BLACK SPIRAL

by Aldo TAMBELLINI
1969 / 16mm / color-b&w / silent / 1S / 11' 00

"Television is not just an object. It’s a live communication media. Black Spiral brings you live information. One day we will look at nature as the floating astronauts do in a spiral or circular form where no up or down or gravity exists. I approached Tracy Kinsel who later introduced me to Hans Reinbold, because I wanted to alter a black and white television set in order to have it broadcast in a spiral configuration. A set was re-circuited for me so that all regular broadcast imagery was transformed into a constantly moving spiral that is drawn into the center of the tube. After many attempts, we finally got the results I wanted. To me it was nature as we will see it in the future, in circular or spiral form. No Up-No Down-No Gravity. Floating. I called the piece, Black Spiral, a television sculpture, later exhibited at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969 in the show TV as a Creative Medium, the first television show in an art gallery." [Aldo Tambellini]

"The result is a TV that swallows images, almost as a metaphor for what television does to the distinctions that our ordinary perception of the world trains us to make." [Kenneth Baker, Levine, Tambellini, and TV]

"Black Spiral, a high-contrast spiraling white light, [which] shimmers, radiates, contracts, twists in orgasmic ecstasy, dwindles to nothing, and blazes forth again on the black video field." [Jud Yalkut, ARTS Magazine, 1969]
"And what we are going to do through the media - let’s say we are going to keep it open and whatever I think is possible. I would like to do whatever one might dream of - that which somebody would not want. If I had the possibility to do it, let’s break all the rules, let’s open up the possibility which everyone else says to you, this is not right and this is not feasible...and I would like to start there: from a reality. So what one wants to do is more like an attitude rather than the specifics of what one wants to do." [Aldo Tambellini, TV as a Creative Medium, Howard Wise Gallery, 1969, NYC]

1 PRINT IN DISTRIBUTION


distribution format Digital file on server (NTSC)
speed 29,976 fps
sound silent
rental fee 48,00 €