Talk-Out!

Douglas Davis, Talk-Out!, 1972
Three-hour interactive telethon co-sponsored by the Everson Museum and WCNY-PBS.

"In earlier works, like Davis' "Talk Out" in 1973a live, phone-in, broadcast television performance workin which viewers participated in the creation of a collaborative text by phoning into the artist who, live, and on camera, literally typed their responses to his text onto the screen in a continuous, superimposed text roll." (Transcription of Lecture by David Ross)

"We went on at 11 P.M. and didn't stop until 2:30 A.M. It was the first art telethon. Calls from everywhere . . . all over the country . . Some of the New York City callers seeing the same tapes we were playing on Sterling Manhattan Cable, public access channel. . . phones backed up all the time . . . getting some calls and statements printed out on character generator, the words floating across the bottom of the screen . . . radio stations plugging in, passing out the number to their listeners . . . very complex and dense layering of communication, live from start to finish."

"It was an authentic dialogue . . . the callers, every one, bright and alert and on the point . . . the audience is better than the people who pretend it is stupid . . . diverse inputs . . . mind to city . . . better than Socratic dialogue . . . most of all immediate . . . at the end I played my last tape, Studies in Color Videotape II, very quiet and minimal in image, and we watched the responses come in, printed over the image, the last message coming from two kids, as Talk-Out! ended, saying: WE LIKE YOUR SHOW — WE ARE ELEVEN. Scott Byrid and Sam Jacopole." (Douglas Davis, in: Radical Software)

Resources:
http://www.afsnitp.dk/udefra/1/dd/home.html

Douglas Davis: Talk Out, in: Radical Software, Solid State, Volume II, Number 4, Autumn 1973
http://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume2nr4/pdf/VOLUME2NR4_0053.pdf

Transcription of Lecture by David Ross, San Jose State University, 1999
http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/ross.html

Related:
Communication Art
Pirate Television

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