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MillimeterHypnotized by Feedback
May 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
The artists of FeedBuck Galore take realtime video mixing to
another level with their live performances and installations.
FeedBuck Galore is a multimedia production company known for its video installation art, video projections, and video mixing. Since 1993, founders Buck and Missy Galore have spun their eclectic fusion of video from the lower Manhattan art scene out to the international arena.
They have performed and created installations at Woodstock '99, the Berlin Biennial, the Warhol Museum, and the New York Historical Society. They have also worked with musicians as diverse as Neil Young, Moby, Elvis Costello, Prodigy, and Philip Glass.
VS: What type of work does FeedBuck Galore do?
Buck: We specialize in live events. We set up big projectors and do multimedia shows, but our specialty is we mix live. We have three or four cameramen, all the graphics, videotape, and we mix it in realtime.
VS: What kind of mixing board do you use?
Buck: I use a really simple Panasonic MX-30 mixing board that had a bunch of improvements made for it by a company out in California called RealTime Video Engineering. They do all these updates on these boards for video artists. The MX-30 has three inputs. We use a matrix switcher so that we can have up to 16 inputs.
VS: So what kind of mixing do you do?
Buck: We started out as psychedelic video artists, so we do a lot of feedback in our work. We're pretty free-form. It's sort of the same idea as when they direct a television show, only we don't do it anything like television. It's not really tailored to be a final show.
Usually we're mixing for a live crowd, though a lot of our stuff has been broadcast. For Woodstock '99 we broadcast the whole thing over the Internet, which was a real cool deal for us. We did the dance part of it — the late night. So we had a couple of Sony Jumbotrons and some big video projectors. It was all being broadcast, but we weren't really doing it for the broadcast. Our main thing is to read the live crowd.
VS: What are the differences from and similarities to directing for live TV?
Buck: It's similar in that we're hooked up to a bunch of cameramen, we're telling them the shots, and taking them — just like they would do the news or any other kind of live thing. One difference is that we don't use final monitors. We see what's happening on the videoscreen at the same time the crowd does. We do have monitors that show us what our cameramen are doing, where our tape sources are at, but we're mixing everything on the fly.
Also, we're not confined by the format of television. There's no built-in commercials, there's no issues of quality. On TV, every frame has to be broadcast quality. But we're not doing broadcast quality, so it gives us a lot of freedom to do stuff that I think, to regular television people, would be abhorrent. I'm looking at my gear right now that I use to mix in my house. I have a proc amp that cost $3 at the Salvation Army, a Sony effects unit that cost $50 new.
VS: What do you do with a $3 processing amp?
Buck: We do the opposite of what most people would do. Most people use a proc amp to calm down a signal that's too hot so it looks more like regular TV. We pump the colors up. We're mainly using video projectors, so they don't have the dynamic of monitors. They're not as bright, so we're pumping the color.
VS: Can you briefly describe your career and what led you to what you're doing now?
Buck: I started out in 1989 doing public access television. I had a partner. We covered the avant-garde music scene. We were moderately successful — about as successful as you can be in public access. Then my partner moved to California to pursue a television career. So I had all the video equipment, and I was tired of going to nightclubs every night and filming bands. So I just started playing with the video cameras and my television and doing all these different, weird feedback effects.
VS: How do you do a feedback effect through your VCR?
Buck: At first I started out just with the camera, by plugging it into the TV and pointing it at the television. When you make a loop like that, you can change the color, you can change the shapes, all by moving the camera and the focus and shutter speed. I played with that about six or eight months, and figured out that what I wanted to do was mix two images together. That's where mixing boards come in, because they have time-based correction where you can mix two signals together.
Once I had my first really simple mixing board, I found out you can make a loop through your VCR by plugging the input and the output into the mixing board. And what that does is give you these bands of different moving colors. That, mixed with the camera feedback, started the whole art project. In the beginning, I was doing this just as a hobby. Then someone asked me to do this behind their band. That's how my career started.
VS: On your company's website, feedbuckgalore.com , you talk about making landscapes and environments. Can you describe them?
Buck: We did a big dinner party for the fall festival of the New York Historical Society. They wanted to bring fall into one of their main gallery spaces. So we went to the mountains and shot tons of changing-leaf video, and then we video-projected it all over the walls of the room really, really slowly.
It was sort of lighting, but if you looked closely you could see that it was actually trees and leaves and colors changing. We shined it on walls, and we used big scrims that you could stretch over any space, big Spandex scrims. So we can really change the architecture of the rooms. I really like working that way. A lot of times, just because of logistics — we do big shows — we're trapped into using just rectangular screens just because of the format of the spaces. What we like to do is create the whole place, and we can do that really well with just stretch cloth and plastics and multilayer screens.
VS: How do you use plastics?
Buck: We use big sheets of white plastic, and we split it into 4-inch strips and make projection screens that people can walk through. One of the reasons we use plastic is because it's translucent — it doesn't stop the light at all. We figure we get double play, because it reads from both sides of the screen. Anything video will shine on, we'll use.
We do a yearly Fourth of July fireworks for a church in upstate New York. We actually use as our videoscreen an abandoned four-story hotel. Everybody rolls out their lawn chairs and sits on the lawn, and we do a video fireworks on the side of this building. That's the kind of stuff we pursue, the kind of stuff we love to do.
VS: When you say you perform, what does that entail?
Buck: I consider when we do the mixing, that's performance art. I'm there and I feed off the crowd. I don't make real concrete plans about what my show is going to be. It pretty much just happens live on the spot. Woodstock is a good example. They have a big stage for the DJ. They have a big stage for me. It's like being a DJ. You have to read the crowd. You keep trying to raise people to another level.
VS: What is your particular affinity for video? What does it do for you that no other format could do?
Buck: I was born in the early '50s. When they rolled that first TV into my house, I was hypnotized. I was raised by TV. If I went to see the Beatles, and they were standing on stage at Madison Square Garden, and there was a videoscreen over to the left, I'd be looking at the videoscreen. The TV was the major development of my childhood. It's my favorite thing in the world to do.
I've been doing this for 10 years, and every day I'm still playing with it. I have a mixing system set up in my living room in front of my TV. I still learn something every day, especially manipulating feedback. You can't control feedback.
You can influence it, but you can never make it do the same thing twice. There are so many components of what makes things feed back. There's this whole chaos theory: The big loop that is the universe is pretty much a big feedback loop, so I am still totally hypnotized by the feedback.
Darroch Greer writes, produces, and directs documentaries for PBS, Discovery, The History Channel, and VH1. He is currently directing Time of Hunger, a documentary on hunger in America.
Feedback
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