HOTEL NEW YORK
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Gallery 205
Curated by Alice Smits

 

SKT-090
Video Turntable from the 70's mimes 80's video art

On Sunday Oct. 8th between 12 and 6 PM a legendary seventies consumer
machine, an SKT 090 by RCA, will check into Hotel New York and present a day-dream performance for one day.

The player looks similar to a record player and is a forgotten video system from
the late 70's called CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) It was the last technology
in the tradition of Edison’s phonograph to read information from a disc with a needle.
This technology was in use for less than a decade and quickly replaced by Pioneer’s Laser Disc Technology.

What makes this particular SKT-090 model a unique performer is its highly
individual and eccentric way of playing back the video.
The machine, 17 Years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record
but chops a scene into fragments less than a 1/4 sec long and re-assembles
them by chance operation. The needle gets physically irritated by several
factors besides the scratches that let it skip the grooves, resulting in an
infinite number of similar but not identical collage variations of the same
scene. The performed "cuts" are almost seamless.
Considering its historical context, there is some irony involved in this "accident"
which is performed without human interaction . This collage machine mimes
deconstructive editing techniques well-known in the video art from the Eighties.
(The same decade this SKT 090 model was manufactured)
The fragile unpredictable nature of the machine reproducing the stored analogue
information in such an illogical way produces a machine autonomy that questions
the way real-time is adapted into film-time. In classical cinema the latter one usually
features a successive order of events. Based on the given data the machine suggests
an infinite number of alternative readings on its own.

 

More on this technology can be found on this incrediblede site dedicated exclusively to CEDs
http://www.cedmagic.com

Also it certainly is listed in the collection of Dead Media (an initiative by Bruce Sterling) which features hundred of other forgotten relatives
www.deadmedia.org

Certainly CEDs are often mistaken by Gebhard Sengmülerr's legendary VinylVideo™ system that propelled senimental feelings into the net.art community
www.vinylvideo.com

The first picture record system of 1923 is listed proudly by British televisionists:
www.dfm.dircon.co.uk