“Interface”, Slowscan / MIT

Posted 6 December 2015

“Interface” was my first experience with the network and the event that hooked me on its potential as an artistic tool. In 1980, Otto Piene, then director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and Aldo Tambellini, a resident artist, visited me in Paris to propose a collaboration on an image exchange event between CAVS and the American Center in Paris. The event took place in February, 1981.

Slowscan was a process which would grab and store a single video image, analyse it from gray to white and gray to black, transform the gray levels into sounds which were then sent over the phone line. The system was used to send check signatures between banks for verification. It never caught on but we used it as an artistic devise for many years.

Posted here is the catalogue of the event. I will eventually add photos of it as well as a movie documenting it by one of the participants, Vin Gable.