Before video art had a name, Aldo Tambellini was making it. Cathodic Works 1966-1976, presented here for the first time on double DVD by Von, is an essential document of one of the most underacknowledged pioneers in the history of experimental media - a body of work that predates the canonical account of video art and, in several respects, exceeds it.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1930, raised in Lucca during the Second World War - a childhood spent in a city that was bombed, twenty-one of his neighbors killed - Tambellini returned to the United States in 1946 carrying a set of experiences that would orient everything that followed. His early career unfolded on New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s: painter, sculptor, poet, cultural agitator. He founded Group Center in 1962, a counter-cultural alliance that staged agitprop in the streets and outside the museum walls. In 1963, he began working with 35mm slides, scratching and perforating the emulsion by hand and projecting the resulting "Lumagrams" onto the facades of apartment buildings. By 1965 he had moved to film, painting directly onto 16mm stock to produce the Black Film Series - works of austere, abstract force that function as expanded painting as much as cinema. Then, in 1966, he obtained one of the first Sony CV 2000 video recorders available. What he did with it placed him, alongside his close collaborator Nam June Paik, at the origin point of an entirely new medium.

The works gathered across these two DVDs span a decade of sustained and radical experimentation. Black Video 1 and Black Video 2 (both 1966, half-inch, black and white) are among the earliest surviving works of video art, recorded in the year the technology first became available to artists. Black Spiral (1969, 16mm reversal) and its projected variant extend the logic of the Black Film Series into a new register of static and interference. Minus One (1969) and 6673 (1973, half-inch, colour) mark a transition toward greater complexity of layering and duration. Clone (1976, 40 minutes) closes the decade-long arc with a work that pushes toward something more structural, more insistent. What unites them is the cathode itself: Tambellini's practice was not to use the video signal to record the world, but to work directly on the signal's own emission - its light, its interference, its capacity for abstraction. Television footage of 1960s political events - civil rights, Vietnam, the machinery of power - enters these works not as illustration but as material to be distorted, subverted, turned back on the screen that carried it. Black, for Tambellini, was not a colour. "Black is the expansion of consciousness in all directions," he wrote in 1967. The phrase is political, cosmological, and aesthetic simultaneously - inseparable from his alignment with the Black Power movement, his antifascism, his conviction that art was "the vital energy of society," not the commodity of a class.

In 1967, with the German kinetic artist Otto Piene, Tambellini co-founded the Black Gate Theatre in Manhattan's East Village - the first venue in New York dedicated to live electromedia performance, a magnet for Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik. The following year, the two artists produced Black Gate Cologne for WDR television in Germany: one of the first works of art ever conceived for broadcast. These institutional gestures are inseparable from the work itself. Tambellini understood, before almost anyone, that new media required new structures - new spaces, new networks, new social forms - and he built them.

All material on these two DVDs is transferred directly from the original tapes, unedited and unmanipulated. Curated by Pia Bolognesi and Giulio Bursi of Atelier Impopulaire, whose ongoing relationship with Tambellini also produced the Retracing Black installation at Tate Modern in 2012. The first release in Von's Classic series.