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that this is seen as one of the key starting-points for what was later to become video art. But this should not let us forget that the whole enterprise was considerably more complex. Four prepared pianos, several disc and tape installations, mechanical sound objects and a freshly slaughtered ox's head above the entrance all formed part of the event, which was open for ten days only, for two hours in the evening from half past seven to half past nine. «Practically no one but the participants' friends came to the opening, and almost no one at all on the other evenings.»[17] Even so, this exhibition's twenty hours still made 1963 into zero hour for the history of video art—and that is true even though no video equipment was used here.

These short evening opening times were to fit in with the broadcast times of the only German television channel at the time. That was the only time an image, albeit modified, could be seen on the TV sets.[18] This shows how important these experiments, scarcely acknowledged by visitors and the press, were for Paik himself. The televisions used were of various makes and various ages, distributed ‹at random› in the space. The best description of the different electronic

 

modifications comes from the Fluxus artist Tomas Schmit, who helped to set the exhibition up: «eleven televisions in the room between the hall and garden; arranged—like the pianos— at random; one TV set is on top of another, the others are on the floor. the starting material is supplied by the normal TV programmes, but they are scarcely recognizable on most of the sets. (…) one of the TV sets shows a negative picture overlaid with a different one. the picture on another has been rolled up, so to speak, into a cylinder round the vertical centre axis of the screen. in what paik calls the most complicated case there are three independent sinusoidal oscillations attacking the image parameters. the group of two: the lower one has horizontal stripes, the upper one vertical stripes (the upper one actually shows the same picture as the bottom one, but is on its side as opposed to its feet). a single, vertical, white line runs through the middle of the screen of the ‹zen tv.› one set lies face-down and shows its pictures to the parquet floor (paik said today: «that one was broken»). in the top eight TV sets the picture composition (in television, the term picture also includes a temporal

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