National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET)

Biography

The National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET) grew out of a project initiated at San Francisco's public television station KQED in 1969. NCET was the most overtly experimental and process-oriented of the public television art projects of the late 1960s and early '70's. Run by Brice Howard and Paul Kaufman, the center was an important locus for artists throughout the Bay Area. Most of the works produced at NCET focused on explorations of early image processing techniques. For example, William Gwin's Irving Bridge and Point Lobos State Reserve use visual and aural synthesis in evocative renderings of the natural landscape. Willard Rosenquist's Lostine and Willam Roarty's See is Never all the Way Up and Passage... A Life Drawing employ painterly manipulations of light and movement. Don Hallock uses colorization, image layering and solarization as interpretative tools in the autobiographical The Father Tapes and the purely abstract Good Time Charlie Mars. The center ceased operation in 1976.