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Mom and Dad

Phil Morton

1972 00:32:44 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:31/2" open reel video
Tags:
Family, Image Processing, The Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive

Description

Mom and Dad highlights causal conservations between Phil and his parents around family life, road trips, and camping in an interview-like setting, where his parents sit against a plain brick wall facing the cameras. Phil gives a live-demonstration of the image processor to his parents. His minimalistic approach to processing implies a laid back family time instead of his pursuit of an artful, finished product.

Phil’s dad starts by blowing into the microphone repeatedly, demonstrating how media tools’ capability to amplify one’s physical, visual, and aural existence. Media tools raise awareness of self-existence through interactions and engagements. As Phil’s parents talk about their visit to an RV manufacturing plant, they also respond to seeing themselves on a monitor. 

The latter portion features only conversations between Phil and his parents without image processing. Towards the end, Phil jumps in and points at a 7-UP bottle that he was holding, and says “7-UP commercial” out of the blue, amusing his parents and viewers. It’s an indication that they, and likely many other video artists, were familiar with marketing techniques in mass media.

–Gordon Dic-Lun Fung

For more information, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive page. 

The date for this title is approximate. 

About Phil Morton

Phil Morton (1945-2003) received degrees in art education and fine arts from Penn State and Purdue. He began teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969. Within a year, he had established the first video department in the country to offer both BA and MFA degrees in video production. In subsequent years Morton continued to expand the media resources and educational opportunities at the School of the Art Institute, establishing the Video Data Bank as a collection of videotaped presentations and interviews with artists in 1972.

In collaboration with Dan Sandin, Morton distributed plans for the Image Processor (IP), a modular video synthesizer based on the Moog audio synthesizer. In 1974, he established "P-Pi's" or the Pied Piper Interactioning System, a cable TV station in South Haven, Michigan. He was the sole proprietor of his own independent video production company, Greater Yellowstone News, which published, among other things, video news tapes of the wildlife and people of the Greater Yellowstone area, many of which were shown on Tom Weinberg's PBS program The '90s.

Many of the titles listed here are also part of the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive (PMMRA), which was established in 2007 by artist and scholar jonCates to coordinate and freely distribute Morton’s Media Art work and associated research under Morton’s COPY-IT-RIGHT license. In 2023, jonCates donated the PMMRA to Video Data Bank. In honor of Morton's COPY-IT-RIGHT philosophy, all titles on VDB's website are available to watch for free. Visit a title’s artwork page to view. For more information and to access the full list of available titles related to PMMRA, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive Collection page. 

The titles listed on this page are videos produced by Morton. To view the list of titles only created and collected by Morton's students and collaborators, visit the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive artist page.