Commisioned by Fields & Frames Productions for Channel 4 TV as part of th TV Interventions Project.
“John Logie Baird invented television. He had worked in isolation for two years, partly because he could afford no help, and partly because he was terrified that his invention would be stolen. His only assistant was a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill. Bill spent many hours under the intense light in front of various machines which were built from the cheapest materials. …
Commissioned by BBC TV as the unannounced opening work for their special Arena video art programme. First transmitted March 10, 1976. The work was based on a previous piece This is a Video Monitor, which was made on 1/2-inch B/W videotape and used Anna Ridley as the ‘presenter’.
‘Richard Baker [the well known newsreader] describes the essential paradoxes of the real and imagined functions of the TV set on which he appears. …
‘Over-lighting exceeds capacity for assimilation in a 1970s video camera and images are ‘burnt’ into the surface of its tube. Here a unique property is discovered where both the passage of time and trace of that continuum are registered as one. A section of the original tape version records the image of the artist with a camera (via a mirror) panning, by stages, across the screen. Before movement the lens is covered and re-exposed after the change, …
‘Over-lighting exceeds capacity for assimilation in a 1970s video camera and images are burnt into the surface of its ‘vidicon’ tube. Here a unique property is explored where both the passage of time and trace of that continuum are registered as one… In this, the original tape, one of three sections records the image of the artist with a camera (via a mirror) panning, by stages, across the screen. Before movement the lens is covered and re-exposed after the change, …
Continue reading “Vidicon Inscriptions (The Videotape 1976)”
‘A live interactive installation (using no recording equipment) which, as the participant moves through, progressively separates and distances his/her image from its origin.’ David Hall 1974
‘Many early installations were devised as a complex analogical mirror where the viewer, interacting with his/her image as collaborator rather than spectator, was simultaneously the viewed in a process of ‘self-referring consciousness’. It is quite evident here that artists were intent on exploring relationships of hitherto unapproachable psychological innovation and response, …
‘These works were Initially broadcast as television interventions but subsequent single-screen gallery viewings cannot induce a sense of the original context. An alternative proposal exhibits them as a multi-faceted installation, all seven displayed at the same time, each continuously looping on seven separate monitors randomly placed in close proximity in a single space. The sound conflicts and viewers simultaneously see parts of others as they attempt to concentrate on one. This induces some confusion, as it was when they first appeared on TV, …
Continue reading “TV Interruptions/7 TV Pieces (2006 The Installation.)”
Leaflet advertising a weekend of video events at Serpentine Gallery, London. Includes a screening of Steve Littman’s ‘Crisps’.pdf here
Stills from Crisps, 1980, 4 mins.pdf here
Art statement for ‘Crisps – 1980 4 mins’, includes information on the production process, editing process and post production systems.pdf here …
This piece was one of an intended series of 5, ‘TV Interventions’ that would take the form of TV commercials. ‘Consumer Demonstration’ was the only piece that was ever made. Weis Smals and Josine van Droffelaar from DeAppel foundation died tragically in a light aircraft crash in 1983.
ACGB programme for Video Artists on Tour; 1985 pdf here. …
Continue reading “Dutch TV Commercials No1: Consumer Demonstration”
