High Fidelity

Description

High Fidelity features a woman talking on the phone with three monitors showing her performing this action. The sound comes from four different sound recordings in which the woman talks about planning a party, moving, children and animals. The monitor at the top left shows the woman in real time, the one at the bottom left shows a delayed view, and the TV at the bottom right shows feedback – a process by which the video camera is directed towards its own video monitor reading, creates what we call a closed circuit, a system where the capture and distribution of images are concomitant.

Additional Informations

The Contemporary Art Fund of the City of Geneva (FMAC) acquired the work in 1997.
"In this experiment, René Bauermeister, a pioneering video artist in French-speaking Switzerland, exploits the resources of the video medium at its beginnings: real time, delayed, feedback. In the image, three monitors are stacked in front of a fourth monitor image. The images broadcast the same woman on the telephone four times, in different positions. The sound participates in this principle of the closed circuit: the banal conversation, juxtaposed and placed in abyss, manifests itself in four mixed and shifted recordings." (LC)
(Sources, website, FMAC Contemporary art fund of the City of Geneva)

View an excerpt from the work on Vimeo

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

- Swiss video, repères... : Bauermeister, Minkoff, Olesen, Otth, Urban on the occasion of the general assembly of the A.I.C.A., September 1978, Musée cantonal des beaux-arts, Lausanne, 1978.

Type
Country
Date of creation