Carol Goss

Biography

Started the Not Still Art Video Festival in the spring of 1996.

A background in theater and music and a family of performing jazz musicians. Early on, she got involved in directing theater for television and was interested in using video for live performance. After a negative experience working with film in which she vowed to never again work with film, Carol turned to video and decided to document a musical performance by William Burroughs and Paul Bley. She later met Nam June Paik who suggested she check out the Experimental Television Center. That was in 1974. The fascination with the pixel began there at the center. Driven away from linear, narrative content, she investigated the visual possibilities of the video medium. The mandala-like quality of some of the imagery created a kind of spiritual significance for her which still holds interest for her. No stranger to theater, Carol became interested in using video in performance. She started the Improvising Artists group with the mission of recording music and video. They would record LP's of avant garde jazz and would set up video synthesizers at the same time and improvise along with the music. A few years later in 1977 they set up a performance of jazz and video at Axis-in-Soho in New York with Walter Wright on video, and Sun Ra and his Arkestra doing music, along with Paul Bley and Glen Moore.

Quotations

"What distinguishes performance from other contexts where you can work. One of the things that distinguishes live performance is that it's collaborative. It doesn't have to be collaborative. But if you use music as a kind of template, jazz in particular which has a hundred year history of improvisation on stage in front of audiences, it's considered a conversation."

"Magic is what you can't figure out. The things I still like doing with old tech are the things that I can't figure out. For example, everyone speaks glowingly of the Paik/Abe, because it did things that no one knew how it did it. Things it wasn't supposed to be able to do."

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