This is a Video Monitor is an attempt to construct a wholly ‘videological’ experience, and is built on an initial take of a woman* describing the paradox of real and imagined functions of the monitor on which her image appears…
Sound synchronisation wavers as she mimes to her pre-recorded voice – an analogy to part of her description. The camera cuts at the end of the first take and a no-signal ‘snow-field’ appears. The take is then regenerated optically off a monitor screen, a third off that and so on. Vision and sound progressively change, at each stage distorting the expected characteristics, displacing the imagined for the real – configurations of variable light intensity at the surface of the screen; each time indentifying and re-identifying the implications of her recurring statement.’ David Hall, 1973

The work was revisited in 1976 for the BBC Arena programme and updated as This is a Television ReceiverHall

* The work was originally shot by Steve Partridge a week earlier at Maidstone College of Art, with David Hall performing. Hall re-shot it using his partner Anna Ridley as the perfomer. Sadly, this version is lost.