Vidicon Inscriptions

Description

Single camera/monitor interactive video installation. 1 monitor, 1 video camera with polaroid shutter and photo-electric switch (in the artist's possession), lighting, plinth, custom-built corridor enclosure (Source, website, Rewind).
"In the 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 fixed and inscribed", David Hall, 1974 (Source, website, Rewind)
"A camera registers the passage of time by continuously monitoring the observer through a polaroid shutter. At intervals the shutter is momentarily released - triggered by the observer's movement across a photoelectric switch. The comparatively brightly lit images are burnt, or inscribed, on to the camera's vidicon signal plate. Both the time continuum reflex and the retained (and subsequently fading) "static punctuations" of that continuum are exhibited as one on a video monitor". (David Hall, Video Show, Tate Gallery, London, 18 May - 6 June 1976.) (Source, pdf, Rewind)

Additional Informations

View photographs of the installation (Source, website, Rewind)
"...Images are burned 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, same source as for photographs, website, Rewind)
"...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, 2005, Source : website, Lux)

Presentation place

- Video Show, Tate Gallery, Londres, 18 mai - 6 juin 1976. L'installation Vidicon Inscriptions a été présenté du 25 au 30 mai 1976. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind) - Video: Towards Defining an Aesthetic, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 16 - 21 mars 1976. (Source, pdf, site web Rewind)

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

- Tamara Krikorian, "Video - Report by Tamara Krikorian", Studio International, May/June 1976. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- David Hall, "British Video Art. Towards an Autonomous Practice", Studio International, May/June 1976, p. 248-254. (Source, pdf, Monoskop)

- Bettina Gruber & Maria Vedder, Kunst und Video, Dumont Buchverlag, Köln, 1983. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Tamara Krikorian, "Video Installations in Britain", London Video Arts Catalogue, 1984. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Joanna Heatwole, "Media of Now: an interview with David Hall", Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Volume 36, Aug/Sep published by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, 2008. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Stephen Partridge & Sean Cubitt (eds.), REWIND| British Artists' Video in the 1970s & 1980s, John Libbey Publishing, East barnet, Herts, 2012.