VSSTV (Images courtesy Gebhard Sengmüller)
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 ]

4 COMMENTS

  1. So what if it takes 300 years to watch a 2 hour movie, it would be great if you were travelling 0.9999999999999254c and managed to avoid crashing into the bubble wrap. Though I doubt you would be able to watch for more than 5 or 10 minutes before the picture cut out.

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