U.S. 23

film by Timothy Artist and Marsie Jacober Wallach

music by Steve Rouse

(1980) Duration: 3:00

This film was a 1980 collaboration with filmmakers Timothy Artist and Marsie Jacober Wallach. It was created while we were graduate students at the University of Michigan. When the film was created, personal computers, which were in their very early stages, did not have the processing power needed for the arts. (IBM’s first PC was not introduced until 1981.)

The visuals of the film are a hybrid of computer generated video graphics and hand-painted and hand-etched film. The computer generated graphics were produced on a large console that looked like an early video game console...think PacMan at an arcade.

The soundtrack was also a hybrid production. I combined (1) recorded and manipulated sounds of acoustic instruments and other environmental sounds with (2) sounds produced in a traditional tape-based electronic music studio. While the University of Michigan Electronic Studio was more or less state of the art for the time, audio creation was extraordinarily slow, often including hundreds of tape splices for only a few minutes of music. The studio at that time had four 2-track, half-inch tape recorders and a 4-track mix-down tape recorder, all of which were synchronized for live mix-down. There was the typical patch bay and outboard hardware of the time. Nothing was digital....all analog equipment, including a large, enclosed plate for reverb.