Interview: Joshua Ellingson

Audiovisual artist Joshua Ellingson (@ellingson.tv) and visual forensics researcher Karyn Nakamura (@frog_spit_simulation) have more in common than you might think. Yes, they both work in a similar field that bridges the gap between science and art but also, there are only so many hundreds of artists out there who exclusively work with vintage television sets. On the day of SHOWstudio's Surface Tension opening - an exhibition spotlighting Nakamura's visual work that investigates and probes the computational metaphor for 'neural networks', we caught up with Ellingson to find out more about the process behind his art and what it is about the Pepper's Ghost technique (which consistently reappears in his work) that endlessly fascinates and informs his work.

Christina Donoghue: Firstly, can you talk about your artistic background? Do you associate more with the term ‘scientist’ or ‘artist’?

Joshua Ellingson: I spent the first twenty years of my career as a commercial illustrator. After studying graphic design in art school, I worked mainly in web animation for greeting card companies and game studios before working freelance for illustration projects. I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in different mediums and sometimes working as a contractor allowed me to try out things like designing for textiles, enamel pins, and publication layout. That experimentation ultimately led to me trying out video art experiments with sound. I wouldn’t consider myself a scientist but I have a lot of respect for actual researchers and the process of real science. I call myself an artist because it’s the easiest way to explain what I do but I don’t always feel like I’m expressing an inner vision in a way that one might associate with an 'artist'. I like to discover things while I work. That’s the crux of it, I guess.

CD: You tend to work exclusively with vintage television sets a lot. What is it about this equipment that you're particularly drawn to?

JE: I grew up with vintage televisions, so I think the nostalgia of it was the initial hook. They are big and because of their prominence in the home, they were designed more like furniture or fashion than appliances. Televisions were lifestyle devices that would express one’s personality. I have 1970s televisions that are covered in denim, some that are all leather, and some with really wild explorations in dials and buttons. Electronics manufacturers were trying out lots of different things and I like that. The cathode ray tube screen is also just a completely unique thing, visually. It’s so bright and captivating in person, so I think that’s part of the allure.

CD: How long have you been working with the Pepper's ghost illusion technique? What attracted you to working with this technique, to begin with?

JE: I had heard of the technique before but I didn’t realise how accessible it was until I watched a documentary about Walt Disney Imagineering. After they explained how Pepper’s Ghost was used in The Haunted Mansion attraction, I tried it out with an old aquarium, a piece of framing acrylic that I had lying around, and an LCD monitor. I was hooked right away and continued experimenting with different shapes of containers, orientations, and as many variations as I could think of. Similarly to the TV fixation, I got hooked on making Pepper’s Ghosts immediately.

CD: I’ve noticed you’ve been asked a lot of questions before on how you bring the Pepper’s Ghost technique to life. Can you talk me through the process of recreating/ designing the SHOWstudio logo in relation to working with this technique?

JE: When I was asked to help out with this logo series, Nick Knight suggested something similar to an experiment from 2022 where I used an oscilloscope to draw letters using sound. Those letters were then reflected into a small dome as a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, making them appear to float in space above the oscilloscope. I thought it might be interesting to draw the letters S-H-O-W for SHOWstudio into a glass bowl from the tube of a vintage TV this time. Once I had that figured out, I decided it would be fun to move the resulting animation around in space, which is easier to do with televisions than oscilloscopes. So, I had the letters move from the Pepper’s Ghost into different TV screens as the tune played.

CD: There’s a key aspect to your work which is that your experiments are timed to music. Can you talk about these real-time video distortions and how the music component of them came about?

JE: The letters were formed using software that interprets what a shape needs to sound like in order to be drawn on the face of an oscilloscope using that audio. So, the letter “S” that I created in Blender on my Mac needs to sound like a crackle-y hum in order to recreate that same letter “S” on an oscilloscope. The sounds for each letter’s shape are entirely different, so I sampled those into my drum machine. I added drum sounds intermixed with the letter sounds, so that the letters are distorted and twisted by the drum sounds as it plays.

The sounds are also driving the animation as they happen, so it’s not something that’s completely planned and rendered out. Working this way has a performative quality and it’s much more fun than trying to plan out and render something. This allows for a lot of spontaneity but it also doesn’t always allow for predictable repeatability. So, unlike something that a motion designer might put together with AfterEffects or Cinema4D, it’s not very easy to go back and make fixes. It’s sort of like catching lightning in a bottle sometimes.

CD: Your work centres a lot around the idea of repetition. Is this a conscious choice?

JE: I don’t think it’s a conscious choice that repetition is a theme but I can see what you mean. My first job out of art school was creating looping animated gifs for an electronic greeting card company, so maybe it has roots all the way back to that. Real-Time animation isn’t always timeline-based, so maybe the cyclical nature of synthesizer things like LFOs and sequences has something to do with it too.

CD: How do you decide on the images you work with? Is there any specific intention behind choosing archive footage?

JE: I like using material that’s not connected with current popular culture or even popular culture of its time. Instructional films, home movies, and commercials for defunct brands are always interesting to me. There was a different kind of broadcast voice in narration in the different decades, so sometimes it’s interesting to capture that. Also, there are performances or messages that I sometimes stumble upon that I just like to present with minimal additions visually or sonically. For Pepper’s Ghosts, I think fish make pretty good floating reflections. I also film various inanimate objects and taxidermy for Pepper’s Ghosts. I don’t really know why.

CD: A question from our Live studio artist-in-residence Karyn Nakamura (@frog_spit_simulation): What is your favourite piece of ‘gear’ and why?

JE: I think my favourite piece of gear is the Moog Mother-32 synthesiser. It was my first real synthesiser and I love how it sounds. It was a complete mystery to me when I unboxed it and I learned so much while figuring it out. My Mother-32 is pretty beat up now and some things no longer function but I still love it and use it in almost every project.