By Andrew Liszewski
This art installation seems to date back to 2006, but since it’s new to me, I’m going to assume it’s new to at least a few of you as well. In the same way a television uses colored pixels to produce images, the VSSTV plotter injects bubble wrap with cyan, magenta and yellow ink using a printhead featuring 3 long needles.
Created by Gebhard Sengmüller, in collaboration with Jakob Edlbacher, Johannes Obermayr, Gerhard Proksch-Weilguni, Ludwig Ertl and Andreas Konecky, the VSSTV is supposed to be a new television format built upon something called SSTV or ‘Slow Scan Television’ which is an image transmission system used by ham radio enthusiasts. Except that since the VSSTV system they developed can only produce a single frame of ‘video’ per day, I think they have a tough battle ahead of them when it comes to convincing the public, no matter how fun bubble wrap is!
[ Gebhard Sengmüller – VSSTV – Very Slow Scan Television ] VIA [ Rhizome ]