Hyper-TV

1981, realization: Alex Sutter, Johannes Gfeller, and Peter Schlosser, 46 mins, ½ inch, black-and-white and color, 14 mins (excerpts), original online: video collection Stadt in Bewegung (Swiss Social Archive and Memoriav)

Experimental video on TV culture. Fragments of TV shows, news broadcasts, feature films, TV ads, and other programs are woven into a collage and visually altered. A parody on the zeitgeist as shown on TV.

Voice-over commentary
To abandon TV won’t do, but video … Politics of the phantoms. Facelessness sits opposite you, ready to be turned into paranoia at any time. To abandon TV means putting together the menu of electronic corporations: data processing, surveillance, personal records. And the politician puts on the grimace of the star. The screen is a politics of masks, it’s an eye-eater, a battlefield of soul engineers. The eye identifies on the screen the schemes that occupy its brain.