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Allan Kaprow: Hello

The elements of randomness and chance, which Allan Kaprow hasexplored so successfully in his Happenings and environmentalevents, were brought into play in a television experiment conductedby Kaprow with the unique facilities of WGBH-TV in Boston for "TheMedium Is the Medium." The station has direct closed-circuit inputsfrom a number of locations in the Boston-Cambridge area: a line toM.I.T., another to a hospital, another to an educational videotapelibrary, and a fourth to Boston Airport. These were interconnectedwith five TV cameras and twenty-seven monitors that Kaprowutilized as a sort of sociological conduit, demonstrating thepossibilities of creativity in the act of videotronic communication,including obstacles to communication.

Groups of people were dispatched to the various locations with instructions as to what they would say on camera, such as "Hello, I see you," when acknowledging their own image or that of a friend. Kaprow functioned as "director" in the studio control room, ordering channels opened and closed randomly. If someone at the airport were talking to someone at M.I.T., the picture might suddenly switch and one would be talking to doctors at the hospital. Thus not only the process of communication was involved, but the elements of choice and decision-making as well. Kaprow has suggested a global form of Hello, interconnecting continents, languages, and cultures in one huge sociological mix. The information transmitted in Hello, he emphasized, was not a newscast or lecture but the most important message of all: "Oneself in connection with someone else."

-- Gene Youngblood: EXPANDED CINEMA, 1970, [PDF /4.6 Mb] pp.343-344

[ index | 1969 ]