Beavertail Point is an electronic landscape painting of the Jamestown Island point where Narragansett Bay meets the Atlantic Ocean. Fittingly, the estuary depicted in the video landscape, an inlet merging into a larger body of water, was the same location where Connie Coleman and Alan Powell began their relationship and art partnership. Their collaboration in video and electronic imaging would span thirty-six years and defined the next chapter in Alan’s career as a visual artist.
This piece was one of the last videos made on the Electron Movers Image Processing system, which consisted of a Panasonic B&W video switcher, George Brown multi-level keyer, and the Larry Templeton quantizer/colorizer video mixer. The colorization was synchronized by a first generation video laser player with tuner. Powell composed the music featured in Beavertail Point at the MacColl Studio for Electronic Music, where he at the time was a composer-in-residence alongside Laurie McDonald. Laurie McDonald (like Powell, a founding member of the Electron Movers art collective) plays the vibraphone heard in this piece. The music was composed on an ARP 2600 audio synthesizer.
The video was chosen for the Ithaca Video Festival and the New York Avant Garde Festival, both in 1978, and showed at the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia.