The center was the result of the expansion of a media access program that Ralph Hocking established as professor of video and computer art at Binghamton University in 1969.

[30][31] This video synthesizer was designed by Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik and built at the center by David Jones and Robert Diamond, for the TV Lab at WNET-TV.

In the early 1970s, the center was the home to many innovative tools that artists in residency took advantage of to make complex and technologically progressive artworks.

[34] The "Abe colorizer"[35] for example, "an image processing device, was the precursor of many of special effects that nowadays are taken for granted", as Bill T. Jones pointed out.

In mid-1970s, the center started to research the interface of an "LSI-11 computer" with a video processing system with the collaboration of Steina and Woody Vasulka and the support of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

According to Ralph and Sherry Miller Hocking, the image processing system became through the years “a hybrid tool set, permitting the artist to create interactive relationships between older historically analog instruments and new digital technologies”.