04.03.06 'We interrupt your regularly scheduled program...'.
It was the '70s and SKP Promotei group was experimenting the use of television screen in a series of artworks called 'Electronic Paniter', which consisted of programming sequences of colors through generators inside the monitor. With the digital incoming, the curiosity towards television as source of abstract images is not exhausted (think about 'Spin' by Liz Nofzinger where TV frames are mediated by a disco ball). Daniel Sauter artwork, ''We interrupt your regularly scheduled program É'' follows this flow, re-encoding the broadcast signal as an abstract narrative sequence. The installation, mentioned at Prix Ars Electronica 2004, consists of a television placed facing the wall, its flickering glow reflecting off the wall and its sound echoing the space. Its broadcast signal is transmitted to a computer, where a customized software collapses every single tv frame in one pixel-wide slice. A code rules the inter-semiotic translation, according to which cinematic cuts are transformed into vertical sections, zooms become visualized as curves, commercials and music videos are seen as splash of colors. The slices are horizontally arranged in sequence and projected back onto the wall behind the tv. What is the guideline of this association between form, color and syntactic elements? Is it based on Kandinski's 'Point and line to plane'? Or is it a free choice of the author? What is sure is that Sauter agrees with the brechtian suggestion "Don't stare so romantically!", revealing the banal and mesmerizing nature of television through the juxtaposition of images.
Valentina Culatti