‘Breeze’ and ‘Disintegrating Forms’ were both designed as multi-screen installations. Breeze consists of four TV monitors placed side by side, showing four different shots of water, the camera being placed and allowed to run for ten minutes in each case. Tapes 2 and 3 are shown here. Close up shots of water appear to relate to the surface of the screen, giving the illusion of a TV set containing water. In 2, rapid movements of the water relates to the scan line. …
‘Breeze’ and ‘Disintegrating Forms’ were both designed as multi-screen installations. Breeze consists of four TV monitors placed side by side, showing four different shots of water, the camera being placed and allowed to run for ten minutes in each case. Tapes 2 and 3 are shown here. Close up shots of water appear to relate to the surface of the screen, giving the illusion of a TV set containing water. In 2, rapid movements of the water relates to the scan line. …
‘This is a table-top tableau of personal items, toys, drinks, cigarettes, actions and non-verbal visual viewpoints.
Though each is innocuous enough on its own, there is a sense of malice-aforethought in the collection of things in time and space against an un-specific black background. This is a sketchbook on video. A noting of starting or end points. Certain and uncertain. This was the last video-art piece I made for several years and is exploratory of expressing my own position as a person at that time, …
Sections from ‘London Video Arts’ catalogue, 1978. pdf here. …
‘The installation comprises 60 old TV receivers. Some operate normally, some distort, ‘flash’, or show a picture only intermittently, others operate sound only..
Mounted on building scaffold around a room they are tuned to various TV channels with the sound volume very high. The atmosphere is one of Media overdose and fruitless activity as TV repair men (in white coats) constantly attend the sets attempting to correct the faults…’ David Hall, 1972
This was the first multi-screen video/TV installation to be seen in a UK gallery. …
Behold is a kind of homage to Edweard Mubridges pioneering Motion Picture Studies (1878/85). Looking back it does seem to mark a significant shift in my practice, moving from single screen work to expanded cinema and installation in the gallery context. At the time I did not own any video equipment, it was too expensive, usually you had to beg, steal or borrow what you wanted to use. I saw the gallery more as a laboratory not an end point, …
This is the second version of the work 60 TV Sets which was part of the exhibition A Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain, Gallery House, London 1972. It was exhibited as 101 TV Sets at The Video Show, Serpentine Gallery, London 1975
‘Although no video is directly involved (the TV sets are tuned or mis-tuned to broadcast signals, and all parameters of picture quality variously utilised) this is an important precursor of British multi-channel video installation work…’ …
