''Reverse Television'' is a series of 44 video portraits made by

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video artist Video art is an art form which relies on using video technology as a visual and audio medium. Video art emerged during the late 1960s as new consumer video technology such as video tape recorders became available outside corporate broadcasting ...

Bill Viola Bill Viola ( , ; born 1951) is an American contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, d ...

in 1983, originally produced for

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and later documented as a 15-minute

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. These portraits depict people throughout

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sitting in their living rooms, silently staring at the video camera as though it were a TV set. The portraits were meant to take fit into space normally occupied by television commercials and as such to "interrupt the continuity of the undifferentiated flow of the television picture, giving viewers the possibility of pondering their own position facing the screen."

Background

"Reverse Television" was first broadcast by

WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS List of PBS member stations, member television station in Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the Flagship (broadcasting), flagship property of ...

In an interview with

Raymond Bellour Raymond Bellour (born 1939 in Lyon) is a French scholar, and writer. Best known to Anglophone readers for his publications on film analysis, his work is dispersed across a wide range of articles and books, few of which are available in English, i ...

, Bill Viola describes the compromises he had to negotiate through in the making and initial distribution of "Reverse Television." Originally, Viola wanted the video portraits to be presented once every hour for a two-week period in one-minute segments with "no label, no title, or anything" attached to them. Viola claims that such a long duration, as well as an absence of identifying information, was crucial to the piece, since the work was meant to be a disruption of the normal viewing experience of television. WGBH-TV, wishing to keep broadcasting costs low, wanted to show the portraits in 15-second segments. The station also refused to broadcast the videos without a title, requesting that Viola include a full description of the piece at the beginning of each clip. In a confrontation with the station director, Viola ultimately agreed to show the clips in thirty-second segments with text at the end of each clip stating his name and the date.

Video Summary

The 1984 documentation of the project begins with text describing the project:

REVERSE TELEVISION is a project for broadcast television. A series of portrait recordings were made of people sitting in their homes, staring in silence at the camera. Forty-four portraits were made in the Boston area with subjects ranging in age from 16 to 93 years old. Ten continuous minutes were recorded with each person. An unbroken one-minute segment of this material was to be broadcast. The portraits would be shown each hour of the broadcast day as image inserts between programs. They would appear unannounced, with no titles before or after, and the series would run for several weeks. WGBH TV Boston presented REVERSE TELEVISION from NOV. 14-28, 1983. They chose to air the portraits for 30 seconds each, showing them 5 times a day. The following is a series of 15-second excerpts from all of the portraits. They are presented in the order they were recorded and represent documentation of this project.

References

{{Reflist Video art 1983 in art