Ron Hays (1945—1991) trained and worked as a television director, landing a job at Boston’s PBS affiliate, WGBH, at the beginning of the 1970s. Just previous to Hays’s hire, pioneering multimedia artist Nam June Paik had deposited his Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer—responsible for some of the world’s earliest computer graphics—in the network’s basement.  Hays, who wrote, “As I listen to music, I see images in my mind,” became WGBH’s first in-house director tasked to create content with Paik’s invention.  Hays's “Music-Image Workshop” paired recordings of classical music with improvised electronic animation.  Hays encountered conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a favorite of maestro Leonard Bernstein’s. The two collaborated on an audiovisual rendering of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for local TV audiences in 1973.  Its popularity led Bernstein to request a computer animation from Hays intended for national broadcast, set to the “Prelude and Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.  Hays moved from Boston to Los Angeles and pivoted to a primarily commercial career, as an Emmy-awarded special effects designer for TV and film (The Demon Seed), director of music videos (Earth, Wind, & Fire’s “Let’s Groove”), and producer of live events and broadcasts incorporating large-scale video projection and lighting (a prelude to the 1984 Olympics at the Hollywood Bowl, made in collaboration with Michael Tilson Thomas and Frank Gehry, titled “Amphitheater of Light.”)  By the time Hays was diagnosed with HIV, in the mid-1980s, he was no longer working as a graphic designer, but as an in-demand creative director with corporate clients including Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Hays’s transition from electronic video art, while it was still a relatively new artistic medium, to an award-winning commercial TV director obscures an understanding of his early career works.  While Hays kept copies of these videos in climate-controlled storage during his lifetime, his survivors were not successful in finding an institution to acquire his archive after his death from AIDS-related causes in 1991.  Eventually, this personal archive was destroyed. What remains of these works is spread across multiple institutional archives, much of it difficult to access and necessitating restoration.  Hays likened his practice to a painter’s or sculptor’s (“only I do it with cathode ray tubes and photons,” he said in a TV interview), and foresaw his works on museum walls.

Space For Head and Hands (1975), a collaboration with Michael Tilson Thomas, was screened on WGBH and later at the Museum of Modern Art.  It is a live improvisation between Hays at the Paik-Abe video synthesizer and Tilson Thomas on a Prepared Piano (the instrument invented by John Cage).  Tilson Thomas also improvises with his voice.  Director David Atwood focuses the camera on musical gesture, which is electronically altered into near abstraction by Hays’s live manipulation of the video synth.  Everything about it is performed in real time.  Media generously provided by Ludwig Forum Aachen.

Odyssey (1979) was the first computer animation to be released on LaserDisc and was honored by the International Television Association.  It features a variety of electronic effects and includes excerpts from the widely seen “Prelude and Liebestod.”  For the New York City AIDS Memorial presentation, a totally new, improvised electronic score will be performed live by Nick Hallett, a creative act Hays, in a 1973 TV interview, names the act of “sight composing,” saying that it had not yet been done, but that it was how he imagined his work evolving in the future.

Media provided by Dave Sieg and David Atwood. This program will be co-presented with Electronic Arts Intermix.