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Video Art Gets in the Groove

High-Tech Slumming With Low-Tech on Art House Scene

By Erica D. Rowell

N E W Y O R K, November 1 Gebhard Sengmuller's head was spinning. He wanted to create a work of art that could visualize the gap between the first television broadcasts, circa 1930, and the advent of video recorders in 1958.

Maybe the evolution could be televised.

His brainstorm spawned the revolutionary VinylVideo, "something that could have recorded television back then with the technology that had been available then," says Sengmuller.

Picture a TV sitting next to a turntable. Then imagine placing the needle on a record, but rather than just hearing sounds, you see an image on the screen. Lift the needle, and the monitor goes blank. Place the needle anywhere on the record, and it picks up the video at that point. It was a wedding of art and technology.

Reinventing History

Once Sengmuller had the concept, the next step was bringing it to life. The main challenge was how to fit a large, complex video signal, which has a very high bandwidth, into such a narrow bandwidth medium. In plain English, this means that the artist and his technical collaborators Martin Diamant and Gunter Erhart had to shrink the video so it could fit onto a record.

They started by sizing down the frame rate, turning standard 30 frames-per-second, American video into 8 fps. Then they switched from the more robust frequency modulation (fm) to the amplitude modulation (am). And finally, they translated pixels, the smallest units of a video image, into sound.

"It's very similar to what a fax machine does" said Sengmuller. Each pixel, a word that comes from the phrase "picture element," is assigned a number from 0 to 256, according to its shade of gray. Each gray level is assigned a sound level. For black, the sound is low, and for white, the sound is high.

Once the image and its many parts are translated into sounds, they can be pressed onto a vinyl long-playing record like ordinary audio. The playback, though, is anything but ordinary. Yes, it's blurry and low-tech, but the images are actually generated by a standard LP. All you need is a black and white TV set, a turntable, and Sengmuller's specially designed electronic black box that converts the audio signals back to video. Dubbed the VinylVideo Home Kit, it's certainly an eye-catcher, but you probably won't find it in living rooms across the country any time soon.

To compare it to a DVD or even a VHS wouldn't be fair and would be entirely missing the point. Finding a "missing link in media history" was Sengmuller's goal — not capturing and displaying high-resolution, crystal-clear images. After all, the system was invented in the pursuit of art.

"Through the decades and millenniums I have the feeling that art has always been interested in new, emerging technologies," said Sengmuller. "Like 12,000 years ago people found out that they could draw on cave walls, and 150 years ago people found out about photography."

Strange But True?

Here, though, it's a clash between the old world and the new, and for some this mix of high-tech and low-tech doesn't quite gel with expectations.

During VinylVideo's run at Postmasters Gallery, a cutting-edge art museum in New York, gallery director Magdelana Sawon says people were intrigued by the exhibit but doubted the technology's authenticity. They thought it was a gimmick.

"We had people here digging under and trying to see if there was a little man or somebody trying to manipulate it," says Sawon. "They couldn't believe that the image actually could come from the record. Vinyl is for sound — that's what you can and ought to get, and that's what's only possible."

Preconceptions aside, Sengmuller does admit working a bit of artifice into his creation.

For its 1998 debut at San Francisco's experimental gallery, the Lab, Sengmuller and his team were so consumed with getting the installation up and running for the show that there was no time to commission content for it, so he created his own. What he came up with is a hilarious faux advertisement for VinylVideo.

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