Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Microtel - the teletext station for the voluptuous blinking eye


Teletext is a system which encodes extra information in analogue TV signals, where televisions with the right chip can decode and display special text and graphic pages. Teletext originated in the UK in the 1970's. Today teletext services still offer a range of text-based information, usually including national, international and sporting news, weather and TV schedules. There is an excellent Wikipedia page describing teletext and itshistory here.
[...]
This new channel is called Microtel. The station managers are artists Emma Davidson [Lektrogirl] and Paul B. Davis from Lektrolab. Microtel teletext programs will be broadcast by NOS, Netherlands public television.

Microtel is one of the projects curated by ambientTV.net as part of VBI [voluptuous blinking eye] - a submission for the exhibition "Satellite of Love" . This exhibition is presented by the 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam in association with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the TENT Centre for Visual Arts. The exhibition runs from 26 January to 05 February 2006.

Up until 04 February 2006, you will be able to create teletext and email it to Microtel for inclusion on this website, a DVD to be distributed by SCEEN magazine andmost importantly broadcast on Netherlands TV station NOS. Check technical information for software downloads and FAQ's to contribute today!


Looks like there are only windows teletext editors available, so make one for me while you're at it, this sounds awesome.
Link

3 comments:

cemenTIMental said...

Sounds like a great project! I'll definitely submit something if i can manage to somehow make teletext content on a mac!

I always used to love the totally unexpected surrealism of Digitiser; ostensably video game reviews, but mostly obscure and weird humour... expecially 'the man diaries'

Wiley said...

Looks like there are only windows teletext generators.
Wonder if it would be hard to write one?

Hal Meeks said...

This may be obvious to some, but VBI also stands for Vertical Blanking Interrupt -- the space in which the electron beam goes from the bottom to the top to do the next scan. Smart people figured out that you could use that period of time to send a little burst of data -- just the thing for teletext, for embedding program data, the time, etc. WebTV Plus used to make use of it.

--hal