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Video Art Gets in the Groove

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

By Erica D. Rowell

Page 2 of 2

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.

"We're going to present to you a revolutionary new home entertainment system," the infomercial boasts. "With VinylVideo, you can now enjoy your favorite films at home, on-demand, any time you like, in a convenient, easy-to-use format, and at only a fraction of the price of comparable home entertainment systems." It goes on to include customer testimonials that marvel at how the product can "do so many different things."

It's a perfect fit for the medium — a could-be ad for a could-be product, offering a satirical look at consumerism.

"My part in the project is to build a whole marketing environment around it which is informational but has a lot of fake stuff in it, too," says Sengmuller.

Retrofitting Images

Sometimes exhibitions even incorporate a sales pitch by featuring "an actor [who tries] to sell stuff to an audience" as part of a live stage show. Other times, the installation is built into a lounge or living-room set, offering a hands-on approach where people can pick out records for themselves and then sit back and watch them. Experimenting with presentation is an essential part of the exhibit — both the setting and the records themselves.

The videos, produced specifically for VinylVideo, offer up the artists' own visions of the retrofitted medium, which they welcomed as an interesting challenge as opposed to a handicap.

The disc by American artist Kristin Lucas features her image rotating around the screen as if it had actually been pressed on top of the record. French artist and musician Cecile Babiole sets in motion a sort of animated humanoid strutting across the screen scored to a bare, jew's-harp-like melody. And Austrian artist Harry Hund, as if taking a page out of television history and reworking the script for the format, offers up the "Guinea Pig massacre" in the style of a Hollywood Western.

So far, 20 artists have produced 22 records for the project, including the VinylVideo creator himself. Sengmuller, whose latest work involves a series of photographs of bulk tape erasers, hopes to produce new records with new artists.

"Since audio CDs came into the market around 1980, it looked like vinyl audio records would disappear," says Sengmuller. "Then there was a big movement ... to print records again. So it fits into that scene." With some 25 showings to date, the VinylVideo exhibit continues to make the rounds at art galleries and museums around the world. Currently, it is part of the inaugural S.O.S.: Scenes of Sounds exhibit at Skidmore College's Tang museum in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which opened last week.

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