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Video  installation
 
Early work
 
Still under de•re•construction 
                   
 
 
 
RAI Amsterdam; february 1976; promotional video installation for General Motors Benelux.    
You're camera man...
 		  
My first - and last - stack of monitors
 
 
Money   Being a student at the Rotterdam Academy of fine arts, I always had to find jobs to make some money. 

This time however, my father - as an employee (sales promoter) of the big American automobile company General Motors - gave me the opportunity to think of solutions to make the G.M. stand for the biannual truck show at the RAI Amsterdam more attractive. 
 
It didn't came in mind right away to use anything more than the usual 'stock' of audio-visual machinery (like dia projectors and 8 track machines etc.), but at the time video came in the picture as a new audio-visual presentation device and I had to come up with something to use that.

  
From this moment on I was really 'hooked' to video. Unfortunately the Sony Umatic color equipment used in this installation was way out of scope for my tiny budget, but I purchased an Akai B&W 1/4" VTR set one year later.
 
 
Trucks   Because 'trucks' were the subject to show, I thought it might have been a good idea to use a truck, but one or two monitors in such a huge space wasn't really going to do the job here. It had to be more than that and it turned out to be possible to store 3 x 8 television sets in a truck.
 
Public   Showing a simple tape on 24 TV's would be nice, but it would be even nicer to have life action feature in the installation. Just at this moment a small 'newvicon' color camera from Sony hit the market and we rented this camera to shoot the public between the promotional video footage.  
Of course 'being on television' in those days still wasn't something of an everyday experience as it is now.
 
 
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