"As it is, our perception of things is a circuit unable to admit a great
variety of new sensations all at once. Human perception is best suited
to slow modifications of routine behaviour."

–George Kubler

A communication system is for sending and receiving messages. A
communication system consists of two transceivers; two components that
transmit and receive messages. A communication system is limited when
the message is sent in only one direction, transmitter to receiver. This
limited system can be expanded by integrating a processing system at the
receiver end to provide access to the message. A processing system
permits special treatment of the message at the receiver end of the
communications system. The computer-processing system described in this
text is specifically designed to manipulate the message transmitted to
the two-dimensional surface of the video screen. The message source is
a commercial television broadcast. The message is limited to display on
the flat surface of the video screen. An analogy is formed between
processing the video message and the act of painting. This processing
system provides personal choice of how the message source is viewed, in
the same way the painter chooses to view the environment through his or
her method or style of painting. This system is labelled the ASCPS.

Style is a phenomenon of perception governed by the coincidence of
certain physical conditions.

The ASCPS is constructed of information obtained from every major
historically innovative treatment of the two-dimensional surface. The
system contains the concise history of painting. By block encoding
historically successful modes of sensing, the system contains a set of
period visions. These period visions are methods of seeing the
environment. They are rule-governed styles for processing messages. The
rules are those instituted by schools of painting dominating particular
periods of history. At this time, period visions contained by the system
are Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Impressionism, Action Painting,
Arabesque, Art Nouveau, Automatism, Barbizon School, Baroque, Bio-
Morphic, Cartoon, Classic, Colour-Field, Cubism, Dada, Danube School,
Divisionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Gothic (Late and
International), Group of Seven, History Painting, Hudson River School,
Impressionism, London Group, Mannerism, Neo- Classic, Neo-Impressionism,
Optical, Orphic Cubism, Painterly Abstraction, Photo-Realism,
Pointillism, Post-Impressionism, Primitive, Rayonism, Realism,
Renaissance, Rococo, Romanist, Romantic, Social Realism, Super-Realism,
Suprematism, Surrealism, Synthetism, Tenebrism, and Vorticism.

The vision circuit for each period contains additional processing
characteristics. These simulate decisions of individual artists
contained by schools of painting or period visions. The capacity of each
period vision-processing circuit depends on sensitive patterning of
physical conditions marking the consistent vision. Fine adjustment
control of contrast, brightness, colour, and form open the end of each
processing channel. The viewer fine-tunes a wide band of processed
message, attaining authorship of the message. The commercial cable
television system provides structure for immediate integration of the
ASCPS in the home viewing system. The ASCPS consists of a centrally
located computer with remote control units functioning as switching
devices, which afford access to the processing circuits of the system.
Passing the message through a chosen period vision is accomplished by
switching in the desired circuit by push-button selection on the remote
control unit.

Application of the ASCPS: The message is the broadcast of a network news
program. The information is in colour with low interference. The viewer
decides to process the message with the period vision labelled Rayonism.
Rayonism was an abstract Russian movement stylistically between Futurism
and Abstract Expressionism. Mikhail Larionov, an instructor at the
University of Moscow, published the Rayonist manifesto in 1913. This
selection is made on the remote-control unit. While passing through the
processing circuit, the message form is disintegrated to simulate the
radiation of lines of force emanating from the objects in the news
program. Important artists having this period vision are Mikhail
Larionov and Natalia Gontcharova. The viewer chooses to understand
Rayonism through Larionov's vision. This processing circuit is switched
in through a selection made on the control unit. Larionov's vision is
nonobjective. Visually, the news program is processed into a pure
abstraction, with objects becoming new forms as they disintegrate into
radiating colours. Fine-tuning controls permit control of colour and
contrast with Larionov's radiations.

The ASCPS is introduced to provide the best possible system for the
study of the history of painting. The system provides a previously
unattained view of the artist's systematic attempts to attain efficient
communication through the two-dimensional channel. The system simulates
the collective visual experience of recorded history and offers choice
of vision to the one-way communication system of commercial broadcast
television. The viewer, in implementing historically incoherent methods
of sensing on a contemporary message, can introduce message
equivocation; that is, uncertain knowledge about the transmitted message
when the received message is known. Uncertainty of message increases
with degrees of image latency, the time interval between image and
response or understanding. Message latency is abstraction.

The ASCPS is a stochastic system. That is, its output is in part
dependent on random or unpredictable events. Total randomness of message
produces monotony, a sense of sameness. Period vision-processing
circuits pattern and structure the message. The structure provides a
familiar visual language allowing new sensations to be perceived through
contrast. By processing an available random message, broadcast
television, the two-dimensional output of this communication system
becomes a highly structured moving image with a degree of
unpredictability.

The completion and integration of the ASCPS into the existing cable
television system effectively surrounds (contains) the history of
painting. Expansion of the methods of communication depends on
technological invention. Components of this video-processing computer
system are being designed and tested by technological artists in
scattered communities around the globe.

+ + +

Epigraph from George Kubler, _The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History
of Things_, Yale University Press (New Haven and London), pg. 123-124.

Published in _Cultural Engineering_, Willard Holmes (ed.), National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Winter 1983; and in _Ingenierie
culturelle_, translation by Helene Papineau, Willard Holmes (ed.),
N.G.C., Ottawa, Ontario, Winter 1983; and in _Videation_ (Richmond,
Virginia): published by Bob Martin at Virginia Commonwealth University,
Spring 1977; and in _Journal for the Communication of Advanced
Television Studies_ (London, England), Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1974.

[this text will be republished in _Before and After the I-Bomb: An
Artist in the Information Environment_, an anthology of fifty-three of
Tom Sherman's texts to be released by the Banff Centre Press (Banff,
Alberta), May 2002.]