Eva Schramm and Gary Willis
TE VE VU DU: A project for public television
1982
The original objective of the 'TE VE VU DU' project was to bring the images and stories of those who have fallen from grace, back into the public arena. In a time when television only presented images of the lives of the rich, the famous and the upwardly mobile, our objective was to present the back-story of our social fabric to the general public.
Unable to raise the funding required to produce TE VE VU DU as a project for public television we decided to produce a low res. version of this project independantly, based on artists in our circles. In this regard these tapes become ‘art video’ although they were never exhibited in their day.
Using Andy Warhol’s technique of just setting up a camera and leaving his subjects to say and do whatever they liked, we set up our recoding equipment and left our subjects to themselves. The brief was for each person to make intimate contact with their own issues and eventually revealing some personal secret to the camera in the knowledge that, just as with the original brief, we would muffle their confession using a range of audio and video interference techniques. Each tape was translated into a choreographed dance sequence, by Christine Meering. These dance sequences were later chroma-keyed in to the bottom of the screen becoming a sub-title to translate, whilst the audio was altered in accordance with the wishes of each subject to subvert the literal translation of the material being revealed.
The list of these tapes include: Ma Prem Surabhi, David Argue, Siobhan Ryan, Tony Oliver, Eva Schramm, Crystal, Gary Willis and Jeff Busby.
DVD not available