Outside the Grounds of Obscenity and Inside the Grounds of Hyde Park

The installation ran over the period of a weekend at the Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London as part of The Video Show, a seminal event for artists and activists who were the early adopters of the new media of the 1970s, low-bandwidth video. Documentation for the installation has since been lost but one of the downloadable PDFs is an attempt to recall the essential operation and procedures. During 2008, the tape held in the Scottish Film and TV Archive and the Centre for Visual Research, Rewind archive, University of Dundee, as the residue tape used in a CCTV installation during The Video Show was digitised. Using this it was possible to revise the schema of connections between cameras, screens, switcher and video tape recorders, see the sketch copied in the PDF. However, this may not be the definitive explanation; this would be achieved if a copy of the Notes made at the time for the public, could be found!

The installation used two cameras, two Video Tape Recorders (VTR) and five video monitors. An insert edit strategy was applied over the duration of the installation, occurring on a Saturday and Sunday. The view is through the windows of the Serpentine Gallery on the east side looking towards Exhibition Road running through Hyde Park.