Closed Circuit Video Installations

A closed circuit installation describes a (tapeless) concept in video art where the image is triggered through the direct feedback between a camera and a monitor. By pointing a camera to a directly connected monitor, the image transmitted by the camera is filmed again, transmitted again, creating an endless loop between the cam and the monitor. By carefully adjusting both elements, the system can create strangely beautiful patterns that are solely based on the surrounding light.

A closed circuit signal is a live signal that can be manipulated in real time, offering chances to create interactive works, for example by using the movement of the spectator as a way to interfere with the video signal.

In 1970 Gene Youngblood described closed circuit as the only pure television art in his book Expanded Cinema.

The self-feeding, selfimaging, and environmental surveillance capabilities of closed circuit television provide for some artists a means of engaging the phenomenon of communication and perception in a truly empirical fashion similar to scientific experimentation.
This approach to the medium may in fact constitute the only pure television art, since the teleportation of encoded electronic-signal information is central to its aesthetics. … Thus television becomes the world’s inherently objective art form.” (p. 337/339)

Closed circuit installations are a core element in the media art of André Werner. Armed with a Sony HVC-3000P colour trinicon tube handheld camera from the early 80s, he showed his first feedback based works during the late 80s at several locations and galleries in Berlin. Since then he has send all kinds of camcorders from VHS to digital, from GDR surveilance cameras to tiny gopro cams into the loop.