Interview with Christoph Blase (part 2/2)

PACKED: When ZKM acquires a work, does it always acquire the equipment together with the work?

Christoph Blase: This is not possible for old video works. For new works we always acquire the equipment as well as the documentation and the source code, if there is any. If ZKM acquires a contemporary videowork, it will also ask for a digital Betacam or sometimes for the Final Cut source project file but never for a DVD.


PACKED: Does ZKM also buy spare equipment at the same time?

Christoph Blase: It happens. At the moment we have a big exhibition at the ZKM with refurbished works of the last twenty years of ZKM. In the meantime a lot of old tube monitors - especially colour SONY monitors - are being purchased. We are also looking for special models. Of course we have some Nam June Paik video sculptures and we know exactly which television and monitor models that we need to look for. Yes, we buy spare equipment but this only started one year ago.


PACKED: This is mostly for works that are using already obsolete technology. But let us imagine that the ZKM would purchase a recent work by for instance Bill Viola with a series of plasma screens. Would the policy of the museum be to buy spare parts at the same time for this kind of work?

Christoph Blase: If somebody is thinking about this at that moment, yes (laughs). I see what you mean but the awareness about this problem only arose during the last few years; before nobody thought about it.

Since the founding of the Laboratory for Antique Video Systems and the rise of the problems to show media artworks, the curators at ZKM have started to realise that the problem does not only exist for the real old videoworks but also for the in-house equipment. Depending on the works they now try to have for example two or three spare monitors, more flat screens, more monitors of a specific model, etc. When it concerns very recent equipment, they will try to wait until the prices go down. They will try to buy it when there is a stock of certain models on the market for a third of the price of two years ago.

Incandescent light bulbs are another example. It has become forbidden to produce incandescent light bulbs in the European community but our technicians have found a company that still produces these incandescent light bulbs. This company is allowed to produce a certain amount of them. As a result we now have a source. We have some works with these incandescent light bulbs, and you cannot replace them by the more energy-efficient lamps. We now have created a collection of hundreds of incandescent light bulbs for the next ten years. We think of these problems.


PACKED: This is a problem that is similar to the one that arose for the works of Dan Flavin.³

Christoph Blase: Yes, for the works with the tube lights. But I think that for the Flavin works they already bought the tube lights ten years ago. The problem already came up at that time. They have a big collection of tube lights too.


PACKED: When another institution borrows a work for an exhibition from the ZKM collection, do they also borrow the equipment from ZKM to show the work? For example when it concerns an old videowork with old CRT monitors?

Christoph Blase: Different situations are possible. It depends on the work. If they would for instance borrow a small video installation of Nam June Paik, they would of course get the entire set.


PACKED: Because the equipment is so specific... Did you provide the equipment for every instalment of the ‘RECORD > AGAIN! - 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2’ exhibition?

Christoph Blase: Yes, and this also meant that we had to transport the television sets.

There is an exhibition upcoming where a museum wants to show some installations from our big ‘RECORD > AGAIN! - 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2’ exhibition. They will need the original equipment, and they will get it from us.


PACKED: Do you have a special warehouse to store the equipment?

Christoph Blase: In the past there were several rooms available in the ZKM building to store our things, but after a year we were asked to leave these spaces (laughs). ZKM also has a very big warehouse at another location in Karlsruhe where we can put the things that do not need to be here all the time. Within the ZKM building itself we recently got a room on the fourth floor under the roof where we can put some stacking pallets with stuff that we do not want to be in this outside warehouse because we do not know whether we would suddenly need it.


PACKED: What are the storage conditions in the warehouse? Is the equipment stored on shelves?

Christoph Blase: The warehouse belonged to an old printing company. It is the space where the paper was stored. The conditions are very good there: not humid and more or less cold. The different devices are on stacking pallets on big ten meter wide shelves. You have to go there with a forklift truck. This is why we all had to get a license for this (laughs).


PACKED: Do you provide maintenance for the equipment in the case of long-term storage?

Christoph Blase: We try to have a certain rotation of our main equipment in the lab, of the old open-reel 1/2” machines for example. When one machine has been used in lab for half a year because it was our favourite, we will try to replace it by another one. We will take this machine from our storage space beside our lab, and then use it for a few months. In this way every functioning machine, or every refurbished and functioning machine, runs at least one week a year. In reality it happens that we forget to use a machine or just do not use it because we do not need it. We recently pulled out an NTSC machine⁴ that had not been running for two years. It was playing, but the belt for the rewind and fast forward actions was broken - but all in all it was still running. We were able to use the machine to work on the transfer of a specific videotape, but we had to rewind the tape on another machine.


PACKED: This mainly concerns the video players, but do you also have a similar strategy for the television and monitors?

Christoph Blase: No, we don’t have at the moment because almost every very good piece is running in exhibitions. It is not necessary to have a similar strategy for our monitors.


PACKED: Do you also collect spare parts like belts, or redesign parts sometimes?

Christoph Blase: We use every possibility that we can; we do it all. Often you get ’new old stuff’ from companies that provide spare parts. These refurbished parts are sometimes good, but sometimes also really bad.


PACKED: Is all equipment catalogued somewhere in a database?

Christoph Blase: I have a Filemaker database for use in the lab only, and the equipment is marked ’refurbished‘ or ’not refurbished‘. If I am looking for a certain very rare format, I will use this database to find the specific machine that has a specific number.


PACKED: Do you store the equipment together with other parts of the installations, for instance a sculpture or a sculptural element?

Christoph Blase: Yes, normally they are all together. It is not divided into for example ‘stone’ and ‘electronics’.


PACKED: Where do you keep the service and user manuals?

Christoph Blase: A documentation database of the big collection of the ZKM exists, but our lab is not involved in this. It depends where we keep the manuals. Some documentation is stored with the rest of the documentation of the works; some others are here in the lab.


PACKED: When you put monitors on the stacking pallets do you wrap them in plastic or put them in cardboard boxes?

Christoph Blase: It depends on the size. Sometimes we wrap them in plastic. We also have these big cardboard boxes called ’Panzer Karton’. Sometimes we put them in there and seal them. It depends on the purpose and the category of equipment. If it concerns a long-term storage, a television for spare parts or a television worth several thousands of Euros, the storage and wrapping procedure can be completely different. It goes from equipment standing unprotected somewhere in the ZKM building, to equipment standing here in our storage space beside the lab, to equipment stored in our warehouse...

All of the most important pieces are here in the storage space at ZKM. In the warehouse we only have things that we do not need at the moment. We know what is in the warehouse because we sometimes go there and have a look.

We have a big collection of old television sets that we have bought a few years ago. These are mostly television sets of the fifties that we do not need at the moment, but I am sure that we will need them one day. They are currently stored in our warehouse.


PACKED: The equipment that is stored in the warehouse does not get a regular maintenance but the equipment that is used in the Laboratory for Antique Video Systems does. What kind of maintenance do you provide?

Christoph Blase: The little bottle of isopropyl alcohol⁵ is used every day in our lab. Cleaning is the only regular maintenance that we do ourselves. When we see that a piece of equipment is experiencing problems, we give it to our technician who will provide further servicing.


PACKED: Do you sometimes use external servicing?

Christoph Blase: There is no external service, that is the problem. This is why our technician normally does all the servicing. Even if we could bring modern Sony monitors of the nineties to Sony for repair and maintenance, it would be very expensive.

When our technician has to repair a monitor of a certain model, he will use this occasion to service at the same time the other monitors that we have of the same model. This is the way how our technician works.


PACKED: What do you consider as the most problematic equipment in terms of acquiring, purchasing, repair and maintenance?

Christoph Blase: The problem now is that you can not buy new CRT monitors anymore. Hantarex was a very classic monitor to buy until two or three years ago. If you would try to buy a new Hantarex⁶ monitor today, you would have to struggle a lot. The video wall of Hantarex monitors is not available anymore because they stopped the production. A few weeks ago I made a research and I found out that they had only about twenty-one pieces left in the stock.⁷

In ten years there will be a problem with CRT monitors. At the moment it is not really a problem yet because there are still enough second-hand monitors on the market. We already buy and collect hundreds of monitors for everything and for every possibility. The prices of the monitors are still OK; they are not that high but they will rise over the next ten years. If they are still functioning they will probably cost by that time ten times their original price.

Until now I can still find it if I am looking for something. This is my impression. I could be wrong because I am not spending that much time anymore on looking for equipment on eBay. But I guess equipment for ½” videotapes are maybe becoming rarer now.


PACKED: Do you collect equipment for your own personal collection or for the collection of the ZKM?

Christoph Blase: Both. All donations are going to the ZKM collection and I buy machines for the ZKM too. Furthermore I still buy once in a while television sets like the Brionvega for my own collection. There was no equipment in the ZKM at the beginning. Bringing in my collection in order to start the Laboratory for Antique Video Systems was a part of my contract when I started working here.


PACKED: Does the contract also allow you to store your personal collection here and to have it maintained?

Christoph Blase: Yes, because we also work with my equipment. The equipment is refurbished, but it also has a certain lifetime that is spent in presentations and exhibitions.


PACKED: In this way the ZKM could avoid to start from scratch?

Christoph Blase: Yes, I came in with a certain stock. I had it all here and I could use any specific machine when I needed it. I think that my first contract with ZKM mentioned something like one hundred machines.


PACKED: Do you also have to deal with devices like cameras?

Christoph Blase: Our technician has the knowledge to deal with it. We can repair and maintain cameras. This is not a problem, but you only need a camera for very specific works like closed circuit installations. For example I need a camera here in the workshop when I reconstruct the Dan Graham⁸ piece ‘Time Lapse Machine’ with my students. In this work you have one recording machine and another one two meters beside it that is displaying your picture with a delay of about ten seconds. In this case we need a camera, yes.


PACKED: Do the artists get involved when one of their works is reinstalled at ZKM?

Christoph Blase: Of course, the artists get involved. We always make several proposals and then the artist can say how he prefers his work to be installed. We had an interesting case with a work from the former DDR.⁹ The work was a performance and in this performance there was a small monitor on a stage, running another video.¹⁰ The monitor was a model from the DDR and we had the exact same model from the DDR: not in white like it was in the original setting, but in red. Do not ask me why, but the artist said: “Never red, never red monitors, I never want to see my video on a red monitor !!” (laughs) In the end we gave him a totally different monitor.


PACKED: Do you collaborate with other institutions and collection holders?

Christoph Blase: Yes, we are restoring and digitising old video tapes from other collections. This is how we collaborate. We received for example 500 tapes of the Raindance Corporation¹¹, the Radical Software¹² and the VideoFreex¹³, all from the MOMA in New York. This collection is here since December 2009. They asked us because they could not figure out a possibility to transfer this collection of videotapes.


PACKED: There are several contemporary art museums in Germany and in other European countries that probably also hold videoworks for which they have to find preservation solutions...

Christoph Blase: Yes, and our offer for these museums is very good. They just have to send us the original tapes that they have. We will restore them and create a digital master. When the process is finished the museums get back everything they want: the tapes and an uncompressed digital master on a hard disk, if that is what they want. All we ask in exchange is that we are allowed to keep a copy of the digital master for our scientific collection that grows in this way. We do not acquire the rights to show these works publicly. The institutions are getting their tapes transferred without having to pay anything for it.

Usually artists, collections and museums are very happy with this deal. But since one and a half years the other part of the agreement is also that I am no longer able to give any specific date indication on when the transfer can be done. Sometimes they will have to wait for months and years, and sometimes it can be done very fast. But we are not able to answer a request of a museum that would say "we have here twenty open-reel tapes and we need them digitised in two weeks." If we would accept this we would no longer be able to perform our own work. We have built up this infrastructure, we have the technical infrastructure and the manpower to do this kind of jobs but we already have our hands full with our own projects.

The other thing is that when you start providing this kind of preservation services to other institutions, you often have to deal with restorers and museum people. All of them will be more or less aware and will have a certain degree of knowledge about the different problems involved. This means that there will be a lot of conversation and communication time dedicated to giving them explanations. Of course I explain these kinds of things to my students, but I can’t explain to every curator during two and a half hours why we do stuff in this way and not in another. We do not have the time to document which part we have changed in a television or a video player. It makes no sense. It is just a lot of paperwork. I know that a lot of people are very proud of this kind of paperwork but it means more or less nothing. What we are interested in is running the equipment.


PACKED: Do you have students coming here?

Christoph Blase: Yes, students from the Academy in Stuttgart, in Germany it is called ‘Studiengang Konservierung Neuer Medien und Digitaler Information’¹⁴. It is the restoration of media art and the courses concern media restoration. They come here every semester for three days. I teach them about carrier formats: which ones have existed, what carrier format was developed when, who uses what, what are the positive and the negative aspects of certain developments of certain recording and playback equipment, etc. And I also teach what is typical for an old black and white video. Together we produce a black and white video in order to give them a feeling of the problems, with the camera. In the second part they learn how to restore videotapes, they work on the cleaning machine and they take care of the videotapes. The third and fourth part are the actual digitisation: how to handle the digitisation? how to store the data? and what is going on with the digital data files. This is in short what the study program is about. How to handle the process? How to store and what is going on with all the digital data files.


PACKED: You talked about exhibition strategies for this kind of work. Has ZKM in some cases decided to show the documentation about the work in an exhibition instead of the work itself?

Christoph Blase: I can imagine that this could happen for scientific research. For instance in our ‘RECORD > AGAIN! - 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2’ exhibition, we had a six-channel work¹⁵ and beside it we displayed the documentation of the presentation in 1975.


PACKED: It was shown in combination?

Christoph Blase: Yes, we showed it in combination and it looked absolutely different, but it was the same work.


PACKED: Nowadays museums are open from 10 o’clock in the morning until 6 or 7 o’ clock in the evening. This is not problematic if you have a painting or a photograph hanging on a wall, but is it a good way to show these early videoworks that are characterised by the use of complex – now obsolete - equipment that has only a limited lifetime? They were also shown in a completely different way in the 60’s or 70’s.

Christoph Blase: One example is the work ‘Der Magische Spiegel’¹⁶ by Telewissen. We had it in the ZKM exhibition for two years, running more or less every exhibition day. We had the original version from December 1970 that was running on a Wega monitor. We only had to change this Wega monitor one time in two years.


PACKED: Did you ever change the way of exhibiting a work because of the limited lifetime of the equipment?

Christoph Blase: Currently we have had no problem with this. Our policy was the same for every place where the exhibition ‘RECORD > AGAIN! - 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2’ has been shown: if a monitor breaks down, we will install another one. At every exhibition place we had four or five spare monitors. If one broke down, we would take the next one.

For the six-channel work with the six b/w monitors, we did send seven identical ones. Thus there was always one available for replacement if necessary. At one moment one of the monitors did break, and it took no longer than ten minutes to replace it and make the installation run again. For such big exhibitions you have to provide a certain amount of spare television sets that can be used in case one television set breaks down during the exhibition.

The Braun television from 1959 was for example very weak. We knew this when we used it for the exhibition in Aachen. As a result we decided not to use it during the next exhibition in Dresden, but we used another one that was ready. We have a certain amount of equipment that fail. In Aachen it was that Braun television, in Dresden it was a Bang & Olufsen and in Karlsruhe it was one of the JVC VideoSphere Ball Nivico televisions.


PACKED: Was it a problem of capacitors?

Christoph Blase: For this Braun television it was. This was one of our earliest television sets. As a result we did not yet have much experience nor spare parts or components. In the meantime we have got the spare parts and components from our warehouse. After one hour of repair this Braun television was running again. Although we did not expect it, it was not a very big surprise that it failed during the exhibition tour.

At the moment we have a very bad Braun in the exhibition that will be replaced by another Wega in the next couple of days. We already knew at the beginning that this television set would only work for one or two months, but we had no time to refurbish it completely and perfectly.


PACKED: Since you started working on these ‘40yearsvideoart.de’ projects you have digitised a lot of German video works. Do you have any idea of the proportion of what you have digitised in relation to the total amount of the works that are worth to be preserved?

Christoph Blase: Yes, this is another special problem. We have digitised hundreds of videotapes for projects and exhibitions. I am sure that if we would digitise another one hundred tapes and look at them carefully in combination the other few hundred that we have, we could present at least one more exhibition with completely different works that are equally good to the ones that have already been shown and that would make an interesting exhibition too. I even think that we can do two or three exhibitions with the material that we have.

We still find interesting works in collections. Sometimes we find a work in the archive of an artist that he had forgotten about and suddenly this work appears to be very interesting, Maybe it already was a very important work in the period when it was produced but everyone forgot about it. It also happens that an artist points us out an important works. But then when he looks at it again, he finds out that it is no longer that interesting. His memory failed because the last time that he had seen the work was already thirty years ago.

It requires a lot of research in order to find out which videotapes contain interesting works and which not. These are the next steps here in the lab. We have to develop a system based on database that will make it possible to view the videos for scientific research. Technically speaking this is very easy. I think that we will start working on this soon, We have hundreds, if not thousands of videos that are currently not available for scientific research.

We will still do all the other things too, but we have to find a solution to make the video works accessible. The access to all these works is a big problem. As I already told you I think that there is a lot of material which could be very interesting in this context.




PACKED: And then it is a matter of deciding what is of importance and what is of less importance?

Christoph Blase: Yes, therefore I would like to have it available for scientific researchers, in order to make it possible that everybody can go there and look at the material.


PACKED: Did you make a first selection of what is worth to be digitised and what is not worth before you actually started digitising?

Christoph Blase: Yes, but in the case of - for example - the open reels we still have to digitise everything. Otherwise we won’t be able to look at it. Every tape gets cleaned. When it runs through the video player, it gets digitised at the same time - although not always in the best quality. Sometimes it gets digitised in a lower quality because we do not know whether it is really worth being digitised, whether it is something that is important for our heritage or whether it is something that we can forget about. This is of course the first step.

We see so many works during the year, every week and every month, that we sometimes also forget works. We need to be systematic but cannot look at everything. Other people also have different points of view. Thus we have to find ways to make it possible that people who are interested can sit here somewhere in the house to watch hours of videoworks. I want to them to be able to do this if they are interested in a certain project, an exhibition or certain cases and so on. This is very important in order to be able to learn more than we have done until now.


PACKED: You will set up some kind of viewing platform?

Christoph Blase: Technically speaking setting up a viewing platform is not difficult. The problem is the documentation of all this material. Take for example this Raindance Corporation collection. It consists of 500 U-matic and open reel tapes. Some of them are very complicated formats: open-reel loop cassettes, very rare things and not easy to handle. I am sure that within this collection there are one or more treasures to be found: really forgotten things. But I will not exactly know what the treasures are until we have digitised the whole collection. Of course we have made a first selection. We have a list, and we sometimes contact the artist Ira Schneider¹⁷ who can tell us what is important and what is not. But our experience is that the memory of the artist might fail. These early video artists are not the youngest anymore and their memories are sometimes not the best. This is very normal.


PACKED: And the perception of the work might also have changed during the years?

Christoph Blase: Yes. this is very important.


PACKED: Do you work with the artworks because they still have some importance today or because they were important during the historical period when they were produced, for instance during the seventies?

Christoph Blase: The selection is a decision that we make in our projects but it should also be possible for other curators, or scientist to make this decision, with completely different connections. Of course there are people who see totally different aspects in our videoworks than we do and who could use the works in contexts that we did not think about.


PACKED: Until now you have mainly focused on works that have been produced in Germany?

Christoph Blase: For ‘RECORD > AGAIN! - 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2’ we did, because this was a project on German video art. We focussed very clearly on German works, German language works or works made by German speaking artists. But we also have already a lot of works from the United States. Of course I also know that there are some regions in Europe where there exists at least the same amount of interesting works than what we have found in Germany - if not more. Of course other institutions that collect early videos do have the same problems as the German collections. This could be one of our next projects.


PACKED: And it could also contextualise the German work?

Christoph Blase: Yes.


PACKED: Do you have works in the ZKM collection that can never be shown again because of certain technical problems?

Christoph Blase: Yes, but this mostly concerns early interactive media artworks of the nineties. There we have works that entail big problems because there doesn’t exist good documentation on them, or even does exist no documentation at all. We did not yet succeed in making a simulation of these works on modern hardware. Until now we do not know whether we will be able to show them again.


PACKED: Is because you do not really know how these artworks functioned or what they "were doing"?

Christoph Blase: We know how these interactive media artworks functioned but unfortunately the equipment is no longer working. They were written in a language that was used by let us say 500 people in 1992 and that was subsequently already completely forgotten in 1994. We know maybe five out of the 500 people: two of them have already died, two others have become in the meantime directors somewhere and they probably do no longer really care and the remaining last one is very expensive and can’t give a guarantee that he will succeed in transferring the artwork. For the early works sometimes documentation doesn’t exist. There are also several problems with a big work that has a room full of interactive stuff. It only concerns a few works, but with these ones there will be big problems.


PACKED: Does this mean that you have always found a solution for the video works?

Christoph Blase: Yes, until now we have always found a solution.


PACKED: Is the situation more problematic for the early computer works?

Christoph Blase: Indeed, at the moment the situation is a little bit problematic for the early computer works, But on the other hand, in the digital world - with all the knowledge that exists about digital works - people are also much more aware of this problem. Furthermore there is growing number of collectors, museums, other institutions and companies that are busy to reconstruct digital data and documents. There is also a growing amount of documentation. I think that the situation will remain problematic for a while but that the problem will also be solved in let’s say twenty years from now. Perhaps one day it will be possible to study the history of computer programming and ‘historical programming’. You will have the possibility to learn all the early languages for computers from the fifties, sixties and seventies. As a result of this there will be specialists. They will probably be very expensive, but they will exist.


PACKED: What are your expectations for the future? We can go on collecting old equipment and making it work again for a certain time, but at one point in the future this is a battle that will also be lost. Or not?

Christoph Blase: Yes or no, that is the big question. Two years ago Johannes Gfeller organised a conference in the framework of his exhibition ‘Reconstructing Swiss video art from the 1970s and 1980s’¹⁸ and this question also came up during this conference. Johannes and I had more or less the same opinion on this (laughs). For the next fifty years – and by the end of this period we will all be very old or already dead – we can solve the problem by collecting CRT tubes, refurbishing equipment and so on and in the meantime a generation of specialists on old media technologies will arrive. They already exist for other fields, like for instance for old cars – oldtimers - where you already have different kinds of specialists. There will be specialists for old electronic equipment too.


PACKED: Can we imagine that for example somebody will start producing CRT tubes again?

Christoph Blase: Yes, I wanted to come to this point. For the moment the production of CRT tubes has stopped all over the world, but I am sure that in ten years time there will be a new production of CRT tubes. I do not know which type of CRT will be produced, but there will be a production of CRT tubes. Maybe you will have to pay 1.000 Euros for them, but you will be able to get them if you really want to.


PACKED: Is there a good reason to believe that even without a new production, we can go on for another fifty years or even longer because of the development of new knowledge and ’new old technology‘?

Christoph Blase: Yes, you have to keep in mind that the development of video art and the development of this kind of black and white and colour monitors took place in the sixties and the seventies of the last century. During this period – like during the twenties - a lot of things happened on a societal as well as on a technical level. I think this period will always be in the picture for let’s say the next two hundred years. There will always be a certain interest to renovate the things from that time and show them in a museum context. Of course every ten years some stuff will disappear, but I think that there will remain a certain stock forever. It is the same with the old machines from the twenties: old projectors, cameras, etc. We still have them. We have film museums. We have institutions that hold collections of technical stuff from the beginning of the last century.

Click here to read part one of the interview.

Footnotes

¹ See http://www.zkm.de
² See http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$6550" title="www.record-again.de/ and http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$6550" target="_blank">http://www.record-again.de/ and http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/stories/storyReader$6550
³ Dan Flavin (1933, Jamaica, New York – 1996, Riverhead, New York) was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.
⁴ NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) is the American standard for the video colour system. It uses 525 picture lines that are scanned at a speed of 30 images per second. The European standard PAL (Phase Alternate Line) uses 625 pictures lines that are scanned at a speed of 25 images per second.
⁵ Isopropyl alcohol (also propan-2-ol, 2-propanol or the abbreviation IPA) is a common name for a chemical compound with the molecular formula C3H8O. Isopropyl alcohol is produced by combining water and propene. It is widely used to clean electronic components such as tape heads in video and audio players.
⁶ Hantarex is an Italian company producing professional and consumer display equipment since 1965. See: http://www.hantarex.com
⁷See http://www.hantarex.com/CRT_Monitors.html
⁸Dan Graham (° 1942, Urbana, Illinois) is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist. His film and video works address the questions of time and space. Dan Graham made a work called ’Time Delay Room‘ in 1974 that had several versions. See http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=403
⁹ DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik. It was the socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany and in the East Berlin portion of the Allied-occupied capital city.
¹⁰This work is ‘Herakles’ (1984) by Lutz Dammbeck.
¹¹ Founded in 1969 by Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, and Ira Schneider among others, Raindance was a self-described "countercultural thinktank" that embraced video as an alternative form of cultural communication. The name "Raindance" was a play on words for "cultural R & D" (research and development). Influenced by the communications theories of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, the collective produced a data bank of tapes and writings that explored the relation of cybernetics, media, and ecology. From 1970 to 1974, Raindance published the seminal video journal Radical Software (initially edited by Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny), which provided a network of communications for the emerging alternative video movement, with a circulation of 5,000. In 1971, Shamberg wrote Guerrilla Television, a summary of the group's principles and a blueprint for the decentralization of television. In 1976, Raindance members Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot edited Video Art: An Anthology, one of the first readers on video art. The original Raindance collective dispersed in the mid-70s; the nonprofit Raindance Foundation continues to exist today. See: http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artistdetail?RAINDANCEC
¹² Radical Software is a historic video magazine that was started by Beryl Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, and Ira Schneider and first appeared in the Spring of 1970, soon after low-cost portable video equipment became available to artists and other potential videomakers. See http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/index.html
¹³ Voir : http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/groups/gtext.php3?id=96
¹⁴A study program that is part of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart. See http://www.abk-stuttgart.de/frames.php?flash=false&language=de
¹⁵A six-channel video work is an video work with multiple videos displayed at the same time on six display devices.
¹⁶See http://www02.zkm.de/you/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=79:der-magische-spiegel&catid=35:werke&lang=en&Itemid=
¹⁷ Ira Schneider is a video artist (° 1939, New York, NY in), living and working in Berlin since 1993. He was a pioneer of video in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his work with video installation and single-channel tapes, he explored the manipulation of time, interactivity and simultaneity as formal and conceptual devices. He was co-founder, publisher and one of the editors in chief of the magazine Radical Software (1970-1974), as well as president of Raindance Foundation (1972 to 1994), director of the TV show Night Light TV (1980-1992), and Associate Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York (1980-1992). In 1976 he published ‘Video Art - an Anthology’ together with Beryl Korot. See: http://www.ira-schneider.com/artist/index.html, http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=401 and http://fr.wikibooks.org/wiki/Art_vid%C3%A9o/Ira_Schneider
¹⁸Documentation on the symposium with contributions by Christoph Blase, Sabine Breitwieser, Wolfgang Ernst, Christiane Fricke, Johannes Gfeller, Christoph Lichtin, René Pulfer/Sibylle Omlin, Jochen Saueracker, Joanna Phillips, Irene Schubiger and Gaby Wijers can be found in the publication Irene Schubiger (ed.), Schweizer Videokunst der 1970er und 1980er Jahre - Eine Rekonstruktion, 2009, JRP Ringier, 248 p., ISBN 978-3-03764-053-1. A selection of the documentation can also be found in the English translation: Irene Schubiger (ed.), Reconstructing Swiss Video Art from the 1970s and 1980s, 2009, JRP Ringier, 184 p., ISBN 978-3-03764-054-8