Vidicon Inscriptions (1976 Installation)
Creator:
Hall, David-
This work is part of the rewind archive.
Year: 1975
Media types:Video
Type of work:Installation
Single camera/monitor interactive video installation
Video Installation
Funding source: Arts Council of Great Britain
First exhibited: Video Show, Tate Gallery, London 1976
Technical details: Requirements: 1 monitor, 1 video camera with polaroid shutter and photo-electric switch (in the artist's possession), lighting, plinth, custom-built corridor enclosure.
‘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, and each time the image appears to be inscribed onto the screen. In the interactive installation a camera registers the live passage of time through a translucent polaroid shutter. Periodically the shutter lifts – triggered by the participants’ movements – and images are fixed and inscribed.’
David Hall‘..Images are burnt into the surface of the ‘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 interactive installation a camera registers the live passage of time through a translucent polaroid shutter. Periodically the shutter lifts – triggered by participants’ movements – and images are ‘frozen’ and inscribed…’
David Hall 1975
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Quotes:
Here preserved are the traces of ghostings, perhaps most poignantly in the installation where the mugging of participants is at once improvisationally real and yet caught already in a moment simultaneously of capture and decay. The work is about the materiality of the screen technologies of the day, for sure. It is also, especially in retrospect, an elegy for the passing of time – the time of the gesture as it fades from the screen, the time of technologies that have their moment and pass away..’
Sean Cubitt, David Hall, Luxonline, 2005.