Rutt Etra Prototype Using Max/Jitter

Synthesized video was inspired by 1960s music synthesizers like the Moog. Early video image processing strategies “sought to subvert the traditional broadcast television image and attempted ‘to conjure up the new realities associated with hallucinogenic drugs’” (Meigh-Andrews, 112). Video Art pioneer Nam June Paik teamed up with Electrical Engineer Shuya Abe in 1969 to produce the Paik-Abe Synthesizer. Dubbed, ‘The Wobbulator’, analog equipment such distorted the television signal with oscillators connected directly to the Cathode Ray Tube of a standard CRT monitor. So, to even record the distortion from these early devices you would have to point a camera at the screen. NTSC wasn’t around quite yet. A Paik/Abe Wobbulator is available at the Experimental Television Center’s International Summer Workshop.

The Rutt/Etra is an analog video synthesizer created in 1973 by Bill Etra and Steve Rutt. “‘The input video brightness connects to the vertical position control. This causes brighter parts of the video to ‘pull’ the raster lines upward. When combined with other synthetic waveforms, the raster forms a three dimensional contour map when video brightness determines elevation (126). The image above is from a Vasulka work.

Here is a selection of images of the Rutt/Etra and a very brief history.

Max/MSP/Jitter is nothing more than a digital/virtual representation of the analog past. A search of the Cycling ’74 discussion forums reveals that the jit.gl.render.grid.pat located in Max/examples/jitter-examples/render/ can easily be modified to appear like a digital equivalent to the Rutt/Etra. The only problem to overcome to to replicate the soft edges of the original Rutt/Etra. Analog video synthesis has a certain crude beauty to it. Vade is already on top of making a virtual Rutt/Etra video Synthesizer using Quartz Composer. I thought I’d start working on this as a side project in Max/MSP. Click the link below and copy and paste the code into Max. You will need a firewire camera or replace the jit.qt.grab object at the top with a jit.qt.movie object.

Rutt/Etra Prototype Max Patch

Bibliography

Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art. New York: Berg, 2006.