Stephen Beck Illuminated Music 2 3 (1973)

Director: Stephen Beck Year: 1973 Time: 28 mins Music: Warner Jepson A classic in audiovisual experimentation, Illuminated Music was a series of live performances by Stephen Beck (visuals) and Warner Jepson (music) in which the artists reworked premade compositions directly before an audience. While electronic video adventures were still a novelty, live experiments, both in the visual and musical arenas, were even rarer. Beck used the Direct Video Synthesizer, designed by himself, which so the narrator claims allowed him to control precisely the visual output in the performance (the myth of control in electronic media) and, still noteworthy at the time, to create pictures without a camera.