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Barbara Buckner 芭芭拉．巴克納
Barbara Buckner: Selected Works Ⅰ—Heads 芭芭拉．巴克納：選作（一）──頭
1979
The American artist Barbara Buckner began experimenting with video and computer technologies in the early 1970s. Selected Works I is a compilation of three videos—Hearts, Heads, and Millennia—that develop a visual language marked by symbolism, repetition, and distortion. Buckner used electronic image-processing techniques to evoke and explore what she has described as ‘spiritual undercurrents’. All three works in Selected Works I are silent, focusing attention on their visual rhythms.
Heads is a nearly six-minute single-channel video made in 1979.Buckner completed the image processing at the Experimental Television Center, an early hub for video art located in a town north-west of New York City. The work opens by presenting a series of human and animal heads. By manipulating the video signal, including through the use of the chroma key technique, Buckner obscures, multiplies, and exaggerates the features of these portraits. As the video closes, the figures become less recognisable as either animal or human, and several abstract, geometric elements appear. In a 1985 interview, Buckner explained Heads as depicting ‘the mental activity of various kinds of beings’. This undefined, metaphysical sensibility is characteristic of her practice.
Heads is a nearly six-minute single-channel video made in 1979.Buckner completed the image processing at the Experimental Television Center, an early hub for video art located in a town north-west of New York City. The work opens by presenting a series of human and animal heads. By manipulating the video signal, including through the use of the chroma key technique, Buckner obscures, multiplies, and exaggerates the features of these portraits. As the video closes, the figures become less recognisable as either animal or human, and several abstract, geometric elements appear. In a 1985 interview, Buckner explained Heads as depicting ‘the mental activity of various kinds of beings’. This undefined, metaphysical sensibility is characteristic of her practice.
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