John Hansen b.

  • Artist (Video Artist),
  • Artist (Digital Artist/Designer),
  • Artist (New Media Artist),
  • Artist (Sculptor)
New media artist who has worked across a range of electronic media. His practice has traversed kinetic sculpture, lighting shows and installations, electronic jewellery, video art and electronic sounds art.
Tags: Electronic jewellery, Electronic music, Synthesiser, Video, LED, Computers, Electronic art

“In the 60s we were doing light shows, in the 70s we did video synthesis and in the 80s we did computer graphics.” 1

John Hansen was born in Denmark and emigrated to Australia with his parents when he was six years old. Hansen grew up in the Victorian country town of Hayfield where his father ran the local radio repair shop. He grew up surrounded by electronics, so it was only natural that he wound up studying communications engineering at Royal Melbourne Institute for Technology (RMIT). Hansen’s first job in the field, while still studying, was in the PMG research laboratories (telephones were under the control of the Post Master General’s Department before privatisation]. He graduated in 1968 and took a job in the Zoology Department at Monash University in 1969.

While at RMIT Hansen was introduced to electronic music at a talk by Keith Humble, one of Australia’s first electronic music composers. He met Steven Dunstan at this event and started building noise generators and other electronic sound-making devices including a theremin. This was the Psychedelic era.

Hansen drifted away from electronic sound into visuals, and shortly after finishing his studies began doing liquid light shows at the Melbourne University Union rock and roll nights with Hugh McSpedden of the Edison Light Show Company. He built motorised, coloured oil/water devices that were driven by stepper motors and then built several kinetic sculptures including one for the Captain Cook Bicentenary celebrations in 1970.

Meanwhile, while working at Monash University in the Zoology Department making telemetry equipment to track animals in their wild habitat, Hansen came across the Light Emitting Diode (LED), a new device which had just come onto the electronic market. He added these to the telemetry transmitters he was using so scientists could track the animals at night. Hansen realised these little flashing lights, that used almost no battery power, would make great jewellery so he began making pieces for his friends. He had an exhibition at Realities Gallery in Melbourne, which was quite successful, and almost began a career in making electronic jewellery.

The Zoologists were also using video equipment to record animal behaviour which gave Hansen his first access to video recording equipment. He came across the book Guerrilla Television, which galvanised many artists interested in the media at that stage, and got involved with the Melbourne Access Video and Media Co-op. His active interests in video got the better of him and he began bending electronic sound devices towards electronic visual synthesis. One of his first image-generating machines was based on a circuit for turning a TV into an oscilloscope. He then added a rotating colour wheel in front of the screen which was synchronised to the audio signal to make colour Lissajous figure images.

In 1974 Hansen received a grant from the Film and Television Board of the Australian Council for the Arts to build a video synthesiser. He bought a colour television set, a Philips [video-]cassette recorder and a Grass Valley video mixer [with mixes and wipes, a chroma-keyer and colour background generator]. And with the change left over built a console and developed a lot of electronic circuitry, primarily audio-synchronised.

Among the circuitry was a pattern generator that produced grids of lines and dots and a device based on circuitry that was just coming out for playing games on television. This was a ping-pong circuit, which was simply a way of making square pixels slide across the screen and when it hit something, depending on its angle and trajectory and speed it would deflect in a proper fashion in different direction. Using that principle Hansen built up about eight of these and used them to deflect objects or key sources across the screen.

As he was completing the synthesiser, Hansen was invited to show it at the Computers and Electronics in the Arts exhibition at Australia 75.

“I remember we first got there and we were all setting up and we all had our individual spaces, and I was next to [the ANU Engineering Physics group]. Everything was very fluid, it just seemed to amalgamate together as a continuous process through the whole show and by the end of it we had some real connectivity between all of us. Particularly between Philippa, Chris and myself. There were some very good cross connections with Philippa’s floors modulating some of my patterns.”2

Hansen also took the output from Engineering Physics’ computer video display of the signals from Philippa’s floors. Hansen used his synthesiser to mix together synthesised image modules, colourise the black and white camera images and feed them to the bank of colour monitors on the stage.

The most significant outcomes of the Computers and Electronics in the Arts show at Australia 75 were the result of the interaction between participants. As Hansen noted, the “coupling [between systems] that we set up at Australia 75 occurred fairly easily with the types of designs we had in those days.”3

1. Hansen at the Synthetics Symposium, curated by Stephen Jones, produced by dLux Media Arts and held at the Powerhouse Museum, July 1998.
2. Interview with Hansen, 18 December 2005.
3. ibid.

Writers:
Stephen Jones, Powerhouse Museum
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012