VinylVideo™ - by Martin Conrads

With VinylVideo™ finally a technology advances, which makes the connection of sound and image, media art and the net transparently like never before - a techno-aesthetic invention which pushes the threshold of the perceptible to its artificial extents. VinylVideo™, developed by Austrian artist Gebhard Sengmüller, in co-operation with Günter Erhart, Martin Diamant and Best Before, retries on the attempt to storage video on analog vinyl disks: after the computer-based transformation of visual signals into sound and the following pressing of the material in a Czech factory, a black box switched between a record player and a monitor serves to translate sound signals on vinyl back into picture signals,which then can be watched on a monitor.
VV's lo-tech charme gently covers the fact that the project is still in its infancy. Nonetheless, VinylVideo™ disks produced so far were made by net.artists Alexei Shulgin and Vuk Cosic, or by Harry Hund, whose Guinea Pig Massacre can hide its cruelty due to VV's characteristic black/white aesthetics. The VinylVideo™ Home Kit in development will reduce VV's presently unwieldy installation format to a minimum: With the Home Kit just being connected to your record player and TV set, VinylVideo™ disks can now be played even at home. Additionally, if one plays the disks simply over loudspeakers, the effect will be minimalist drone music, which, like the extensive 50's TV commercials-styled documentation of the project on the net, has the aura of "a piece of fake media archeology", as they say.

VinylVideo™








last update: 12.09.1999

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