had was really to build a box for this thing. The concept of having a video memory was worked out and the computer had 1K of RAM, it actually came with 256 bytes of RAM and I upgraded it to 1K. The programs were all written in assembler, hand typed in, debugged in the RAM and then burned into EPROM. 4K of program we ended up with. The video memory was 128 pixels by 128 pixels by 4 bits per pixel, 16 colours, and that I made up from an 8K S-100 Buss board that I bought and interfaced to the system. I experimented with a lot of innovative input-output tools. I had a light pen on the system and just before this system got retired I actually made an audio cassette zero-crossing detection modulation data-storage for it so I could actually put my programs onto magnetic media and reload them without having to type them in, that was quite an innovation.
This was what became known as the Friden Video Computer. It used an Intel 8080 microprocessor development kit with 256 bytes RAM as the main processor. It was built into a Friden electronic calculator case which used a Multibus motherboard same as 8080 kit. Hansen attached a keyboard and 32 characters by 16 rows character generator display which was genlocked to video synchs (i.e., the video display for the Friden video synth was locked to the video syncs of a source camera). The graphics memory was 128 x 128 pixels at four bits deep so that it could show 16 colours per pixel using 8Kbytes of static RAM made up of 64 memory chips. Input video was digitised with a Computer Labs analogue to digital converter (costing $1100) which was the size of a block of chocolate and needed to be bolted to a large heatsink.[33] Mixing of video, character generator and computer memory graphics display was done via push-button actuated sequences and pegboards.
Fig.4: The Friden calculator conversion to a video synthesiser. [Courtesy: John Hansen]
“The box that I ended up putting this thing in deserves a bit of interest. You can see here the keyboard, all that keyboard I made up myself. This box was actually an electronic calculator (the Friden) from the early sixties, it had a cathode ray tube in here for the display which had twelve digits on it, and it was one of the first calculators purchased at Monash University and they were chucking it out so I said "well, I'll have it". So I ripped it apart and found that the Intel microprocessor board was exactly the same size as the single transistor boards that had been in this system, and everything fitted in very nicely. Although I ended up cutting some of the original boards out and aralditing the S-100 board in there, and making up my own buss structure. I had direct memory access, for the technical people, to the video memory, switching in to the processor access during vertical blanking. And with great amounts of saving up I bought an $1100 analogue-to-digital converter which gave me the ability to take digitised video and add that to the whole mix. This was a block about this big which had to be bolted onto a large piece of aluminium because of the heat that it dissipated, and of course these it days would be about that big and cost about $50.
“The types of things I was doing with this synthesiser were a lot of live stuff and then also static pattern generated things. We found it particularly attractive as a performance machine because of its live capabilities of streaming video in. A lot of the processes that are now all programmable I had on little push buttons and peg-boards and it was very easy to make up sequences and let this thing run and to have live performance with it. We did various pop clips with it, the Jo-Jo Zep thing, installations at Adelaide Arts Festival. People like Robert [Randall] and Frank [Bendinelli] would come and utilise it for some of their video pieces. I called it also my tapestry phase because a lot of the programming that I did with it was concerned with a level of quadrilateral symmetry and random object generation and using Boolean logic functions and exclusive or-ing. It was possible for this machine to just chug away and just produce its own patterns at random. These are some of the examples.” [Synthetics transcript '98]
Fig.5: 4 frames produced with Hansen's video synth [Courtesy: John Hansen]
Computer art prize
“In 1980 the International Federation for Information Processing had its convention in Australia. As part of this they offered a computer art prize, so I thought "well this is me." I took images off the screen with a 35mm camera and we were allowed to put in a maximum of three entries. So I collected three shots and had them blown up, submitted them. Well they liked them that much that they gave them all equal first prize so they could keep them all. And what the world thought of computer art in those days was $500, the world prize.” [34]
Fig.6: One of Hansen's computer art prize images on the cover of
Pacific Computer Weekly trade journal. [Courtesy: John Hansen]
Then in 1982 Hansen’s company developed a display list driven 2D Graphics and Paint system, called Conjure. The concept for its development came from the traditional CAD type system. It was one of the first Computer Graphic Design and Presentation Graphics Packages in the world, and had installations in Australia, Canada, the United States, Japan, and Europe.
The first version of Conjure was written in C and ran on a Z80 based microcomputer under the CPM Operating System. Images were built up by specifying the start and end points for lines, the centre and radius for circles, and diagonal points of a rectangle, etc. Objects could be filled with a flat colour or shaded colour across a range of the palette of 256 colours available in any one image. Palette colours were selected from a possible 4096 colours. Stepping through a sequence of pixel value to colour palette gave a form of animation.
The system included a digitising pad and pen, with a menu and drawing area on the pad surface gave accurate drawing control. It could also digitise and grab video images, which could be coloured and overlaid with drawn images or text characters. Images were then converted for video output with the Number Nine Corp display card, or for 35mm slide output through a film-recorder.
They then designed
- a satellite data to video image storage system for the Bureau of Meteorology.
- the Western Australia Fire Brigade Mapping System.
- Various Broadcast Television Applications including Federal Election Graphics with live data feed from the Electoral Computer, Keno Number Display System and Various Game Show Multi-screen display Systems.
- An Integrated Network Display of AAP Reuters Information for Money Market Dealing Rooms.
- and the Telecom Network Traffic Management System. [4]
