Frank Gillette

Frank Gillette (born in 1941) is an American video and installation artist.

Interested in the empirical observation of natural phenomena, his early work integrated the viewer's image with prerecorded information.

He has been described as a "pioneer in video research [...] with an almost scientific attention for taxonomies and descriptions of ecological systems and environments".

Frank Gillette was born in 1941 in Jersey City, NJ.

He attended Columbia University –dropping out after two years– and studied painting at Pratt Institute in New York –dropping out also after two years.

He lives with the artist Suzanne Anker in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY.

Gillette was one of the first artist to explore video as a vehicle for social and political change.

Described as an "abstract painter turned media activist", Frank Gillette's fascination with Marshall McLuhan's ideas made him connect with Paul Ryan –who was McLuhan's assistant at the Center for Media Understanding at Fordham University in the Bronx.

His seminal work Wipe Cycle –co-produced with Ira Schneider in 1968– is considered one of the first video installations in art history.

Gillette and Schneider exhibited this early "sculptural video installation" in TV as a Creative Medium, the first show in the United States devoted to Video Art.

During the spring of 1968, Ryan facilitated access to four Portapack video cameras, that Gillette (and others) used to make alternative television.

In October 1969, Frank Gillette and Michael Shamberg founded the Raindance Corporation, a "media think-tank [...] that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication.

Raindance Corporation was conceived in 1969 by Frank Gillette to "promote and disseminate ideas about video as a radical alternative to centralized television broadcasting".

In October 1969, Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Louis Jaffe, and Marco Vassi registered Raindance as a Delaware corporation –in an ironic reference to the mainstream organization Rand Corporation.

Raindance was later joined by Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot, who worked producing the publication Radical Software.

Wipe Cycle (1969) is a seminal video installation by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider that transposes present-time demands as a way to disrupt television's one-sided flow of information.

Consider an example of the "earliest uses of real-time closed-circuit video technology in an art gallery", Wipe Cycle "expanded the relation of the audience to the artwork, from passive receptors to actual participants".

In the exhibition TV as a Creative Medium (1969), this installation was constructed in front of an elevator so that each visitor was immediately confronted with his or her image.

The monitors also featured two videotapes and a television program.

The installation made visitors part of the information.

It was programmed in a highly complicated fashion: in four cycles, images wandered from one monitor to another delayed by eight or sixteen seconds, while counter-clockwise a gray light impulse wiped out all of the other images every two seconds.

Gillette and Schneider sought to "create a experience that would break the conventional single-screen TV perspective by providing a complex mix of live images and multiple viewports".

Video, black and white, 20 minutes.

Produced with Paul Ryan.

Video, black and white, sound, 19:25 min.

Taking its title from a scene in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, in which Finnegan awakens from a dream, ''Hark!

Hork!'' evokes natural and subconscious landscapes.

Video, black and white, 138 min.

Six videotape playback decks, one audio deck, 30 television monitors, 10 (h) x 20' (diameter) x 25 minutes.

Six different prerecorded channels of video

information are simultaneously displayed on the monitors, with two different channels displayed on each stack of ten in the illustrated arrangement.

Taking its title from the four consonants of the ancient Hebrew name for God, Tetragramaton contemplates the relationship between man, technology, and ecological systems.

Three-channel video, black and white, 26:00 min each.

Characteristic of much of Gillette's work—which treats video as a field of light, movement and reflection—Muse extends beyond optical sensation to engage the viewer in metaphysical contemplation.

Video, color, sound, 19:00 min.

Originally designed as a three-channel work, Quidditas is a study of Cape Cod's woodland and coastal landscapes.

Frank Gillette is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (1983) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1979), as well as grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (1970, 1972, 1974) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980).

He was artist-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1984-85.

4-channel video, black and white, 20 min each.

Video installation with one CCTV camera, six videotape recorders (two playback prerecorded material and four record and playback time-delay loops), nine television monitors of which one is a receiver, one audio tape deck, and one automatic switcher, 9½ x 8 x 2 ft. Built for the exhibition TV As A Creative Medium, Howard Wise Gallery, New York.