Metaskop
Bernhard Schorner
Media Archaeology, 2006
Interface Cultures Everyone’s seen them—these tiny image viewers in the form of miniature television sets. Not so very long ago, these plastic TVs could still be purchased as souvenirs.The images available for viewing were mostly the sights of sightseeing tours and typical motifs of places frequented by tourists. The classic content of this medium is a metaphor of emptiness, an information vacuum. To offer an ironic depiction of this point of view, Metaskop totally dispenses with a picture; all that’s to be seen is the name of the image. The Metaskop works with meta-information about the picture not on display. For example, instead of representing Venetian gondoliers, the viewer can only read the word “gondolier.” The tiny image viewer’s inner life has been eliminated and replaced by an LED displaying crawl text. One might regard this as a sort of reductio ad absurdum, or simply as Simplicity.
Metaskop was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival 2006.
Supported by
www.plastiskop.de
Media Archaeology, 2006
Interface Cultures Everyone’s seen them—these tiny image viewers in the form of miniature television sets. Not so very long ago, these plastic TVs could still be purchased as souvenirs.The images available for viewing were mostly the sights of sightseeing tours and typical motifs of places frequented by tourists. The classic content of this medium is a metaphor of emptiness, an information vacuum. To offer an ironic depiction of this point of view, Metaskop totally dispenses with a picture; all that’s to be seen is the name of the image. The Metaskop works with meta-information about the picture not on display. For example, instead of representing Venetian gondoliers, the viewer can only read the word “gondolier.” The tiny image viewer’s inner life has been eliminated and replaced by an LED displaying crawl text. One might regard this as a sort of reductio ad absurdum, or simply as Simplicity.
Metaskop was shown at the Ars Electronica Festival 2006.
Supported by
www.plastiskop.de
