The day the Eagle of Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Tom OíHorganís eyes were intent on a TV monitor showing the Vikingsí discovery of America in a miraculous flow of color and kaleidoscopic images unprecedented in television history.  While New Yorkís avant-garde La Mama players enacted an ironic tale of Viking myths and the murderous instincts of men, director OíHorgan, the man who put the zip into ìHair,î improvised a musical accompaniment all by himself on 18 percussion instruments and a fire extinguisher.  Yes.

It was a virtuoso performance to match the extraordinary visual effects achieved by Videospace, a new concept of television developed at KQED, San Franciscoís educational TV stations, without one new piece of equipment.  Videospace involves a whole new way of looking at the infinitesimal electron.

The 90-minute play ì!Heimskringla!" or the Stoned Angels,î written expressly for Videospace by Paul Foster, author of ìTom Paine,î will be shown on ìNET Playhouse,î Friday night at 8:30 on Channel 13.  The first part of the title is old Norse for ìorb of the earthî; the second, the playwright's fancy.  But today, the play is not the thing, the place is not the theater, the medium is not the message; rather with Videospace, the medium is the mix, the electron is the clay and the question is;: What happens when artists take the same old TV equipment and turn it inside out?

The answers, in the form of Fosterís exploration of ìthe thin edge between truth and myth,î began to unfold that Sunday at the first complete showing of the ì!Heimskringla!î videotape.  In the play a skaid, as the old Norse poets were called, recounts how far man went to discover himself and his universe, beginning at  the top of the world in Greenland in the year 955.  The cast of characters includes King Olaf, who converted Norway to Christianity by force and persuasion and looked for new worlds to Christianize; Eric the Red, discoverer of Greenland and disciple of Thor, the ancient god of war; his son, Leif Ericsson, who discovered America at Vinland; and the Indians, who with love and brotherhood greeted the ìfirst of the devouring tribesÖto act out the tale of extermination.î

Foster had become fascinated with Norse legends when the La Mama troupe traveled through Scandinavia.  He had also spent three weeks in San Francisco learning about the Videospace conceptions being developed by a group headed by Brice Howard, who put the first La Mama plays on NET several years ago.  It seemed an ideal medium for a poetic playwright with magical visions often too difficult to stage.

Videospaceóa term coined by Howardóhad its inception when the KQED Special Projects department went to the Rockefeller Foundation with a fumbling proposal for funding a project  ìwhich, if its results could be described, there would be no need for the projectÖan experiment in art and communication in fully contemporary terms.î  On Aug. 1, 1967, the yearlong experiment got underway with a $150,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and $70,000 from the National Endowment of the Arts.  Howard, who had left NBC in 1958 to become executive producer of cultural programs for NET, was asked to take charge.  He and his wife Rita, a former casting director for ìOmnibus,î found ìfive lovely, obstreperous, delicious, maddening peopleî to work with them.  An artist, a poet, a composer, an underground magazine editor and an avant-garde filmmaker with an understanding of physics and philosophy.

The group began to question and probe the raw nature of the beast that has brought ìPeyton Placeî and the moon into the living room.  From KQEDís engineers and electronic technicians, they learned that the elusive electron can be to a master mixer at a television control-room switcher what stone is to Henry Moore.  In studying the conversion of light and sound waves to electricity, the artists and engineers discovered not only a new material in the electron flow, but a new way to express themselves.  They started to experiment with the artistic possibilities of the synchronization, amplitude, amplification and modulation in electronic circuitry.  They photographed the television monitors to achieve a visual echo effect.  They played around with the color guns, one of the four tubes in a color TV camera, to achieve unusual colors, halos and outlines of figures.  By adjusting the verticals and horizontals, they could create a hall-of-mirrors image.  They used tape delay for esthetic reasons rather than for the conventional protective purposes.

According to Howard, people in commercial TV, hounded by the demands of product, profit and time, have failed, in their rush toward broadcast distribution to grasp the ìremarkable richness of mixing electrons.  This newer medium is swift in nature.  It demands a new kind of perception.  It moves like light sparked into life as through a nervous prism.  It is another paint, another dance, another music of sound.  Another message to catch the quick vision of the inner eye.  Whether or not people like what we've done with ì!Heimskringla!î television will never be the same.î

But in order to realize the infinite possibilities of Videospace, old habits of thought, particularly about conventional theatrical staging, have to be discarded.  To use the TV studio as another form of theatrical space is a waste of what Videospace can offer, and Videospace means using available equipment in new ways.

Last April, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting decided to continue the exploration into Videospace.  It established the National Center for Experiments in TV here with a $100,000 grant and the stipulation that KQED provide an additional $50,000 in money, men or material.

ìWe are not a production center,î Howard emphasized.  ìWe are not interested in producing anything, but in finding out.  We have simply turned our heads around and begun regarding the medium in a different way.  The TV system has a unique likeness to the human nervous system.  It's wild.  An electron is both a wave and a particle.  Its just like where we are today.  Culturally, baby, our big hang-up is ëare we waves or are we particles?í  Are we in and out of each other or are we separate?  What is obviously true is that we are both.î

ìOne of the terrible things about our culture is that we don't know what's for real and what's pretend,î said Howard, 51, who grew up immersed in the natural world of Alaska.  ìAre those cats Huntly and Brinkley real?  Are they pretending or are they for real?  How come we can sit down and eat our dinner and a war is going on at the dinner table?  We're trying to steer away from pretending.  Much of what Off Off-Broadway theater involves is ëletís get away from pretend.íî  Thus leaving more room for real fantasy.
 

So when the opportunity came to explore the use of Videospace in a dramatic narrative, it was natural for Howard to call upon Ellen Stewartís La Mama group.  Playwright Foster, director OíHorgan and Howard met about a year ago and agreed that the medium demanded something mythic, large and open.  After watching five hours of experimental videotape at the time of their first joint meeting, OíHorgan recalled, ìI felt slightly seasick.  It was such an intense visual experience.  It was abnormal exposure to a lot of visual things, in a new and very rich medium.  It made a new surface of the TV set.  Like the eye or a Braque or Kandinsky, it had the ability to take something and abstract an image and make it comprehensible.

ìWhat became immediately discernible was that you could not mix this new rich idiom with plain photography,î OíHorgan said.  ìThe plain photography seemed more unreal than the other techniques.î  All the new approaches were used to enrich the ironic blend of fact and fantasy, old Norse myth and wild Yankee humor in Fosterís narrative, not to substitute electronic gimmickry for ideas.

Although the 90-minute ì!Heimskringla!î was taped in only eight days, there were frustrations about the time spent in achieving visual effects.  ìAll in all it left us with less time to work on our part of it,î OíHorgan said.  ìI'm never prepared for the difficulties involved when you're up against machines.  In the middle of all this, I thought, ëMy God, what are we doing?  We're doing a play and the play is the last thing we're thinking of.î  I'm sure we could have done more if we had had more time.  We had to sacrifice clarity of diction, for instance.  But when the smoke clears, it will have been very much worth trying.î
 

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