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Categories: Action | Television
Keywords: Politics
Relevant passages:
Dieter Daniels «Television-Art or anti-art?
Conflict and cooperation between the avant-garde and the mass media in the 1960s and 1970s»
Rudolf Frieling «Reality/Mediality
Hybrid Processes Between Art and Life» Heike Helfert «Technological Constructions of Space-Time
Aspects of Perception»
Works by Peter Weibel:
Action lecture Audience Exhibited Observation of the Observation: Uncertainty Cartesianisches Chaos Trampling on the Law The Tangible Image The Theorem of Identity The Theorem of the Identity Tritity The Dream of Everyone Having the Same Consciousness The Wall, the Curtain (Border, the) technical terminology also: Lascaux Epistemic Videology (I + II) Imaginary Water Sculpture Intervals Crucifixion of the Identity Simultaneous Split Medium Synthesis The Endless Sandwich TV Aquarium (TV Death I) Video Texte Time Blood
Karlheinz Stockhausen «Study I» Ulrike Rosenbach «Dance for One Woman» Paul Sermon «Telematic Vision» Nam June Paik «Traitor, you left fluxus (Postcard to Nam June Paik)»
Peter Weibel
«TV-News (TV Death 2)»
Video as a box, the TV set as a case. The newsreader reads his news. He smokes at the same time. His body is inside an invisible glass case, meaning the smoke doesn't disappear but accumulates inside the enclosed space, making it seem as if the TV set is filling up with smoke. The smoke makes the newsreader cough more and more, especially during the weather report. He stops reading the news when the TV set is filled with smoke and the screen is milky and impenetrable. He suffocates.
The medium has been taken by its word: the message occurred in the medium. Television’s day-for-day poisoning of communications has now turned on itself. The daily dose of fatal words read by the newsreader brings about his own death. He chokes on the noxious TV ecosystem of information and communication. A closed-circuit of word and meaning, of meaning and action.
In 1972, Austrian TV showed this work with its customary newsreader inside the glass case. Following the broadcast, many outraged viewers phoned up to complain – not about the obsolete news items (the news he read was one month old), however, but about the amount the newsreader had smoked.
Peter Weibel
