David Stout

Biography

David Stout, who studied with Ed Emshwiller, works with interactive media forms in a synthesis of dynamic visual, music and audio elements and machine performances. In using feedback and closed circuit structures in his interactive video-noise-performances, David Stout relates to the early videographic concept of noise at the level of digital manipulation of raw material in the computer. He states, “My recent work in interactive installation and chaotic video performance shares a common origin in the use of video noise as the primary visual element. A simple definition of video noise is ‘a random grouping of black and white pixels changing position 25–30 times a second.’ I have subjected this ‘visual noisefield’ to a range of digital image processes to produce an array of images and sounds. One process common to all works shown here is the use of feedback. Those familiar with this technique will remember the early video experiments of the late 60s and early 70s, which produced a rich body of recursive visual phenomena that has been subsequently dismissed for its cheap hallucinatory allusions; nonetheless, feedback circuits have proven an important means of illustrating the dynamic principles of theoretical chaos and suggest the potential power of artificially intelligent sound-image engines.” (David Stout, unpublished notes). Like Steina, David Stout uses the software Image/ine (developed by Steina and Tom Demayer in 1997) to manipulate signal processes in the computer in order to create feedback loops of interacting sound and image.