ON VAKUUM TV
VakuumTV was founded in February 1994 on the initiative of László Kistamás. Its members presented weekly broadcasts on Monday nights at the most popular cultural club in Budapest, Tilos az Á. Needless to say, the designation “VakuumTV” was not meant to refer to any kind of conventional television channel which could be received on TV sets in commercial circulation. Rather, its founders envisioned a live show in which a large frame separating the stage from the audience imitates the experience of watching TV for the audience. Thus VakuumTV can be received only where this frame is set up. The name “VakuumTV” stands for a kind of modern cabaret in which theatre blends with video art, performance with television, and art with play. This combination shows some affinity to the earliest “café theatres” and the Cabaret Voltaire, which was founded in 1916 and also operated in an entertainment locale. In this television censorship is obliterated and everything desired by the body or the soul is permitted. The broadcasts consist of various, largely independent numbers. Absurd humour and attempts toward greater permeability of the boundaries between different media are only two of the hallmark features of VakuumTV broadcasts. Many of the numbers take conventional television broadcast techniques as their point of departure in order to reinvent them in a distorted manual form. In VakuumTV, electronics and high technology are present on a different level and applied in a different manner than in ordinary television. Here everything takes place live, through a peculiar imitation of tricks normally associated with television (slow motion, fast forward, freezing images, etc.). This imitation presents the familiar visual space of television in an altered form. Broadcasts also feature short videotaped material recorded and edited by the members of VakuumTV before the broadcast. These videotaped images are projected upon a tulle screen attached to the TV frame, a technique which allows the combination and alternation of video projection and live performance. When illuminated by stage lights, the tulle becomes transparent and those on the stage enter the broadcast; when the stage is dark, the tulle surface serves as the screen for projections. The combination of live performance and projected images, the mobilization of the audience for active involvement, as well as the employment of a camera which can broadcast happenings and images occuring simultaneously on the stage or elsewhere enable VakuumTV to transcend the limitations of conventional television. With the viewers being simultaneously in the television studio and in front of their TV sets, interactive television is to become reality.