THE FIRST EXPERIMENTS OF SKB "PROMETEI" IN VIDEO ART

Bulat M. Galeyevn 

 

CONCLUSION

Can serious content be mastered with video art? Probably. For an example, consider our still-unrealized project titled 'Babiy Yar' (the name of a fascist concentration camp in Kiev). Two TV monitors resist each other. On one monitor one can see fascists armed with tommy guns; on the other, figures of doomed people standing on the brink of a gully. The fascists shoulder their guns . . . shots ring out. A new group of doomed people appears, and again shots ring. This repeats again and again from morning till night, from day to day, as it was in reality.

At a Moscow exhibition, our colleagues living in the capital presented two TV sets tuned to two different broadcast channels. The TVs leaned against each other. The name of the composition was "Art for Art's Sake" ("Art pour l'Art").

Unfortunately, we could not realize another project. Several video cameras were to be positioned on automobiles driving along a road parallel to the railroad tracks to shoot footage of the individual cars of a rushing electric train. All of the roaring train footage would be rendered (reproduced) in 'TV Train', for which we would create a train of TV sets rather than train cars. Each monitor would show a train-car, shot with a changing landscape in the background.

(Published in "Leonardo", 1994, vol.27, No.5, pp.399-402)