Peter Weibel - Endless Sandwich, Closed-Circuit Video 1969

-----------Category: Pioneers of MediaArt-----------
Weibel: "Between TV and viewer there is a function, i.e.: The user switches the device on and off. This function is illustrated and content of the program. A "sandwich"- character of real process and figure process, of reflection and action. In the screen there are viewers seen sitting in front of their TV. In the last picture a disturbance occurs, so that the viewer who watches this scene has to get up, in order to repair the failure. Thus the screen of the next viewer is disturbed. The disturbance reproduces itself, up to the real TV set, so that the real viewer must rise the same way, in order to remove the disturbance. Time delay: The real action is the final point of the reproduced process."

Weibel introduced a conception that focused on questioning the role of spectatorship, through which he aimed for an immediate affection of the spectators consciousness. Through his work he suggests that the mirroring experience of video feedback might produce a phenomenon of a reflected consciousness. In his initial work on this concept, Weibel broadcasted, through a television, the phenomenon of world within the world (briefly mentioned earlier), which endlessly repeated a picture of a spectator. In the Endless Sandwich (1969) he represented a phenomenon of a closed-circuit system in which the chain of replication produced a representational feedback loop of observer [spectator] observation. As such, the chain of multi-universes ended in a real reality, with the TV spectator creating immediacy between real and technological repetition. A feedback of the spectator was triggered when the replicated realities do not reflect the real reality back anymore; namely errors occur at the end of the spiral that has effects on the other modalities of reality as a chain reaction, until the action steps out into the reality. Weibel depicted this as follows:
"An error happens in the first Universe. The person has to get up to correct the error, and while he does so, it jumps to the next Universe. In the end, each Austrian TV viewer had to get up to readjust his own TV. So this is on of the first model of Multi-universes and how the information exchange and transformation works. You can see very clearly that the TV is treated as a kind of interface." (Weibel, 2001, p.272)
For Weibel, the fractal loop is a conceptualisation of self-observation that, as he suggested, can never be totally fulfilled (Weibel, 2001). With the self-representational loop he describes the distortion that occurs through every interface but also, most crucially, in the spectator consciousness. As such, the installation of Endless Sandwich attempts to model a self-consciousness that is able to experience only itself, since no one else can enter this vision. Therefore, all of the other selves are interpretations of the first self (the spectators consciousness), replicas that draw out patterns of feedback in forms of fractal structure. In this respect, Weibels primary artistic conception profoundly characterises an affection of the spectators consciousness through a feedback loop, which, in every single fragment, produces a different distortion of the self.

Weibel is currently the Chief Curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz, and since 1999, chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (for more information: http://www.zkm.de). His many exhibitions curated and publications edited include "Making Things Public" (with Bruno Latour, 2005), "Future Cinema" (with Jeffrey Shaw, 2002) and "MindFrames : Media Study at Buffalo" (with Woody Vasulka). He has also been the artistic director of Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, Professor at the University for Applied Art, Vienna, commissioner for the Austrian pavilion of the Venice Biennale, and director of the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt (1989-94).

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• art
• media
• pioneer
• closed-circuit
• feedback
• loop
• video
• spectator
• viewer